slickening

if you had any doubt about how broken international news coverage is.. think about the thrilling blow-by-blow, high-school-hostage dramatic, 911 type awful, that the coverage of the DeepWater-Horizon ecological horror would have been, if only it wasn't so politically unpleasant for the masters of the medium.

freedom in the cloud

"Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They’ll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in. And you can’t wait to let them. They’ll store your stuff, they’ll organize your photos, they’ll keep track of your appointments, as long as they can watch. It all goes into the “Cloud.”

How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0."


got sent this way by the folks at diaspora. they cite it as one of their motivators.

eyeopening talk. nice bits about the choices that were (not) made about internet architectures - why client-server limits the internet peerage possibility - and some of the political aspects of those choices.

Technoliberation

It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
with the erasure of the last invidious border
when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
and delineate the arrhythmias of drought
to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna
as rich as a thousand human tongues
and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
ancient beyond mythology's reach

So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
no patent can encompass zero and one
no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
no empire rules the quantum waves
And there must be room for all at the celebration of
understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

From Technoliberation by Muteba Kazadi (Greg Egan)

this is how the novel Distress by Greg Egan opens.. bodes really well :)

Heres another work of technoliberation that bears repeating : the Declaration of Independance of CyberSpace, by the lyricist for the GratefulDead, John Barlow, February 8, 1996

Blue Brain Project : Year One

just finished watching this preview of a documentary film on the BlueBrain Project - an attempt to reverse-engineer a human brain.

catch it here at The Beautiful Brain

the project site is at http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

google sidewiki as a real wiki.. or maybe a host of other real sidewikis to choose from

@google: give us a truly wiki-like public entry on SideWiki, with wiki functions like revision and restore and spam-reporting and we will garden it.

There'll probably be large scale spam and trolling, but with some good design, wiki revisions and restores, along with maybe a tight linking to google accounts before granting edit, perhaps wiki principles will out.

Oh, and there's no reason why the public entry shouldn't work as just another entry alongside all the others, only rising to the top if it gets voted there.

....
update (20100117)

I remember digging the first "wiki margin for the internet" i saw, i think about 5 years ago. wikalong - a firefox extension and a promising idea i thought - a firefox extension that let one create/edit a wikipage for any web page out there.

so when google recently(ish) announced their Sidewiki , and it turned out to be more of a side blog i tried shouting out that bit above.

But now maybe I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe, rather than google's one and only sidewiki, we need an open extension that allows us to choose which side wiki community we want to follow and contribute to..

like a host of wiki channels for discussing the web. many internet margins - with choices between real wiki's, public and private, and sideblogs (like the current google sidewiki)

parasites

hourlong RadioLab audio episode on parasites. excellent

audio here : http://audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast603parasites.mp3

also recently added to my delicious mediachannel

geek rapture ?

ABC Radio National's All In The Mind podcast on the technical singularity. a nice warning about geek rapture :) , alongside a nice description of the idea.

audio here. short, well produced, easy to listen to.

adding it to my slowly growing mediachannel tag, of online media i think worth consuming.

emergent metadata

the idea in the general: is to continuously grow metadata from the use of the data - keeping a history of use, learning patterns, links, and contexts from that history. eventually establishing a strong semantic layer over the data.

in the specific: a plugin for my personal wiki of choice, WikidPad. The plugin, lets call it WikidPadMonitor for now, when in 'learning mode' should collect information about the wikipages you open, the wikilinks you follow, and the patterns of wiki and tag usage - and use this to grow useable metadata.

Eventually, this emergent metadata could be used to establish a new measure of the strength of the links between wikipages, make predictions about the page being looked for, and discover context..

well, thats the idea, anyhow: growing metadata in the wikigarden.

er. i'm hardly ever here anymore

more likely here or here

march against xenophobia and hate

The Social Movements Indaba is mobilising social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs, unions, concerned residents from around the province for a march this Saturday, 24th of May. The march will gather at the Pieter Roos Park, corner Empire and Queens Rds, Hillbrow from 9a.m., proceed through Hillbrow and stop at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the Library Gardens.

The message marchers will be conveying is that our struggle is common and knows no borders. Everyone who wants to make their voices heard should join us – our struggle knows no borders.

Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008
Time: 9:00am - 12:00pm
Where: start of the march is the Pieter Roos Park, corner Empire and Queens Rds, Hillbrow
Street: corner Empire and Queens Rds
City: Johannesburg, South Africa

Bring placards, banners, friends!


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