August 2004 Archives

August 31, 2004

Skype for Mac

18:52 UTC » VoIP

Skype for Mac is out. Yay!

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David Weinberger, a small person

12:12 UTC » US Policy and Politics

Warning to conservative readers: partisan thoughts below

I don't think I'm going to have the fortitude to watch the Republican Convention. I know that makes me a small person, but I just can't take it.
I'm getting some blow-by-blow commentary from Mitch via IM right now and I can understand David's feelings.
Mitch on IM
Mitch: sorry, distracted by the glaring whiteness of the RNconvention. no people with any color while Rudy talks
Mitch: pretty wretched talk -- it is ugly in several dimensions, suggesting anyone who disagrees with Bush is an appeaser
Mitch: he literally just said "either you are with us or with the terrorists"
Mitch: and followed by comparing Bush to Churchill
Mitch: Rudy is sure he's Churchillian
Regarding David's post, Mitch says, "too many years as a reporter -- I can watch anything."

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Encouraging Cameraphone Use -- For Less Than Encouraging Reasons

11:54 UTC » Global Politics - Moblogging - Privacy - Wireless and Mobile

The Feature
Encouraging Cameraphone Use -- For Less Than Encouraging Reasons

Instead of banning them, Chinese authorities have creatively adapted cameraphones as yet another tool to control its citizens, if the latest allegations prove to be true. Authorities there reportedly threatened pro-democracy radio talk show hosts, after which they all quit. This didn't involve cameraphones until new reports emerged that authorities have contacted the families of callers to these shows still living on the mainland. They have been told to convince their relatives to vote for pro-Beijing candidates and then snap a picture of their ballots with a cameraphone to send back proof.

Of course we should all have seen this coming. I remember when I got my first camera phone, I got one for Mizuka and myself. Our relationship was still pretty "fresh". That week, I went on an trip to Kyoto with a small group of older Japanese businessman friends. "So... where are you? Can you send me a picture?" "Ummm... sure. OK. Here." Yes, there are simple ways to get around this by preparing photos or doctoring stuff, but it's obvious that the privacy issue for camera phones isn't just the subjects being photographed, but the owners of the phones as well.

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New Technorati politics page

11:41 UTC » Technorati - US Policy and Politics

We've updated politics.technorati.com. Lots of new features and a new look. More info on Dave's site.

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The New York Post

08:12 UTC » Media and Journalism

I've never actually picked up and read The New York Post. I first heard about it when their front page story was: "Kerry's Choice, Dem picks Gephardt as VP candidate" and now this.

Reader Mike Harris says, "The New York Post is reporting that it was spray paint, instead of a water-soluble chalk mixture. Users might want to ask that they correct their reporting. The online edition/news editor's name is Chris Shaw, at cshaw@nypost.com."
I wonder where they get their facts?

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RNC-NYC: Update on arrest of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush

07:39 UTC » Activism - Art - US Policy and Politics

Xeni Jardin @ Boing Boing: RNC-NYC: Update on arrest of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush

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August 30, 2004

RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested

10:05 UTC » Activism - Art - US Policy and Politics

Xeni Jardin @ Boing Boing
RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested

A post on an indymedia website says activist Joshua Kinberg -- inventor of a wireless, bike-mounted, dot-matrix printer for spraying protest messages in the street -- was arrested yesterday at the RNC in NYC. At the time, he was reportedly being interviewed by Ron Reagan, covering the convention for MNSBC.


Kinberg's invention allows users to spray messages transmitted to the bike-printer by way of the 'Net or SMS. They're painted in a water-soluble chalk solution that washes away with water (not spray-paint, as misreported elsewhere). Link to indymedia post, Link to previous BB post about Bikes Against Bush, Link to August 02 Wired News story with background on Kinberg's invention, Link to yesterday's NYT piece on Bikes Against Bush, and link to a torrent identified as video coverage of the incident, via DV Guide. (Thanks, Patricia and el norm)

I think I saw this device at Ars Electronica a few years ago. I have a feeling that at the time it wasn't mounted on a bike. I remember thinking, "What a cool idea. I wonder if it will ever be used for something useful." I love it when political art projects/proposals get put into real world action. It's too bad that they confiscated the bike before it was used "in the wild." I wonder whether this bogus arrest will end up getting this project more press than if they hadn't arrested him...

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August 29, 2004

Wikipedia attacked by ignorant reporter

07:12 UTC » Media and Journalism - Wiki

Al Fasoldt, staff writer at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, writes about how untrustworthy Wikipedia is based on an oh-so-trustworthy email from a librarian. Mr. Fasoldt asserts that Wikipedia is not a verifiable authority and that it is it is not trustworthy. Mike from Techdirt tries to explain Wikipedia to Mr. Fasoldt and receives insults in return. For those of you who haven't yet taken a good look at Wikipedia, you should. It is a community built encyclopedia where anyone can edit any of the 300,000+ articles in it. The fact that anyone can edit the pages appears to be why people like Mr. Fasoldt question its authority, but that is that exact reason that it has authority. Any comments that are extreme or not true just do not survive on Wikipedia. In fact, on very heated topics, you can see the back and forth negotiation of wordings by people with different views on a topic until, in many cases, a neutral and mutually agreeable wording is put in place and all parties are satisfied. Tradition authority is gained through a combination of talent, hard work and politics. Wikipedia and many open source projects gain their authority through the collective scrutiny of thousands of people. Although it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived.

I believe that Wikipedia is helping to revive the encyclopedia as a form and it hurts me to hear such ignorant criticisms. Having said that, Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal, Dan Gillmor of the Mercury News and many others have already written tons about Wikipedia so maybe I'm overreacting to an isolated case of ignorance and insulting the knowledge of my readers in the process...

Anyway, I was on the jury which gave Wikipedia the Golden Nica this year, the highest prize in the Digital Communities category for Prix Ars Electronica. I will be going to Linz, Austria next week to attend the festival and will be meeting the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. More on Wikipedia then.

via Boing Boing

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August 28, 2004

9/11 toy found inside candy bags

09:34 UTC » US Policy and Politics - Warblogging

AP via CNN
9/11 toy found inside candy bags

Wholesaler recalls 14,000 bags it bought from Miami import firm

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled.

First NROjr and now this. For some reason, all of my posts today are about the US government and the last two are very weird messages to kids...

via Adam

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NROjr.gov - a message to kids from the US intelligence community

08:43 UTC » Cool Web Sites - Humor - US Policy and Politics

Since I can't get onto the GW site, I guess I have to settle for the NROjr.gov site. The NRO?

National Reconnaissance Office
The NRO designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites. NRO products, provided to an expanding list of customers like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), can warn of potential trouble spots around the world, help plan military operations, and monitor the environment.

As part of the 14-member Intelligence Community, the NRO plays a primary role in achieving information superiority for the U. S. Government and Armed Forces.

So what is NROjr? It's a "A fun site to engage children in the wonders of science, math and space in a fun and interactive manner," brought to you by the NRO. (Make sure you have your sound turned on to enjoy the full experience. And all this time I thought Ernie actually worked for Sesame Street... although I guess he was recently heard singing Orkutworld.)

via Karl

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CAPPS II is back

08:18 UTC » Privacy - US Policy and Politics - Warblogging

The US Transporation Security Administration (TSA) announced that CAPPS II, the controversial passenger profiling system is back looking a bit more shy and sporting a new name, "Secure Flight." It still sounds bad and they'll start testing it within the next 30-60 days.

via Kevin @ EFF: Deep Links

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Japan blocked from George W Bush site

07:51 UTC » US Policy and Politics

I still can't see the George W Bush site from Japan. I wonder if the Japanese are blocking Bush or Bush is blocking Japan... ;-)

via Jim

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Technorati will be at the RNC

07:48 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Search - US Policy and Politics

CNN has invited Technorati back to provide real time analysis of bloggers blogging about the Republican National Convention. Thanks CNN! More on Sifry's Alerts.

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Free speech vs buying influence - Joho on 527's

07:41 UTC » Emergent Democracy - Media and Journalism - US Policy and Politics

David Weinberger blogs about George Bush denouncing 527 groups. David links to Roji pointing out that this is a serious flip-flop from his original position.

David's point is that on the one hand, the 527 groups represent a way to buy influence. On the other hand, limiting the ability for a 527 group to be formed and express a point of view is limiting free speech.

I think the reason we have this conflict is the nature of media today. It shouldn't cost millions of dollars to get your message out; the system should be transparent enough so we know who is behind those messages; and most importantly, those messages should spark dialog and lies and stupidity should be smacked down as fast as urban legends on snopes. The problem with allowing money to buy "free speech" is that the speech is asymmetrical and not deliberative. ...yet.

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August 27, 2004

Radio Taiso

22:47 UTC » Health and Medicine - Japanese Culture - Music

10,000,000 people doing radio taiso
picture via Kampo
One of the participants of Fat Club uploaded an mp3 of radio taiso (morning radio exercise show) and I just set it to my alarm clock sound. radio taiso was banned by the US Occupation after WWII along with shogi (Japanese chess), all martial arts and a bunch of other things that were considered militaristic. I remember hearing a story on the radio that the original radio taiso came from the US. When life insurance just started as a business in the US, there was an uproar about "betting on people's lives." As part of a PR campaign, the life insurance companies started broadcasting exercise programs on the radio to make people more healthy. This culture migrated to Japan where now every morning millions of people exercise to radio taiso...

Here is the mp3 of chorus 1 of radio taiso.

Does anyone know if this story about the US insurance companies is true or not?

UPDATE:
exe1.gif
The Kampo home page has little animations like the one above and a full explanation (in Japanese) on how to do these exercises properly.

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Sell side advertising

18:30 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Marketing

As someone who was heavily involved in introducing the theory of CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) to Japanese ad agencies, I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about what comes next after Google AdSense. Ross tried CPI (Cost Per Influence), trying to come up with an index that included the influence of the blogger or site where the ad was placed. This reminded me of the "branding value" or cluster value argument. Also, the idea would be that an influential blog would trigger a word of mouth diffusion. Anyway, inspired by Ross, John Batelle came up with a really cool idea. He writes about sell side ads where bloggers could copy ads that they saw into their blogs if they liked them. The ads would have information about what sorts of sites they could be posted on and other instructions. They would "phone home" to the advertiser who would pay the blogger for the impressions or clickthrus or whatever. The idea is that it would be viral and publisher driven, rather than advertiser driven. It would be set up so that the advertiser could track which site a blogger copied the ad from so that that they could track the diffusion pattern as well.

Anyway, awesome idea. Lets build it!

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Patenting punctuation

13:58 UTC » Intellectual Property

Ernest Miller @ Copyfight
Patenting Punctuation (Ernest Miller)

Well, it seems that someone has patented some new forms of punctuation: WIPO Patent Publication No. WO9219458:

Using two new punctuation marks, the question comma and the exclamation comma: and respectively, inquisitiveness and exclamation may be expressed within a written sentence structure, so that thoughts may be more easily and clearly conveyed to readers. The new punctuation marks are for use within a written sentence between words as a comma, but with more feeling or inquisitiveness.Seems that this is sort of an addition to the faddish punctuation known as the Interrobang.
via I/P Updates

This reminds me a bit of when Despair, Inc. trademarked the frowny emoticon ":-("

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ecto goes wysiawyg

13:31 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Software


ecto, the blogging client developed by Adriaan at my company Kula has just released the beta of the next version which has "What You See Is Almost What You Get" (wysiawyg). This means that you can now do things like drag, drop, resize images into posts. You can also create links, change font information and lots of other stuff without looking at or dealing with html. (More info on the ecto blog.) ecto 2.0 has a bunch of other cool features. Adriaan says it should be ready for general release of the OS X version in about two weeks. Until then... gloat.. gloat...

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WQD Forums hit 100

12:57 UTC » Health and Medicine - Joi's Diary

In December, I announced that I quit drinking. I got a flurry of comments of support. Several of us who had decided to be sober, thought a group blog about quitting drinking would be interesting so we started We Quit Drinking, the blog. Soon, due to some weird Google magic, the blog became the first result for "quit drinking". A wide variety of people who were looking for support and help dropped in and commented. Jonas, who among other things works with addiction as a counselor, decided that a more private space, a message board requiring login might make sense so he created the WQD Forums. He announced today that WQD Forums has hit 100 members and have become a vibrant community of people who are in various stages of sobriety sharing and supporting. Since that day in December, I've received sooo much input and advice. Thank you. Some of it has been very useful and some, frankly, not so helpful. I have been to a few AA meetings and have really enjoyed them. On the other hand, I have not yet passed the first step, "Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable." At the meeting I said, "I think I have a problem, but I don't yet believe that I am powerless or that my life has become unmanagable." The interesting thing is, no one was upset. One AA'er later said, "In AA, we call that 'a quart short'". I think I will still drop into AA meetings because I love the stories and the comfortable atmosphere of sharing, but until I get to Step One somehow, I don't think I can really be a true member. It's been quite a journey hearing the wide variety of opinions about drinking. I've decided on the few advisors and approaches that I think work for me now in helping manage myself. My opinion may change and if I finally believe that I am powerless and my life has become unmanagable, I know I can always count on AA, which I now believe has an incredible power to save people from alcoholism. If you thinking you have a problem or know you have a problem, try dropping by WQD Forums and join us in our emerging community.

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Conference call surfing

11:56 UTC » Joi's Diary - Social Software

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August 26, 2004

The Search Engine Belt Buckle

07:50 UTC » Gadgets - Search

searchenginebb.jpg
I remember when I was Chairman of Infoseek Japan, I would get a weekly list of the top 100 search words. I remember loving this list. You could see watch trends and stuff, but mostly it made you realize just how sick people were. When I was around, the only US search term that beat adult content phrases was "Olympics" and the only Japanese query was "Tamagocchi" when it was all the rage.

Now uber-gadget-hacker Phillip Torrone has brought this experience to the street via the Search Engline Belt Buckle. It uses the SearchSpy service which shows real search queries and is provided by Dogpile, the metasearch engine.

I suppose this is slightly more useful than an RSS feed of my weight, but definitely harder to build.

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Interview with Craig from Craigslist

07:27 UTC » Cool Web Sites - Joi's Diary

I blogged earlier about the sale of 25% of the stock of Craigslist to eBay. Out of context, some people might not understand why this requires explaining or someone with a casual understanding might think Craig sold out. Here's some more context. (And no, Craig has not "sold out".)

Craig is a very unique individual and this interview and his site are a testament to that. In March, on the way to SXSW, I was with a group which had an airline nightmare at SFO. Craig negotiated with the extremely unhelpful Mesa Airlines for the whole group of us and was amazingly effective. I was moved by how he insisted that we were a group and was not willing to settle for anything that left anyone behind.

Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing
Craig of Craigslist interview
Wired Magazine ran an interview this month with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and an all-round mensch:

Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?

Give people a break.

A break from what?

A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.

What poses the major threat to that survival?

Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.

Link

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August 25, 2004

USB weight sensor

18:15 UTC » Gadgets - Health and Medicine

Wow! A USB weight sensor. Now we can automatically add our weight to the sidebar and make RSS feeds of our weight changes. Who wants to write the mt-weightsensor plugin?

via Daiji

Current Mood: chipper
Current Weight: heavy
Listening to: You Trip Me Up by The Jesus and Mary Chain from the album Psychocandy

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Army Okays Computer Spying

18:05 UTC » Privacy - US Policy and Politics

Donna Wentworth @ EFF Deep Links
Army Okays Computer Spying

JetBlue ignited a huge privacy scandal when the news broke that the airline secretly provided more than 5 million passenger records to Torch Concepts, a military contractor. Yet the Army Inspector General Agency concluded [PDF] that JetBlue did not violate the Privacy Act. The reason: Torch never looked up individuals by name, but instead used a computer to dig through and analyze their private information.

This is quite disturbing. I guess this means that taking massive amounts of data and crunching through them to create "profiles" is OK. I wonder how small the clusters can be? Can they, for instance, profile companies, race, occupation, address or other kind of groupings for profiling?

There was a case in Japan where the Japanese government kept a list of Freedom of Information Act requesters in a list on a network with their backgrounds and this was found to be "legal".

I don't know enough about the JetBlue case to make a judgment on just how bad I think it is, but it seems to be part of a larger trend pushing the limits of the law.

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Emergent Democracy paper in German

17:35 UTC » Emergent Democracy

The folks at Ars Electronica have translated a shortened version of Jon Lebkowsky's edited version of my Emergent Democracy paper into German. It will appear in this year's book for Ars Electronica. Thanks for coordinating this Ingrid and thanks for the translation Susanne!

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Fat Club redux

12:46 UTC » Health and Medicine

Yesterday, Mutsumi in our office told me half a dozen times that I looked "bigger". I'd been thinking about how to lose some weight and I remembered Fat Club because Jane linked to a Fat Club entry on her blog. For some reason, I seem to be able to motivate myself to lose weight when I'm competing. I asked everyone in our office if they wanted to join Fat Club 2004. Kuri, Jim and Nob agreed to participate. The race is to see who can lose 10% of their body weight first and sustain it for one week. The last one in has to be a slave to the winner for a day. Slave rights can be sold or rented. We decided to set up a private wiki to organize this event.

Mizuka bought a fancy scale awhile ago hinting that I should probably lose some weight. I jumped on it this morning and it told me that I had the body of a 49 year old. (I'm 38.) The fancy scale uses Bioelectric Impedance to measure your body fat and calculates basal metabolism, body fat percentage, muscle percentage, internal body fat level, your body mass index and your body age equivalent. Let me just say it was very motivating. This new scale has 6 contacts, two for your hands and 4 for your feet and seems more accurate than some of the older models.

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August 24, 2004

RNC protestors and their rights

08:02 UTC » Activism - US Policy and Politics

UPI via The Washington Times reports that the Weather Underground are planning some action during the RNC. UPI says:

United Press International
"These people are trained in kidnapping techniques, bombmaking and building improvised munitions," the source said. "They're very bad people..."
Someone who asked not to be named emailed me and says that they heard that, "it's planned on being a nonviolent action. Something about leaflets and random covert protesters." If this is indeed the case, there is a pretty high likelihood of some really wound up police running into some pretty innocent people. If you are at risk of looking like a risk to the police, make sure you read about your rights. (344k ZIPped PDF on cryptome.org) via Boing Boing
UPDATE: An anonymous tipster sez "this pamphlet was done by the wonderful Katya Komisaruk over at the Just Cause Law Collective. At her site, lawcollective.org, there's the pamphlet and tons of other info about how to not lose your rights when dealing with the po. (Including Komsiaruk's book, set up much like the pamphlet, 'Beat the Heat.' Komisaruk applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School while in federal prison for anti-nuke demonstrations. She went to HLS while on parole and graduated with honors. Now she's one of the most active anarchist lawyers in the U.S."

UPDATE: Anonymous old media journalist who thinks the UPI story is bunk: "my theory is that the republicans are going to have their own anarchists there a la the reichstag fire...."

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Pierre invests in Socialtext

06:48 UTC » Social Software - Socialtext - Wiki

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August 23, 2004

Urban legend diffusion

17:03 UTC » Information and Media

Mizuka just asked me if I had heard about some guy who was busted for making tons of money trading stocks who claims to be a time-traveler. The story was that he would show them the time-machine if they let him go. She said her Japanese friends were talking about it. I laughed and checked Google News with an assortment of keywords with no results. I wandered over to #joiito. Soon enough nichlas came up with a link to a WWN article from March, 2003 about the story. Just as I was wondering if this was something to blog about, KevinMarks page-slapped us with the snopes.com entry from April 2003 debunking the story.

I would really love to see the path that this silly story took over the last 1 1/2 years to get from WWN to me via the Japanese girls gossip network.

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Memories of vinyl

10:17 UTC » Joi's Diary - Music

communicatems.jpg
test press of Communicate with notes from Mark
I've been thinking about audio files lately. There are lots of interesting audio blogs these days and I realized that putting audio interviews for my sharing economy research online would be a neat thing to do. For the last month or so, I've been diving into audio gear and software. (I'll write about all this in another post when I figure out what I'm doing.) During this journey into gadgets past, I stumbled into my vinyl records from my DJ days. Most are promotional records that Rockpool sent me when I was reporting my charts to them, but many were from Mark Stephens. Mark Stephens was my mentor and one of my best friends. He was also the first person I knew who died of AIDS. Mark received tons of promos and he would share some of the good stuff with me. He would jot things down on the record jackets or on little post-its. Since I stopped spinning records, I've allowed several DJs as well as my second-cousin Cornelius to go through my record collection and take what they wanted. What I have now is a 1000+ record collection, almost all from 1988-1990, 90% crap, with very high sentimental value. What do I do with them? I looked into software to convert vinyl to mp3's but it looked like a real pain. The other idea I had was browse my vinyl for stuff I liked, scan the notes and try to find the music on a file sharing network. I should know the answer to this question, but is this illegal?

I seem to be getting into these diary-like entries these days, but digging through old vinyl and reading the little notes from Mark brought back a lot of memories. I'm struggling with how to bring some of those memories into the medium I have today.

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Reverend AKMA almost arrested for stealing public wifi

08:16 UTC » US Policy and Politics - Wireless and Mobile

Image from Gary Turner
OK He wasn't almost arrested, but he was told that he couldn't be use computer within range of the open wifi network of the public library by a policeman. The officer cites some law against it and describes all of the terrible things Reverend AKMA could be doing. When AKMA asks whether this was a state or federal law, the officer says, "It’s a federal law, sir; a Secret Service agent came and explained it to us.”

Anyway, it's worth reading his entire post. What law is this officer referring to and how can we undo damage that misinformed (if there is no such law) Secret Service agents are causing? If it were me or some other less pious person, I'm sure the policeman might not have been as nice.

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Identifying authors in feeds

08:05 UTC » Blogging about Blogging

I have been doing my blog reading and writing primarily with Net News Wire for my reading and Ecto for my writing. A simply copy paste will paste html which is a very good start for a blog post. The biggest problem is the multi-author blogs. I bugged Boing Boing about it, and they put the name of the author in the text, even though it was already in their creator tag. This makes it much easier for me because the name of the author is in the html when I copy from Net News Wire. So Brent, and other news reader developers... I have a feature request if you haven't done it already. Can you please figure out an easy way to allow me to copy the name of the author and view the name of the author in the post? Also, for people working on syndication formats, keep in mind that in the case of group blogs, the author is important and I think some of the templates don't automatically add the authors.

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August 22, 2004

Looking for Adam Curry's Rocket Car of Death

17:45 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary - Video

Adam Curry samples a portion of Halley's interview with me on Memory Lane on his Daily Source Code Aug 17 2004 - (1.2MB mp3 of relevant section). I'm talking about how I showed the chairman of NHK (Japan's public broadcast network) a video that I downloaded from Adam Curry's MTV.COM. I think this was around 1994 or 1995... It was one of the few video files on the net at the time. I used to show this video all the time and I told this to Adam when I met him at Bloggercon. He said he wanted a copy of the video and I thought I might have it around, but I looked and I don't have it. Sorry Adam! Does anyone else have it? It's a bit of Internet nostalgia and history that would be fun to have. Unfortunately, I think this predates archive.org.

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Jonah Peretti and Jane's Blog

16:26 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Joi's Diary

Warning: rambling diary style entry to follow

Jonah, a friend of Neeru and Joshua emailed me that he was going to be in Japan and wanted to talk about Eyebeam, a very cool art R&D project he is working on. He was leaving the day after I came back to Japan so we decided to meet for lunch at the airport. I printed out Andrea and Jonah's picture from Andrea's photo blog, taped it into my moleskine notebook and headed for the airport. I've been mastering the shortcuts from my house to the airport since I make the trip so often. Today, I found a new little shortcut where I take a right at the rice vending machine and cut through miles of rice paddies and skip the traffic lights on the main road. I love zooming through the rice paddies looking for crop circles until you run into oncoming traffic and have to maneuver just right or fall into the ditch. Anyway, I met Andrea and Jonah at the airport and took Jonah to have a quick bite at Sushi Iwa while Andrea made some phone calls.

The conversation was really interesting and we had an amazing number of common interests. When we were talking about diffusion patterns of ideas and links across blogs, he mentioned that he had helped a new television show use blogs. He explained that there was a new TV series called "Good Girls Don't" and he helped them set up a blog for Jane, one of the characters. How cool. He then started explaining about the character and a funny interaction she had with Instapundit. Holy synchronicity. I suddenly realized that this Jane was the same Jane who had linked to my blog post about no more alcohol until I lose more weight. I had just been reading her blog this morning totally perplexed about the most random link in my Technorati cosmos in quite awhile. I hadn't read the "about" page so I hadn't realized she was a fictitious character. Anyway, so weird, funny and... bloggy. I wish my favorite TV characters had blogs and that they randomly linked to me.

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August 21, 2004

Olympic athletes banned from blogging

15:03 UTC » Blogging about Blogging - Information and Media

The AP reports that the IOC bars athletes, coaches from writing first-hand accounts This reminds me of the (now defunct) rule that companies couldn't report earnings and other reports on the Internet until after newspapers had time to print. This was supposed prevent an "unfair advantage" for people who use the Internet. Protecting traditional journalists by muzzling first-hand reports from athletes and coaches is so wrong and stupid.

via Smartmobs

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Police raid US high school at gunpoint

15:01 UTC » US Policy and Politics

meta-roji
teach your children well, at gunpoint
ap via abc news, august 20, 2004
Justice Says Guns-Drawn School Raid Legal

A guns-drawn raid at a high school last year did not violate civil rights laws and the case is closed, the U.S. Justice Department said.

...

Fifteen officers entered Stratford High School's main hallway and ordered 130 students to the floor Nov. 5 of last year. They used plastic ties to handcuff 18 students and school officials opened and searched 17 book bags using a drug dog.

Police found no drugs or weapons, but the raid frightened children, provoked marches and lawsuits and brought national media attention and the resignation of the school's longtime principal.

the original story is covered here with video. the memory hole has more, including an unidentified person in what appears to be a military uniform.

This is one incident that I can't imagine happening in Japan... at least not yet. I wonder what this sort of "police state" behavior does to children.

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Back to Tokyo

02:46 UTC » Joi's Diary

I'm at SFO on my way back to Tokyo. It definitely feels like Silicon Valley is "waking up" again. Hopefully, we've learned from our mistakes and the "recovery" will be a better managed one. See you again from Japan.

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August 20, 2004

Reverend AKMA on the cave of John the Baptist

03:28 UTC » Religion

Reverend AKMA has an interesting post on the front-page story claim that someone has discovered the cave of John the Baptist and why he isn't into archaeology anymore.

AKMA
This story reflects several problematic tendencies in the popular (biblical) archaeological market. We get their textual siblings over in literary historiography, so I’m not casting stones only at the other interpreters. But there have been heaps of hermits (I just spent way too much time trying to devise a collective noun for anchorites) in the Judean wilderness about whom we know absolutely nothing. We happen to know a little about one of them: John. So when an archaeologist finds a hermit’s cave that fits what we might expect John’s cave to have looked like, someone draws the inference that it actually was John’s cave.
Go AKMA! The image of heaps of hermits reminds me a bit of Life of Brian. ;-)

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EFF wins Grockster case

02:30 UTC » Activism - Intellectual Property

Xeni @ Bo