my passport photo |
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by Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 17,
2002 • Last
week's weblog
Bertelsmann
to buy Napster for $8 million: "In another of its astounding
turnarounds, Napster
has been snatched from the brink of bankruptcy by German media conglomerate
Bertelsmann AG."
Peer-to-peer,
like a telephone. Dan
Gillmor (San Jose Mercury News) writes, The
technology behind Napster is far from dead. There's a list of people/computers
who have a certain file. People who get that file directly from one of
them get added to the list. The more people who have the file, the less
demand on any one computer for it. It's sharing the load. Onion calls
it the "content-addressable
Web." (Poets don't name these things.)
Our
Conscious Mind Could Be An Electromagnetic Field:
I once showed email and the Web to one of the spaciest, most right-brain
people I know, a painter who shrank from technology. After watching for
a while, she very slowly said, "This is fascinating. It's a prosthesis
for telepathy."
Professor
Johnjoe McFadden from the School of Biomedical and Life Sciences at the
University of Surrey in the UK believes our conscious mind could be an
electromagnetic field. “The theory solves many previously intractable
problems of consciousness and could have profound implications for our
concepts of mind, free will, spirituality, the design of artificial intelligence,
and even life and death,” said. And for telepathy, I suspect.
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Women's
day:
Am I
good enough yet? Why do women's magazines assume women need so much
advice?
"If
millions of women stopped and said, 'Hey, I don’t think I need
lipstick, Lestoil, Oil of Olay, Victoria’s Secret boulder holders,
Diet Coke, L’Oreal or Ultra Slim-Fast anymore,' that would lead
to a serious advertising revenue shortfall. So the media must continue
to manufacture postfeminism as the common sense way to understand women’s
current place in American society." Interesting read called Manufacturing
Postfeminism from Susan
J. Douglas, who passed through Providence to earn a Ph.D. at Brown.
Via Blog
Sisters. This segues nicely into an oldie (2001) but goodie, Women's
websites not appealing to women by Angela
Genusa at CIO .
Can
women have it all? Can't speak for everyone, but I've had it all,
not just all at the same time. Post-Jungian maverick James Hillman (The
Soul's Code) thinks it's central to figure out your destiny
and live it. "He proposes that our calling in life is inborn and
that it's our mission in life to realize its imperatives. He calls it
the 'acorn theory,' the idea that our lives are formed by a particular
image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn."
It's in an interview, On
Soul, Character and Calling: An Interview with James Hillman, adapted
from the radio series Insight
& Outlook, hosted by Scott
London. Via Metafilter.
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AP
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Give
it up for art: Braball
will be complete when it reaches 5'4" -- the height of the average
American woman -- says California artist Emily Duffy. A few thousand
more are needed. Bras with metal hook-and-eye closures (any size, color,
and condition) can be sent to Emily Duffy - Fine Artist, P.O. Box 1555,
El Cerrito, CA 94530, U.S.A.
Weekend
toonz: Third Stone Radio - Internet
Radio Streaming Jazz
May 16,
2002
Creative
Commons
is up!
Shameless
plug:
If you're coming to Rhode Island this summer, you'll probably find useful
the Summer Guide we published
today. Lots of events, a beach map and a coupla hundred summarized restaurant
reviews.
The Virgin
and the Dynamo, Part 1:
"... he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines
at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden
irruption of forces totally new." -- The
Education of Henry Adams.
Reports from blogging luminaries at O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference include,
Doc Searls: "The
last slide said blogs weren't a threat to the established journalistic
order (or something like that), but that it was a threat to Google —
but only if we come up with some kind of standards for something or other
I wasn't listening to because f*ing with technology took up all my precious
and declining cycle time."
Dave
Winer: "I tried to live-blog some of the sessions, but by the
time I had it all set up, my battery ran out."
If those
with the knowledge, experience and tools to advance the frontier can't
chaos-proof their connections, what hope is there for you and me?
In
Amsterdam last month, I didn't have any Net access. I'd been advised
to use AOL, but you can't just sign up with an all-your-waking-hours-for-a-month-for-free
disk and use it -- you need to be a member for two months before you have
global access. I couldn't sign up with a Dutch ISP for a week.
The spare
projo laptop kept crashing, the most elementary memory management boggling
its little chips. I would race to get the digital photos off the USB card
reader onto the hard drive before a seizure, reboot, resize and optimize
them, reboot, copy to floppy, reboot, write, reboot, code the blog entry,
then walk the floppy to a $10-an-hour Internet cafe with a real computer
and floppy drive, not merely EasyInternet's screen and keyboard setup.
(Every word on the screen was in Dutch, but I didn't need to read much.)
Is it too
much to ask for a globally wireless box, a sleek, $200 laptop designed
for communication via satellite? No spreadsheets, no heavy crunching,
not much giggery, just a browser, email and publishing software. Perhaps
it is too much to ask, now.
When might
this be something we routinely give each other for Christmas?
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The Virgin
and the Dynamo, Part 2:
"Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither
Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental Goddesses was worshipped
for her beauty. She was Goddess because of her force; she was the animated
dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of
all energies; all she needed was to be fecund." -- The
Education of Henry Adams.
A long, long
time ago, my teenage self read an essay in Mademoiselle magazine that
bluntly said, If you don't want to be a hapless bimbo, read these books.
I carried the list around for two years, eventually getting them all.
I can't remember the essay's author -- Who changed my life? Budd
Schulberg, perhaps? -- or most of the books. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf
was on there, Colin Wilson's The Outsider appealed to my teen angst
(The Outsider sees too deep and too much and what he sees is essentially
chaos); Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, probably Fitzgerald;
the only woman I recall on the list was Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead).
(Is there
a similar list, updated to include the entire range of 20th-century+ authors?)
What brought
this all to mind was discovering Moxie,
published out of an attic loft in Berkeley, a magazine of short stories,
some fiction, some first-person accounts, most by younger women authors.
(One, republished on AlterNet,
led me there: Are
We Dating Yet? by San Friancisco writer Lori
Writer, whose name is astonishing in itself.) Moxie, on
a page devoted to an award it seemed surprised to win, characterizes
itself as "Designed for smart, gutsy women who want an alternative
to fashion, sex, and beauty magazines." Fecund it is.
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Flamed: Dave
Copeland is a blogger who also works as a staff writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He hated something I wrote last
week headlined "Journalist Bloggers Walk the Line" and said so vehemently.
I was reading his site and ran into my name and choked on my coffee.
I emailed
a response that includes a link to a column I wrote after I first fired up a modem in 1990, he
published the email on his blog, and responded graciously.
Now we're
new friends. Read the exchange
here. (It's on a page with no branding, a gesture meant to suggest
"between our sites.")
SONICblue
Wins Stay of Tracking Order: "SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Reuters)
- Electronic device maker SONICblue Inc. said on Wednesday it won a stay
of a court order that would have forced it to track the television viewing
habits of people using its ReplayTV digital video recorder. "
May 15,
2002
Do you
own a ReplayTV 4000? Cory
Doctorow reports that the Electronic
Frontier Foundation wants to talk to you if you do. EFF's Robin Gross
is putting together some legal briefs to protest the court's ruling. Email
her: robin@eff.org. Background: Digital
video maker fights 'spying' order (BBC); Sonicblue
wants court order reversed (news.com).
Music
middlemen endangered: Kazaa,
Verizon propose to pay artists directly. Interesting idea to permit
mp3-sharing, pay musicians and bypass the record labels.
First
float of Hillary Clinton for VP in 2004? Idea
of senator in No. 2 spot generating a quiet buzz , says New York Daily
News. "She'll probably be at the top of the list," said political
consultant Tom O'Donnell, a former top aide to a likely 2004 presidential
candidate, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.).
Interview
with a Hong Kong blogger: "The way I try to explain blogs
to people is that it's sort of like that crazy old man on the street with
the sign that says 'The end is near,' " Frank Yu tells CNN.
Is there
more to this story? "Lithuania
has scrapped a Soviet-era regulation that forced women to have a gynecological
exam before getting a driving license.... Some medical officials opposed
changing the law, saying certain gynecological disorders could cause enough
pain for a woman to pass out behind the wheel," Australian
Broadcasting Corporation reports.
May 14,
2002
Quick blog
today -- too much to do producing the site.
Escape:
100
Greatest Online Games. And one more: Roadies.
"Get the roadies to the gig on time."
Today:
"WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Electronic Privacy Information Center
(EPIC) and a coalition of civil liberties and consumer groups today asked
a federal court to overrule a decision mandating enforced surveillance
of ReplayTV 4000 television users. Two weeks ago, numerous television
studios persuaded a judge to issue an order requiring SONICblue to monitor
and record the TV uses of its customers."
NYT:
"A group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons,
a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others
to easily designate their work as freely shareable." The Creative
Commons site is up, promising more than a front page on Thursday.
Tiny
site contest is back: Make the best web page or site you can,
in 5 kilobytes or less.
May 13,
2002
Bloggers
aim to organize for fun and profit:
From
Proposal:
The Weblog Foundation, "The
foundation would support weblogs with hosting, software, and honorariums
for a wide array of selected webloggers..." Read it at Jeff's
Jarvis's WarLog:
World War III blog. Oh, boy. Can MacArthur Foundation "genius
grants" for bloggers be far behind?
But wait,
there's more: "We need to bring business discipline to the world
of weblogging so we can show advertisers (aka sponsors or underwriters)
how to use weblog to reach influencers and give them the responsiveness
they demand."
Whichever
quote rings your bell, the proposal seeks ideas and elbow grease.
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Journal
/ Bob Thayer
An iris blooms in Cowesett.
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BLOGSPAM
update: Blogdex
creator Cameron
Marlow of MIT's Media
Lab replied to email asking why insurance
site and ad portals showed up on the weblog search engine's most-linked
story index last Friday:
"The
situation that you're referring to is one that happens frequently at Blogdex,
especially since Netster has come around. Webloggers host their pages
on a number of free servers, many of which are temporarily unavailable,
or get acquired by companies like Netster. In these cases, the weblog
page is usually replaced with a splash page that has advertisements for
the webhosting, in addition to other companies. Blogdex treats these as
if they were a weblog, so when a server with 10 weblogs on it goes down,
suddenly Netster has 10 links, and rises to the top of Blogdex.
I'm usually
quick to catch it, but yesterday I was late getting into work. I have
been meaning to build an automatic system to detect these happenings,
but I haven't gotten around to it. Daypop doesn't suffer from this problem
simply because he doesn't index as many weblogs as I do, so it's a tradeoff
between accuracy and coverage."
Here's a
background
story on Blogdex at Wired.
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Fresh
Mozilla:
The free, open-source, cooperatively developed Mozilla browser edged closer
to a v. 1.0 launch with Mozilla
1.0 Release Candidate 2, which fixes some bugs in its April 18 release,
RC1. I replaced RC1 with the new release this weekend, and haven't crashed
since. Still, unless you like to play with software that may not yet work
perfectly, wait till the volunteers find all the bugs. Mozilla.org reports
that nearly
400,000 of us downloaded RC1, and asks that we do it again with RC2.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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