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I ended the work day with a study group and an expert guest where we discussed the Japanese legal system. Although there were some small signs of hope, I find that the more I learn about how things really work, the more pessimistic I get about causing actual change in Japan.

As I pondered the futility of revolutionary activities in Japan, I jogged to try to catch the train to connect to the commuter train for my 1.5 hr shlep back to my home. As I entered the station, I noticed an unusually large crowd of people on the platform.

The PA system announced a delay due to an accident. Japan has over 30,000 suicides a year (one of the highest rates in the world) and 800 or so of them as a result of “train accidents”. As I crammed myself into the standing-room-only train full of drunken businessmen, tired “office ladies” and shriveled old people, I thought about what kind of person might have jumped in front of the train this time.

As we approached the station where the accident occurred, the train came to a stop and the conductor apologized again for the delay. They shut down the motors as we waited and the everyone was silent and still. As I looked around at the tired people with their blank looks, it felt like we were all involuntarily mourning the death of another person in Japanese society who had to give up.

When I arrived at at my home train station, Mizuka was there to pick me up. I shared my depressing thoughts and she scolded me for being so down. When we got home, our dog Pookie yapped away and almost blew these thoughts away, but I decided to share them with you anyway.

We did another photo walk the other day. This time we wandered around Shibuya. I just realized that I didn’t blog about it. I posted my set to Flickr and you can see the images of the rest of the photographers tagged with ccphotowalk071111. Thanks to everyone who participated and special thanks to Fumi and Mika for organizing everything.

Got back yesterday from the Enjin01 event in Niigata. The theme of this year’s event was laughter. (Flickr set here.)

Enjin01 is a Japanese non-profit that I helped start. It is a funny mishmash of people including artists, business people, politicians, academics, journalists, novelists… just about every kind of background you can imagine. It is a membership organization with about 180 people. It is a totally volunteer organization and no one gets paid for talks we give or activities we participate in and it is funded by membership fees from the members and corporate donations. Some members give a percentage of their normal lecture fees to the organization as well. I was involved in the selection of members and setting up the organization a lot at the beginning, but am mostly just a member now.

One of the activities that we do is go teach at Jr. High Schools that want us to go. Any Jr. High School can sign up for us to dispatch teachers on our websie. I blogged about this earlier. We also have a group that focuses on trying to change government policy, especially in the area of taxation of donations to non-profits.

The main activity of Enjin01 is to organize an annual meeting in a different region of Japan each year. Most of the members attend this annual meeting. The meeting is organized into a few plenary talks, a bunch of workshops and panels, and a “yagaku” where we go to dinner with people from the local community. We also usually have a closed meeting where the members meet an invited guest.

The program committee assigns the participant members to various panels and different “yagaku”. This year, I was assigned to a panel about IT, which is par for the course.

I was also assigned to be on a panel at a workshop lead by Koichi Inakoshi to learn about and actually participate in photographing a nude model. I had never photographed a nude model before so I was quite nervous at the beginning. Mr. Inakoshi started by explaining that we should think about the beauty of the model and imagine looking at our own bodies while we are bathing. He told us to try to imagine and see the beauty of the human body. After showing us some of his nude images, he told us to try taking photographs ourselves.

The audience was also invite to participate. The audience probably consisted of 50% women and maybe 50% of them over 40 years old. The panel, which I was on, chose a number of winning photos. One of the women who won a prizes was wearing a kimono. I wish I had a photo of the woman in a kimono photographing a nude model. ;-)

One side-effect of this session was that I ended up with some nude photographs. I posted them in Flickr flagged as “Moderate” and “Hide this photo from public searches”. I still got a few people telling me that they were surprised and a thread started on one of my photos about nudes and sensitivity about nude images. After reading a bunch of posts about nude vs naked, I realized this is an old and deep discussion online. The collapsed context of the Internet forces us to deal with these cultural differences in a very real way. With nudes, I find that even in the same society, there is a very wide range of sensitivity levels. One curious thing is why people turn “safe mode” off when they don’t want to see nudes…

The special guest for the closed member meeting this year was Charles Robert Jenkins, the former US Army soldier who lived in North Korea for 39 years. He gave us a very candid and real account of his time in North Korea and while some of the facts and assertions were interesting and shocking, his personal account of his day-to-day life in North Korea left the strongest impression. He now lives in Niigata, Japan.

The “yagaku” can be hit or miss, but this year it was a lot of fun. The deal with the “yagaku” is that we choose a dozen or so local restaurants and several members are assigned to each venue. Then all of the local people are invited to join us to dinner where we are the hosts. We learn a lot about the local culture and they get to spend “quality time” with us. This year, I sat with a number of women who had worked in Tokyo at companies like Fujitsu and Intel but returned to Niigata after getting married. We talked about how to use the net to “stay in the loop”.

One of the highlights of the event was getting to hear Ken Mogi speak and having time to chat with him a bit. In addition to being one of the most brilliant people I know, it turns out that he has a very funny and rich personality.

Next year, we will be holding the event in Nagoya. Anyone is welcome to join us.

Technorati Tags: Enjin01

JUMP系列 Photographer：老0

I landed in Beijing yesterday at 5AM from Los Angeles and am leaving today at 1PM for New York. From a logistical and environmental perspective, I think this was one of my stupider trips. However, from a content perspective, this was one of my best trips ever. I really met more interesting people, saw more interesting things and had more interesting conversations in a single day than I’ve had in a long time.

I started out the morning yesterday by giving at talk at cnbloggercon organized by Isaac Mao. I gave a talk about the sharing economy and got some interesting questions and hallway conversation about sharing in the context of China. I also got to meet a lot of the Chinese bloggers I only knew by name. Many thank for Isaac and his crew for organizing this excellent annual conference and sorry I haven’t made it over before.

Then I went to the Creative Commons China Photo Content ceremony at the National Library in Beijing. There were 10,000 submissions of professional and amateur works licensed under various CC licenses. There were three categories: Society, Nature and Portraits. Winners were chosen by a panel of judges including famous photographers, professors and other notable people. The photographs were amazing. There is a web page of the winning photographs. Don’t forget to click the link underneath the winning photos for the second place winner gallery.

While we have silly people in the West saying that for every free photo on Flickr a professional photographer loses their job, we have professional photographers in China licensing their best works under CC licenses. As far as I could tell, the amateur and professional photographers seemed integrated and supportive of each other.

After the awards ceremony, we have a workshop with presentations from an illustrious and interesting group of speakers. Overall a groundbreaking and well executed event. Congratulations Chunyan and the CC China team!

I’m uploading photos from my trip in a Flickr set. I found out yesterday that there is a Firefox Plugin to bypass the Chinese block on Flickr. Yay!

Today Vint stepped down as chairman of ICANN as his term came to and end. The new board elected Peter Dengate Thrush as the new chairman.

My term also came to and end. I'll blog about this more, but thought I should post this first...

My new Hello Kitty UI for WoW

Via Yusuf.

And no. I didn’t do this. ;-) … but it is awesome.

Does anyone know where I can download this?

UPDATE: Found it! Hello Kitty Island Adventure UI

Still early stage but very well done. Enjoying PhotoPhlow a lot. Reminds me of proto-Flickr.

Set up a #joiito PhotoPhlow channel there and hanging out when I’m free. For now it appears that they will shoot you an invite if you sign up on the site.

Kudos to iMorpheus for the invite.

Me with Timothy Leary's terminus made of his mortal remains

As Timothy once said, "everyone out there gets the Timothy Leary they deserve". WAV File

Today, I did an interview with agent etoy.Monorom and agent etoy.Silvan for their Mission Eternity project. My job was to channel Timothy Leary who is one of the test pilots of the project. The project involves a terminus made from the mortal remains of Timothy which are connected to a sarcophagus installation. It keeps track of and maintains a network of volunteer angels who keep his archival identity parts alive on the Net. In many ways it is still a work in progress and I was contributing in my own way.

I had told etoy that several of us had had experiences in the past where Tim asked us to channel him. When he was busy or needed to do other things, I would be asked to play his role by answering questions and explaining thoughts. I was working on a book with him at the time and would talk about the ideas from our book, The New Breed. Most silly questions looking for an answer were responded to with a, "think for yourself!" In the past, I did these interviews in chatrooms with Tim often in the next room so it wasn't that hard to imagine what Tim would say. Now 10 years after his death, I had to think a deeply about what Tim would think about the current state of affairs and try to play this role.

It was a lot of fun.

While I was preparing for this, I reflected on Wikipedia where someone edited a comment on my Wikipedia article from "Ito is Timothy Leary's God Son." to "Ito has claimed that he was one of Timothy Leary's so-called 'God Sons'". Someone nice edited it back eventually. Also, somewhere along the line, my name was also scrubbed from Timothy's article as well. I realize that to some people my relationship with Tim is not notable or interesting and possible annoying. I don't really feel like being greedy about it at all. It just feels a bit sad that something I said on my blog has been reduced to a claim that looks like some kind of heavy name dropping...

As I thought about this more, I remembered the quote from Tim. I also remembered that Tim touched people deeply and made them feel special. I think EVERYONE he touched directly or through his work came up with their own Tim. I don't feel I have any right to take away from that. However, I think that it would be great if we can understand Tim as the aggregate of all of our Tim's and somehow come together to help him come back to life through our memories. I really think that this is what etoy is trying to do with Mission Eternity and that makes me happy.

What's amazing to me now is that as more and more information becomes available online and we are able to talk to each other about our memories... Tim can come back to life instead of fading and through us, maybe he becomes much larger than what he could be if he were all in one piece right now. I look forward to working together to bring back his spirit instead of bickering over the pieces and the details of the past.

Update: Chris found a video of Timothy calling me his godson. Thanks Chris!

Based on the true story of Tom Coates

Technorati Tags: Tom Coates

The saga of Tom Coates will continue…

Technorati Tags: Tom Coates

Tom Coates

Fiona and danah

I’m at one of my favorite meetings of the year - the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium.

It’s being streamed here: http://131.107.151.221/SCS - open in VLC as MMS

We also have an IRC back-channel on irc.freenode.net/#scs2007

Also hanging out on #joiito as usual…

Uploading photos in a Flickr set.

Jun Murai giving opening remarks

It started at noon today Japan time, but don’t miss Mozilla 24, a 24 hour global event organized by Mozilla.

Gerfried Stocker

Other than being 7 degrees celcius and raining most of the time, Ars Electronica this year was a lot of fun. It was packed full of work for me this week with five talks and ten media interviews, but with Sandra, Elizabeth and Fumi's help, everything went smoothly and I survived. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to see all of the installations or talk to as many artists as I would have liked, but I had more than enough interesting conversations to make it great.

I went to Ars Electronica this year together with the MOGA unit which is a collaboration between Professor Inakage's lab, Joi's lab (mostly Fumi) and Hiroyuki Nakano's Peacedelic team. MOGA set up the "Jump" installation in Linz. Yuichiro Katsumoto, also from Professor Inakage's lab presented Amagatana. It was fun seeing the students I had been working with in the Ars Electronica context.

I think that most of the talks will end up online somewhere, but I'm not sure where. ;-) I did see one video interview on Artivi.com.

The theme of this year's Ars Electronica was privacy.

The first session I participated in was with the Austrian Association and Judges and members from the Ars Electronica community. I talked broadly about the generation gap and the how the behavior and use of the technology was very different among the new users of the Internet and how difficult it was, yet how important it was, for the older generation to try to understand the way the new generation used the new medium. I was really impressed in the conversations with some of the judges and how forward looking they were. I also talked about the importance of Global Voices in the future of global democracy. I suppose that federal judges can think more long term about democracy and things like the cost of privacy than their politician brothers. Having smart judges is a great thing as the recent ruling by the 10th Circuit Court in the US shows.

Summer Watson

The second session I participated in was a discussion about future trends with some of corporate executives. It was a good group with a number of interesting presentation. The presentation that was the most interesting to me was Summer Watson, a British soprano opera singer, who announced that she is going to ski the last degree (from 89 to 90) of the North Pole and sing an Aria at the North pole as a call to action on environmental issues.

I had coffee with her afterwards and we talked a lot about Creative Commons and online identities and was inspired to start the Summer Watson Wikipedia article.

I also did a session about WoW which I think you can imagine without me going into too much detail.

Volker Grassmuck

I did a session with Leonard Dobusch to talk about importance of Free Networks and Free Knowledge. Again, I'm sure readers of this blog can imagine what my position was. Leonard, who is also the son of the Mayor of Linz, had some interesting perspectives on the role of municipal governments in supporting public access. He had co-edited a book recently where they discussed many of these issues. He cited an article by Volker Grassmuck where Volker argued that having a public space for hosting content on the web was important.

Finally, I was on a panel as part of a awards ceremony and a kick-off meeting for Fair Music. The idea behind Fair Music was sort of a music parallel for the Fair Trade mark. Whereas the Fair Trade mark tries to identify products where the production meets basic Fair Trade parameters and requirements, Fair Music marks were awarded to companies and projects where the artists and consumers were treated fairly. Fair in this context means a number of things including the artist receiving a fair share of the remuneration or the project promoting diversity against the bias of "Northern" dominance in the music business.

I mostly talked about the need for new business models and the role of Creative Commons in this context.

I uploaded my photos a Flickr set.

Just got back from visiting Kyoto with Reid, Michelle and Mizuka.

Posted some photos to a Flickr set. Also posted a short chat with Reid about venture business in China and Japan in mp3 (8.9 MB) and ogg (15.3 MB) formats.

View from Shanghai JW Marriott

Just returned from a trip to China with Reid, Michelle, Ellen and Kazuya organized by Leonard Liu and his team.

We met with VCs, entrepreneurs and a few of my old friends.

I was in Shanghai a few years ago just as the US VCs were starting to set up offices in Shanghai. Things have clearly moved forward a notch. The first wave of entrepreneurs have exited their successful ventures and are now on their second or third venture. The VCs seem to have a community. More and more US educated Chinese seem to be returning.

There are many things about the Chinese venture scene that remind me of the Japanese venture scene. There are clearly fewer experienced VCs and entrepreneurs compared to Silicon Valley. Many of the people are copying US models - some with a great deal of success.

The Chinese market in general reminds me of Japan during the bubble. Everyone hugely optimistic, explosion of spending, explosion of brands and luxury goods, investors from all over the place flocking to participate. While the dynamics are quite different and the market much larger in many ways, I see some of the similar indicators of irrational exuberance as well.

When we launched a lot of our ventures in Japan like Internet advertising, ecommerce and other things that were going strong in the US, we typically overestimated the short term growth for Japan. I have to give Reid credit for triggering this thought, but I now think that it is possible that many entrepreneurs may be overestimating how easy it is going to be to get Internet ads and ecommerce going in China. On the other hand, even very narrow nitchy markets in China are HUGE so it's possible to build pretty big business with a narrow focus compared to what you can do in the US or Japan.

I'm still not sure what we're going to end up doing in China if anything, but I'll keep you posted. Thanks for everyone who took time in their busy schedules to meet with us and share thoughts. Thanks especially to Leonard, John, Vivian and Stefanie for organizing such a great trip!

I organized my photos into the Shanghai part and the Beijing part.

Just got home from Aspen and Taipei. Thanks to everyone for all the fun.

Shona Brown in Aspen

Benajamin Mako Hill at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei

I've uploaded my photos as Flickr sets - Aspen Institute 2007 and Wikimania 2007.

Talked to nacho_c and we decided to start using the "freeplaces" tag as a location/place compliment to the "freesouls" tag.

Just made a gallery on my Wikimedia Commons User Page. Wee.

According to Wikipedia, "Ryuichi Sakamoto (坂本 龍一 Sakamoto Ryūichi, born January 17, 1952, Nakano, Tokyo, Japan) is an Academy Awards-winning, Grammy-winning, Golden Globe-winning Japanese musician, composer, producer and actor, based in New York and Tokyo."

I first met Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1997. Of course I knew of him having been a HUGE fan. Like many Japanese my age, Yellow Magic Orchestra defined an era of our youth where video games, anime and technology merged in the 80’s. YMO made us feel cool, global and different from our parents.

Timothy Leary and I talked a lot about YMO in the context of our discussions and plans to write a book about the New Breed of Japanese youth. [I recently wrote about how I met Tim.] Tim died in 1996, but apparently he had told Ryuichi that he should look me up.

I still have the email from January 26, 1997 where Ryuichi says that Tim had urged him to meet me at some point. Ryuichi invited me to visit his home in New York to chat sometime. I think that I ended up visiting Ryuichi at his place for the first time in April 1997.

I still remember the feeling that we all get when we first meet someone who we have been looking at in posters and album jackets in our room through our formative years. I was extremely excited and nervous and didn’t know what to expect.

Ryuichi turned out to be a down-to-earth, smart and super-curious guy who wanted to talk about computers, the Internet and the future. We talked about everything from computer generated music to PGP encryption. We hit it off and both agreed that Internet was changing everything.

Through the rest of the 90’s we worked on a bunch of things together. Among other things, he joined the advisory board of Neoteny and I joined his advisory board when he worked to invite the Dalai Lama to Japan. There was also a period where I was clubbing a lot and Ryuichi and I bounced around Tokyo together sometimes. We also took aikido lessons together and sometimes spontaneously sparred in awkward locations. As they say, “those were the days...”

In 1999 Ryuichi worked on the Media Artists Association which was a group to try to promote artists rights for new media artists and musicians which I tried to help with.

Right after the September 11 attacks, Ryuichi spoke out strongly in an appeal to not diminish human rights in response to the terrorist attacks. At the time, this was a very unpopular notion and I remember Ryuichi’s enormous bravery in speaking out about this as a foreigner living in New York City.

Later, Ryuichi launched a campaign against the plans to begin the war on Iraq. Again, he was way too early to get too much general support, but he persevered with this, at the time, unpopular position, putting his reputation and career on the line. In retrospect, I think we all should have listened to him more and made more noise.

Ryuichi has also been an outspoken environmentalist for as long as I’ve known him. I first heard about carbon offsets when Ryuichi started offsetting the carbon footprint of his concerts years ago. Recently he worked to try to stop a nuclear recycling plant in Rokkashomura and has launched a new projected called More Trees to help offset carbon and help support projects to plant more trees.

Ryuichi has always been early and strong in taking positions about political and social issues. I think a lot of this comes from his active participation in the student movements in Japan in the 60’s and 70’s.

These days, the student uprisings of the 60’s and 70’s are considered uncool. I remember in the 90’s fashion became rather fake and shallow and being serious or an activist was considered boring and stupid. People like Ryuichi and Ryu Murakami (a mutual friend who Ryuichi introduced me to) are some of the few people who are able be fashionable and activists at the same time.

Ryuichi’s adherence to his social principles while still retaining a super-high sense of taste and artistic quality have influenced me heavily. I have tried to model my life in many ways after his in terms of balancing creative and social endeavors. However, I still lack his his courage in calling out the unpopular issues early and loudly although I think I’m improving.

I think Ryuichi is a role model for us all in many ways and I’m really proud and happy to have him as my friend.

Harajuku Takeshita dori

A bunch of us went for a walk in Tokyo and took some pictures.

Mizuka and Kaoru 2007

When I was born in Kyoto my father was still at Kyoto University studying under the late Kenichi Fukui. My grandparents on both sides had been against their marriage - my father a merchant class boy from Kansai shunned as lower-class by my mother's noble family from Northern Japan. My father's family wanted him to marry someone who was healthier and more likely to be a hard-working member of their family. Because of this, my parents were rather poor, lacking any support from their families. We lived in a dumpy home and they struggled to make ends meet.

Kenichi Fukui's wife, Tomoe, had a brother who knew people in the Geisha district, Gion. Through this connection my mother was able to get a job teaching English to geisha and maiko in Gion. They called her "Momoko-sensei". She taught at a geisha teahouse called Minoya.

Later, we moved to the US. Kaoru, the teenage daughter of the mistress and owner of Minoya wanted to visit the US. My parents agreed to let Kaoru come and stay with us for six months or so in exchange for baby-sitting. Kaoru was 18 and I was 3.

Me and Kaoru at Yellow Stone National Park

We were so poor that my father once scolded Kaoru for eating too much food. ;-) Kaoru returned to Kyoto and eventually took over the family business of the geisha teahouse which she continues to run today.

I kept in touch with Kaoru over the years and I have made a habit of popping down to Kyoto whenever I can to see her and my other friends there. Kaoru is my guide and interface to Kyoto. She reminds me that when I visit a famous philosopher's house, that I should NOT, even when asked twice, actually accept the invitation for tea. She tells me how to deal with restaurant owners, geisha, maiko and monks... without her, I would never be able to navigate the exceedingly complex social system of Kyoto.

She still treats me like a 3 year old boy sometimes and embarrasses me to no end by continuing to call me by my baby name, "Jon-bon"... which as a result is my name among all of the geisha of Gion. The benefit, however, is that many of the geisha and maiko are like family. Even though I only lived in Kyoto as a baby, Kaoru and my geisha and maiko friends in Kyoto really help me continue to feel like Kyoto is my home. They provide me with an essential culture backbone to my Japanese nationality.

I'm at Frankfurt airport getting stuck in elevators during fire alarms and stuff...

I just posted photos from Barcelona on Flickr.

According to Wikipedia, "Cornelius (born Keigo Oyamada (小山田圭吾) January 27, 1969 in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese recording artist and producer. Oyamada's first claim to fame was as a member of the pop duo, Flipper's Guitar, one of the key groups of the Tokyo Shibuya-kei scene. Following the disbandment of Flipper's Guitar in 1991, Oyamada donned the "Cornelius" moniker and embarked on a successful solo career."

Keigo's mother is my mother's cousin. Keigo's grandmother moved to Tokyo in her youth while my grandmother stayed in Northern Japan to run our household. Keigo and his cousins became our local "family" when we moved to Tokyo since my first cousins were either in Northern Japan or in the US. When we used to get together as an extended family, our older cousins used to cheat us out of our allowance and everyone used to tease Keigo because he was always the funny little kid.

As we became teenagers, we hung out a lot and listened to music together. We listen to a lot of stuff like Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Clash. When both of our families were going through a somewhat difficult financial period and his mother was working for my mother, we both lived in a dumpy old love hotel in Shibuya that had been converted to a dumpy old apartment.

Keigo was in Jr. High School at the time. He had a little cult following in his school, some kid writing a school comic strip about Keigo and his escapades. (If I remember this correctly...) I remember his mom being called into school regularly to make Keigo apologies for random things... I don't remember the details. I remember him practicing the guitar all the time and talking about starting a band.

One day, I heard that his band was a huge hit - Flippers Guitar, his first band. As they say, after that it's history... Keigo's music has evolved and it always involves a humble, funny and experimental attitude. I see his awesome mother, our humble teenage environment and our playful family in his music. I remember hearing that NHK had invited him to be a judge on a music show. When the host asked Keigo what he thought, he pointed out that the host had a nose hair sticking out and Keigo wasn't invited back... I guess she didn't think it was very funny.

Now Keigo has a wife, house, a super-cute kid and has mellowed a bit with age. On the other hand, his music aged well and continues to inspire me to experiment and remain playful. We're hoping to collaborate more directly more and he's helping with Creative Commons these days.

According to Wikipedia, "Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic. He is currently professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications."

I think I met Larry when he was in Japan promoting the Japanese edition of Code and I was on a panel with him. I got to know Larry better when he was in Japan for an extended period in 2002-2003 I think. At the time, I was struggling as an activist in Japan, fighting against the broken democracy of Japan. This struggle and the advice that Larry gave me for how to think about this struggle lead me to write my Emergent Democracy paper and take my struggle to the rest of the world.

Larry is a genius at identifying how complex systems such as law, code and politics influence each other. He's able to figure out where the balance is and turn murky complex issues into sharp, understandable thoughts around which movements can rally and debates can be won. Most importantly, Larry throws himself into acting on these causes with a dedication that energizes everyone around him.

Larry has really helped me evolve from an armchair philosopher to increasingly more serious activist. When Larry asked me to join the board of Creative Commons, I was honored and shocked, concerned about whether I would be make a sufficient contribution. I was even more surprised when Larry asked me to be the chairman of Creative Commons and I'm still concerned about my ability to play the kind of role that Larry expects from me.

However, Larry hasn't left me with much slack or time to wallow in my lack of confidence and the combination of his confidence and firm leadership is pushing me to have to grown quickly into my new position.

Larry is the mentor of mine who sets the standard of high-quality, no-compromise dedication to our higher causes, showing that there is no issue too complex or large that we can't make a difference with enough commitment, persistence and focus.

According to Wikipedia, "Justin Hall (born December 16, 1974 in Chicago, Illinois), is an American freelance journalist who is best known as a pioneer blogger (internet-based diarist), and for writing reviews from game conferences such as E3 and the Tokyo Game Show."

I don't know exactly how I officially met Justin, but it was probably through Howard Rheingold or something back in the early early days of the Web. (Howard is one of Justin's mentors.) Justin had a site called Justin's Links from the Underground. It was the first website of his kind where he wrote about his life. This was a great inspiration for my own website which was also one of the earlier personal websites.

Suddenly, Justin decided to move to Japan in 2001 and lived there/here until January 2003. In Japan, we grew closer and he became a closer friend of the family. It was during this period that Justin convinced me to dump my old hand-coded website and switch to Movable Type. Justin was the first webmaster of my blog and is the one who got me started blogging. He was also the one who recommended that we use Movable Type. (Thanks Justin!)

When he was in Japan, he wrote Just In Tokyo, a crazy guide to Japan.

Justin eventually moved to Los Angeles where he studied at USC in Scott's department and recently graduated. In LA he became a member of Mimi and Scott's extended family together with Merci and Pixley Wigglebottom. Pixley is like Justin's doggy twin.

Recently, Justin has become an entrepreneur as he begins to build some structure around his passively multiplayer online game. I'm trying to help him out with this process.

I've really been enjoying watching Justin develop over the years, never losing his super-happy, honest, fun and spazzy core. He's one of the most lovable bundles of energy that I know. He's also great because he's always pushing me to be more social and proactive.

According to Wikipedia, "Howard Rheingold (born July 7, 1947) is a critic and writer; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing)."

I met Howard a long time ago by Internet standards - in the early 1980's... before The Web. *gasp* We were both heavily involved in online services and their forums like The Source, CompuServe, The Meta Network, Delphi and others. We were both part of an organization called "The Electronic Network Association". I think that Howard was the editor of the Whole Earth Review back then. I was still in High School and Howard was a distant guru-like figure for me back then.

Later, when I moved to (part of my base) to San Francisco, I got to know Howard better and he became one of my cyber-gurus who together with Timothy Leary, taught me the history of the Hippy and New Age movements and got me plugged into that corner of the San Francisco universe.

Howard has invited me to his home a number of times for long chats while walking in the mountains or sitting in his garden. Listening to Howard talk about his garden and his life in this environment is super-inspiring and is one of the main reasons that I've recently thrown myself into trying to grow my own food and make my own compost.

Howard is incredibly well read and has provided me with more life-changing books than anyone else I know and has recently succeeded in getting me to start drawing and thinking of art in a new light. This has been a big factor in my increased attention to the quality of my photography.

Howard contributed to my business history as well. In 1993, Howard wrote about me in an article in Wired and also mentioned me in his book, The Virtual Community. Cyrus Shaoul, a fellow ASIJ graduate, read the article and sent me an email about wanting to get together. This eventually led to the formation of Eccosys, my first successful company.

According to Wikipedia, "Scott Fisher is Professor and Chair of the Interactive Media Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Fellow of the the Annenberg Center for Communication there. He is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on virtual reality, including stints at NASA, Atari Research Labs, MIT's Architecture Machine Group and Keio University."

When I first moved to California, Timothy Leary, who I had recently met in Tokyo, picked me up at LAX and took me to his house where he had a party and introduced me to his network and extended family in Los Angeles. That weekend, Tim drove my sister, mother and me to San Francisco where he organized a party for us at the Mondo 2000 house. He introduced us to a huge number of people at that party. We first met Scott at that party.

Scott had either just set up or was setting up Telepresence Research, a virtual reality (VR) research company. I was very interested in VR at the time and VR was actually how I first connected with Tim. Scott was looking at Japan as an important market so I joined Telepresence Research part time to help Scott with business development in Japan.

This position mostly involved helping Scott and his partner at Telepresence Research at the time, Brenda Laurel, set up meetings in Japan and providing translations for their presentations at these meetings for them. It was a great way to learn about VR as well as meet all of the people doing cool things in Japan in this space.

During this period, I was mostly living in Japan and my sister started a program at Stanford. Before I knew it, Scott and Mimi were a "thing" and Scott became my brother-in-law. In Japanese, if you marry a younger sister, you are considered a "younger brother-in-law" and in most formal settings are required to walk behind the older brother etc. I tease Scott to no end about this.

But Scott's a great brother-in-law and has become one of my closest confidants and best friends.

Links

May 31, 2006 - 10 years since Timothy Leary's death
March 20, 1995 - Hanging out with Timothy Leary

According to Wikipedia, "John Perry Barlow (born October 3, 1947) is an American poet, essayist, retired Wyoming cattle rancher, political activist and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead."

Barlow is one of my best friends who connects to a large number of my different networks. I first met Barlow through Timothy Leary. Timothy was always generous with his network and Barlow was one of the first people Tim introduced me to. Barlow became a friend of the family and we spent a lot of time together.

Barlow and I have talked a lot through the years about the differences in our cultures as well as the similarities. Barlow introduced me to a whole part of America that was previously unknown to me. He took me to my first and only Grateful Dead show at Shoreline. I visited Barlow at his home in Pinedale, Wyoming where we drove through a double rainbow in one of the most memorable of drives through American scenery that I can remember.

At his home, we schemed about writing a book, but we were not able to stay focused long enough to get it going.

Lately, we invite each other to conferences and run into each other like randomly molecules bumping into each other in brownian motion. He is one of the few people who travel as much as I do.

Links

May 31, 2006 - 10 years since Timothy Leary's death
March 20, 1995 - Hanging out with Timothy Leary

Pat recommended I try to Pclix for time-lapse. Just recorded dinner in our living room using my Canon 5D. Pretty interesting effect. Now to find something more interesting to shoot.

(5 MB .mov of the dinner)

UPDATE: Put together a day's worth of time-lapse with Wataridori 2 by Cornelius. (29 MB mp4)

Good news. Pierre made BusinessWeek's list of Entrepreneurs for the Ages. Congrats Pierre! And... they used my photo of him. Yay!

Bad news. They didn't give me attribution. It's the ONLY thing I ask people do with my photos since they're Creative Commons Attribution licensed. It doesn't cost them anything... and they're crediting the photos by Getty Images.

/me shakes fist at BusinessWeek

The original Flickr image is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/498701092/

I suppose they might have found it on Pierre's Wikipedia article. But... clicking on the photo shows the license.

UPDATE: I wrote them a letter and they sent me an apology and fixed article. Thanks BusinessWeek!

Jet lag woke me up again at 3AM so I watched the Adobe Lightroom stuff on Lynda. I learned how to control more things in post-processing so I went out into the foggy and hazy sunrise to take some photos in the yard to play with in Lightroom. I still have a lot to learn, but I think I have a better handle on how to deal with overcast lighting... Which is good since it's rainy season in Japan right now and overcast a lot.

I also learned how to fix chromatic aberration which I used today on one of the images.

I thought about whether I should go back to a more journal-like form for my blog or start writing more stuff on Flickr. I seem to be spending more time responding to comments on Flickr these days than on this blog. I suppose my online presence needs an overhaul.

My photos from the ICANN meeting in San Juan are posted on Flickr in a set.

They're all Creative Commons Attribution licensed so free to use with attribution. If they're pictures of yourself, go ahead and use them without attribution if you have to.

Last month, I blogged about one of my new "missions" - to take photographs of people and post them under a CC-BY license so that Wikipedians and other people writing articles have access to photographs that they can use in articles. There is a problematic lack of usable photos of most people as any Google Image search will prove. I've been talking about this a bit more and Larry suggest we start a "freesouls" movement to encourage people to post take and post their photos under a free license.

I've started tagging any decent quality images of people on my Flickr stream tagged with their name and the tag "freesouls". If you're interested in joining, just start using the tag.

I did a workshop about photography at the iCommons Summit and discussed freesouls. One of the issues that came up about portraits was the issue of moral rights, model releases and privacy. We've decided to make the photography discussion at iCommons a permanent thing and will be setting up a "node" for this. If you're interested in discussing these issues, please join the node and the mailing list I'm setting up. For now, you can just sign up on my wiki or the Flickr group until we have a more permanent place for the node.

We'll mostly be discussing norms and legal issues around taking and sharing portraits as well techniques, tools, services and events. We'll also try to put together a tutorial online. We're planning to do the workshop again at iCommons Summit '08 in Sapporo.

Update: You can sign up for the Photo Commons mailing list here: http://labml.ito.com/mailman/listinfo/photo-commons_labml.ito.com

Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher interview Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. John Markoff wrote a New York Times article about this interview. They used my photo. w00t!

A few notes of my own that I posted on Flickr:

Bill: "I'd give a lot for Steve's taste."

Steve: "Bill was much better at partnering than Steve Wozniak and I were."

We've kept secret that: Steve: "We've been married for 10 years." [It was actually: "We've kept our marriage secret for over a decade now."]

Bill: "I'm not the Fake Steve."

Quotes from memory. Exact text may be wrong.

UPDATE 2: The full video is online too.

I feel like this tree - lots of branches that are heavy and overextended.

I wish I felt more like this rock.

Today, I experimented with taking pictures of strangers. I'm always impressed by Jim and iMorpheus' photos of strangers and I figured that the best way to get better at it was just to start doing it.

I had been practicing portraits on people I knew and thought that portraits of strangers should be fun. It was definitely harder than I had expected. I had asked a number of people their "secret". Some people asked before shooting, some people people fooled people into thinking that they were shooting something else, others were stealthy. I felt a bit "dirty" taking pictures of people sneakily. On the other hand, I didn't have the guts to go up to people and ask if I could take their picture. Some of the photos turned out OK, but it was a lot of work.

I am still not sure what my ethical position on photographing strangers is. Personally, I don't mind if people take my picture without asking. On the other hand I'm a weirdo. I've read a number of articles an essays about this topic and I still don't have a very good sense of whether it is cool or not to do it. I definitely think it's OK if you ask. My question is whether it is cool to shoot photos of people and post them to Flickr or our blog if they didn't give you permission. As far as I know, in most countries it's legal to do this.

I wrote a post awhile ago about Chuoism. Chiba Newtown Chuo is a designed from scratch community in the middle of nowhere near my house. The town has the feeling of Japanese consumer culture for the masses that someone decided to spin by calling it "Chuoism". I always thought it was a funny word.

On my way home today, I decided to get off of the train at Chiba Newtown and go Ismhunting and try to capture some of the Ismism with my camera. I've posted some of the images in an Ismhunting Flickr set.

I am an ismhunter.

I just started the Leica M8 Magenta Madness Flickr group.

About Leica M8 Magenta Madness

The Leica M8 has a sensor that is overly sensitive to infrared. This problem causes a magenta hue on certain blacks, particularly fabrics. The color is also visible directly in lights and on anything that is lit by strong infrared light.

There is a promised firmware update and IR/UV filters are just now shipping to early M8 customers with more to follow for the rest of us real soon now.

Until we get our filters, why don't we call this a "feature" and share our Leica M8 Magenta love with each other?

After the ICANN board meeting yesterday, some of us went sightseeing. We visited a beautiful cathedral. It was amazingly fun and full of wonderful photo opportunities after spending a week trying find interesting shots in conference rooms and my hotel room.

One thing I realized after taking some shots of the stained glass was that the cathedral was a perfect opportunity for High Dynamics Range (HDR) imaging. The Wikipedia article describes HDR thus:

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures (i.e. a large difference between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows.

HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a HDR image from a set of photos taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy to use desktop software, the term "HDR" is now popularly used[1] to refer to the process of tone mapping together bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range; however, in this case neither the input nor the output qualify as "true" HDRI.

Because I didn't have a tripod, I couldn't shoot bracketed images, but I was able to take the RAW files that I was shooting and use Photomatix to render HDR images of some of the stained glass shots.

Here is an example of the same image. The first one has gone through HDR and the second one has only had the levels adjusted. (Sorry, I rotated and cropped the second one so they don't look identical.) You can clearly see that in the second image, you lose detail in both the shadows and the highlights, whereas the first one is able to preserve both. You can argue that the HDR image is "doctored" but some argue that HDR is similar to the way our eyes work. Our eyes, apparently, are able to adjust VERY quickly to the brightness and change "aperture" as it scans between highlights and shadows providing with us with high dynamic range imaging in real life.

I think an argument can be made that HDR is "cheating", but I think it's a fascinating technique that I'm going to try learning more about. Hat tip to Justin who first turned me on to this and to Pat who helped me find the software. Also, I've heard that you can use Photoshop to do HDR, but that Photomatix is easier to use. Pat has a very cool landscape HDR shot and Justin has been experimenting with hand-held HDR.

I've been spending more and more of my time over the last few days looking at the world through the viewfinder of my M8. The predominantly interesting thing here to look at are people. The lighting of the conference is the standard tungsten lighting that causes my M8 sensor to turn everything into a horrible magenta hue. I've figured out how to basically correct for this, but the lighting in most of the meeting rooms is so boring anyway, that my focus has started to shift away from trying to do anything fancy in color during the sessions. Ian gave me some advice about increasing the contrast and shadows of my black and white images for that "Leica look" which seems to help pictures that have boring lighting in color.

The result of looking for characteristic expressions and gestures of everyone here and trying to capture them has been a renewed appreciation for the diversity and depth of the people attending this ICANN meeting. The effect of spending time editing and tweaking the images of my favorite people has really been satisfying and enlightening.

I should probably wait until I'm finished with the conference before posting this, but as an anxious blogger, I'm going to post this now. I am uploading additional photos throughout the day so please come back or refresh the sets if you want to see them as they come in.

You can view the Black and White images as a flickr slideshow or in the normal set view. I have uploaded the color shots as well, but put them in another set and put both sets together as a collection. I was going to go back and "do the B&W Leica thing" on the color images, but since I've got a constant flow of new images, I'm going to focus my post-processing on the new stuff for now.

The photos are licensed under a CC Attribution license of course.

Ian Bogost is helping me figure out my "workflow" and my post processing. He's giving me very good advice on the shots. As I work on trying to figure out how much perfection to work on in the context of my workflow, I realize that I'm getting more and more confused about the role of Flickr on my photography.

My Flickr feed currently consists of everything from quick shots uploaded immediately from my camera phone to quick portraits shot, processed and uploaded in minutes with my Leica to 6X6 film shot with my Hasselblad scanned with my film scanner. The feed also includes my WoW screen shots. It contains everything from presence to "art" and everything mashuped up in between.

I used to upload images to photo.net, but there is a max size and the traffic there seems low. I've started uploading to JPG Magazine, but it's rather intimating and probably still a bit too high end for me.

Any thoughts? How does everyone else manage to separate the various versions of photography in your life and what makes the most sense from the perspective of a viewer? Inevitably, "want to see my pictures?" has been the dread of any house guest, photos usually being more interesting to the photographer than anyone else. Do you even CARE about my photos? If so, what is the best way to present them to you?

From the perspective of a viewer, crappy photos from friends of other friends that tells me a story, or slightly crappy pictures of friends where a gesture or expression make the image for me, or amazing photos from people I don't know - these all "do it" for me. Crappy photos from people I don't know, or even "nice" images from people I don't know are just noise to me. The context is so important. I guess maybe I'll start splitting up my feeds to Radar, Flickr and JPG Magazine or something and blog links here when I want you to look at them. ;-)

At GDC, Ian Bogost and I were geeking out about the Leica M8. He showed me his M8 and the amazing leather case he had for it. Later I asked him to refer me to his source. There is a guy named Luigi Crescenzi in Italy that makes them. You email Luigi via the somewhat crazy looking website. He took my order immediately and I got it a few days later. I've been sporting it for a few days now and I'm in otaku bliss. The case is really great and has that special handmade loving workmanship thing that really gets me going. It reminds me a bit of some scene from Pattern Recognition.

Following Ian's example, I've started reading and posting to the Leica forums, the mother-lode of Leica otaku madness.

I sort of knew this, but it's clear now. Leicaism isn't really about wanting a "better" camera. It's an excessive obsessive syndrome.

Ever since the OS X update, Aperture keeps crashing. Bah!

Mar 16 15:52:09 joi crashdump[4663]: Aperture crashed

I reinstalled it and ran a bunch of disk/directory repairs, but no go. I'm switching to Adobe Bridge.

UPDATE: Someone at Apple just told me that the patch I made to the system to get it to do M8 RAW is probably the problem causing the crashing. They also told me that Apple is working on M8 RAW support. Stay tuned!

I am visiting Mozilla today for a board meeting. After a few inquiries, I was able to track down Stuart Parmenter who is working on the color profile issue that I blogged about in my last post. The good news is that Stuart is a photo and color geek and has already figured this out and fixed it. (It is Bug 16769 in Bugzilla@Mozilla.) Firefox 3.0 will have a bunch of improvements including dealing with color profiles in images properly. There are a few more tests that are required, but it will soon be in the tree and should be available in the Alpha of Firefox 3.0.

Special thanks to Stuart for the tutorial on color!

UPDATE: Special special thanks to Tim Rowley who did most of the implementation part in Mozilla.

UPDATE 2: The fix should be in Alpha 4 of Firefox 3.0 not Alpha 3 that is coming out next in a week or two.

I got the Leica M8 last week. My logic was that I had a lot of M series lenses already. I had waited too long to get the Digital back for my R8 and it was way too low-resolution by the time I finally got it. I didn't want to wait so long to get the M8.

Although I guess I'm still happy I got the M8, I didn't do my research and there are a number of bugs that I'm having to work around.

I already knew about the first bug by the time I actually got my M8. I wanted to use Aperture for my workflow, but Apple doesn't support Leica M8 RAW format so you need to make a fake RAW profile for the M8 and use the Adobe RAW converter to convert the M8 RAW files before importing them into Aperture. (Thanks for the pointer Ian.) One more step, but OK. Fine. I'm going to assume that Apple will eventually support the M8. (Maybe a bad assumption.)

I encountered my second bug when I started shooting at SXSW. Black cloth and other things in the conference sessions came out looking purple instead of black. Several people saw me visibly panic as I previewed photos that I was taking of Phillip Torrone who had a black shirt on. Someone told me to google "IR Leica M8". Tadaaa... a serious flaw.

The Leica sensor is overly sensitive to infrared and certain materials when lit by a source with strong IR (The lights in the conference) will show up as purple. Since it's not a color balance issue, you can't just white balance it out. The Leica forums explained that the Pro version of Capture One had profiles that could substantially improve the image and make it look almost right. However, it looks like you will need to get a special UV/IR filter and a firmware upgrade that is still TBD from Leica to correct for it. Doh. Even after the firmware comes out, needing a new filter for all of my lenses really puts a dent in the amazing backward compatibility that Leica is all about.

After sort of getting this all working, I finally uploaded a bunch of stuff to Flickr and noticed that things looked washed out and lacked saturation compared to how they appeared on my screen. It turns out that Firefox on the Mac doesn't recognize the ICC profile tags so I need to remap the colors and export the images in Aperture instead of just dragging them into Flickr. (Thanks Kevin!) I'm exporting to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 which seems to fix it.

Compare an image remapped/exported to sRGB IEC61966-2.1

to
one which is not

in Firefox and Safari on a Mac. They will look the same in Safari, but the second one will look washed out in Firefox.) I also learned, from the same post that Macs and Windows machines typically use a different gamma so even if I get the colors right, the gamma will be off for most of the world. There is a page that clearly describes these phenomena.

I guess the lesson here is that the closer you get to perfection, the harder it gets. I'm not upset and I'm learning a lot about imaging and color in the process. It's just amazing how complicated the world of digital photography has become for me in the last few days.

UPDATE: After the OSX update, Aperture is crashing randomly and frequently. Anyone else getting this?

Does anyone use Aperture and RAW images? I'm having trouble. I've downloaded and installed the RAW update, but it doesn't seem like Aperture recognizes the RAW DNG files from my Leica DIGITAL-MODUL-R. My Adobe Bridge deals with them fine. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any advice.

They just announced that the conference is on the record (yay!) but there are no photos allowed (boo!). They cited security reasons. I have a feeling maybe this had something to do with it. (disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the "derivative work")

Xeni Jardin @ Boing Boing Blog

Pieter Hugo's photos: Hyena people of Nigeria

The thought that popped into my head when I first saw this incredible photo was, "next time you feel smug or badass, remember this and say -- no you are not tough. This is tough."
Pieter Hugo's photo series "Hyena People of Nigeria" is the result of a ten-day trek the South African photographer took with a group of wandering minstrels and their animal companions: three hyenas, two pythons and four monkeys. Shown here: "Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Nigeria, 2005"

Here's a snip from a "making of" interview with Hugo:

‘Last year I saw a picture on a website that was taken from a car window in Nigeria,” says Pieter Hugo. “It showed a man with a hyena on the streets of Lagos.”

Seated on a restaurant balcony overlooking Cape Town’s city bowl, the tall, athletic photographer says it was this crude photograph that motivated him to visit Nigeria. “The caption said he was a debt collector,” he continues, a glass of wine and salad placed in front of him. “The photograph really intrigued me.”

Through a local researcher Hugo was introduced to Adetokunbo Abiola, a Nigerian journalist who emailed him to say he knew of the men (there were more than one) in the picture. A few weeks later Hugo nervously exited Lagos airport on his first visit to the country."

Link. See this post on Clayton Cubitt's blog for a slew of additional links about Hugo's work.
Previously on Boing Boing: Hyenas and baboons for pets

I remember linking to a picture of these Hyenas last year. The picture was amazing, but honestly, it didn't motivate me to visit Nigeria. I'm glad it motivated Hugo though.

Technorati Tags: hyena, nigeria

I just saw this cool image in my 1001 flickr stream... which lead me to Comic Life which turned into this and this. I really should be packing. I'm off to Japan today. Special thanks to Master Willem and his team for letting me stay at their chateau.

OneVoice

Getting out the vote in Ramallah

More photos are available in the new Palestinian Elections gallery.

Good luck and my cheers for everyone working on getting out the vote in Palestine!

dog listening to podcasts

Originally uploaded by pt.

This is my favorite picture of the year...

1001

1001 is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr, the online photo-sharing website. 1001 not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what's new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos.

Groovy new OS X client by Adriaan for Flickr.

disclosure: Adriaan works for me and I'm an investor in Flickr.

I'm going to quote David's whole post because it has a bunch of good links.

David Weinberger

Metadata without tears

Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses:

But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.

He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of "ethnoclassification" (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it "folksonomy.") He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we're making for ourselves.

Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell's article on "collaborative knowledge gardening." I've also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he's talking about.

I totally agree that this "ethnoclassification" is really an amazing solution to the metadata problem. Although, as they point out, there are some problems, I think that we'll find solutions. I feeling very taggy these days. I think there should be more cross-site tag linking. Blog categories, wiki pages, music meta data, and many other things can be "tagged". TAGCON 2005! Sorry. Just kidding.

I just got my picture taken with my second cousin Keigo. Keigo is aka Cornelius and is a pretty well known musician. The picture for a magazine called Brutus and the series is about cool people and their relationship with someone else. So I was the "someone else" for this article. The photo was taken by Kishin Shinoyama who is well known for his portraits. His confidence and efficiency were quite amazing. He found this cool spot to take the photo in our offices in 5 minutes. Then he set up his 8X10 camera took polaroids of three poses. He seemed to only take one or two actual photos of each set up. It was all over in like five or ten minutes.

He gave me one of the polaroids and signed it for me upon request and said that I could post this on my blog.

Esther scooped me and announced that she is investing in flickr. So am I. I haven't been blogging about flickr too much, even though I'm addicted because I wanted to wait to announce this first. I'm just a passive investor, but wanted to disclose this relationship.

You can see my photos on my flickr photo page. You can even subscribe to it in RSS 2.0 or Atom. Remember to check out the Tags page. There is also my personal tags page. Things have been getting very taggy around here ever since I started using del.icio.us.

Thanks for the opportunity to invest Stewart and Caterina.

Ever wanted to take digital pictures from a kite? Phillip Torrone who brought us the Search Engine Belt Buckles shows us how. He makes it sound so easy.

I think the "mystery creature" in Maryland (via Boing Boing) is just a lost Nigerian pet Hyena.

The mystery creature or "Hyote"

Nigerian pet hyenas and baboons

flickr, a photo management/social network/community/chat service just integrated Creative Commons so you can choose a license for a photo when you upload this. This is awesome. flickr integrates photos into your chat so that you can plop photos into a chat room from your shoe-box and copy photos into your shoe-box from a conversation. People can comment on the photos, etc. It's probably the best integration of photos in conversation that I've ever seen and now with Creative Commons, it should make feel safer and more fluid.

Nice job Stewart!

News24.com

Rumsfeld bans phone cameras

London - Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported on Sunday.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US defence department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.

via Smartmobs

The increasing reliance of this administration on secrecy is really disturbing. When your government starts to strip the people of their privacy and civil rights and consistently marches forward with a variety of efforts to hides its own movements, you know you're in real trouble.

I've worked on whistleblower protection bills and thought a lot about the importance of the ability for people to come forward outside of the chain of command. It is an essential protection measure against coverups and corruption. I can understand arguments about why allowing random photos could be bad, but I'm sure the importance of having "eyes on the ground" outside of the "main channel" out-weigh the risks.

UPDATE: There are many media sites and blogs running this story, but they all seem to quote the same source. We still have no corroborating original sources. Please see comments on this entry for more.

UPDATE2

Xeni @ Boing Boing

This morning, I asked a Defense Department spokesperson whether or not the reports of a phonecam ban were true. This spokesperson said that these reports were technically inaccurate -- that the Pentagon is not issuing a new ban on camera phones per se, but that a Directive 8100.2 was issued on April 14 establishing new restrictions on wireless telecommunications equipment in general. The text of this directive is available online here in PDF format: Link. The intent of this April 14 directive, and how commanders in the field will be expected to enforce it, are matters I'll be reporting on in more detail for the NPR program "Day to Day," later this week.

I recently discovered lomography. I think it fits very naturally with the spirit of moblogging.

Lomographic Society International

The 10 Golden Rules of Lomography

1 - take your camera everywhere you go
2 - use it any time - day and night
3 - lomography is not an interference in your life, but a part of it
4 - try the shot from the hip
5 - approach the objects of your lomographic desire as close as possible
6 - don't think (Wiliam Firebrace)
7 - be fast
8 - you don't have to know beforehand what you capture on film
9 - afterwards either
10 - don't worry about the rules

The Japanese "sort of equivalent" of SuicideGirls is Cure, a cosplay sight. The biggest difference is that the sexy pictures are not allowed. It's quite an amazing community. There are 5000 layers (comes from Cosplayers) and 30,000 cameko (comes from camera kozo or "Camera Boys"). The layers can be sorted by ranking or by the characters they play. The cameko are otaku who spend their lives taking pictures of the layers and giving beautiful prints of their photos to the layers and sharing them online. The site lets you send these photos to or view them on your mobile phones.

Sergey Brin in Drag - EXCLUSIVE on Google Weblog

That' me holding Ben

Dan Gillmor

Ethan and Ben

At the Emerging Tech conference, more than one person noted the striking resemblance between Ethan Zuckerman and Benjamin Franklin. Coincidence? You decide.

A lot of the people working on emergent democracy look founding fatherish. I wonder if you start looking like a founding father after you start pondering or whether looking in the mirror each day causes you to go down the "pondering about democracy" path. Where does that put me?

I knew I would not be able to compete with the other bloggers in covering the content of ETech so I focused on photos. I've finally uploaded most of the decent photos here. I took the photos with my Canon 300D. I used a 55-200mm telephoto zoom lens which helped me be more invasive and catch people off-guard. It looks more like a collection of snapshots of my friends than anything resembling photojournalism. For some real photojournalism, take a look at the World Press Photo awards.

Rob Kaye is promoting bluetooth this year...

My ETech 2004 photo album (feel free to use any of the photos)

I'll be uploading through the day.

In order to 1) mess around with TypePad more, 2) allow me to indulge my gadget obsession with complete abandonment and 3) experiment with multiple blogs, I've decided to start a blog about Joi Ito's Stuff. It is "a blog about stuff that I have, why I have it, what I'm doing with it and how I feel about it." I have no idea if this is a good idea or not, but starting blogs on New Year's Day seems like a good idea to me.

Just got back from Munakata Shrine. This year we moved to a small village in Chiba and Mizuka and I decided to go to the local shrine to pay our New Years respects. At Munakata Shrine, we met many of our neighbors, clensed ourselves and payed our respects. I've just uploaded some photos.

Anyway, Happy New Year EVERYBODY!

Ever since I saw a $30K digital back for my Hasselblad, I've been waiting for digital photography to come to REAL cameras. The guy at the store said, "some day they will be cheap enough to be worth it." Then I saw the article about the Digital-Modul-R digital back for the Leica R8/R9, I decided that I was going to go that route. I have a whole R8 system with many many lenses and this just made sense to me. Yesterday I went to a camera shop and asked when they would have them. "Oh, probably about a year from now." !!! I broke down and bought the Canon EOS "Kiss" Digital or a 300D as they call them in the US. I'm very happy with it. It's reasonably priced and just works. I was getting really frustrated with crappy digital cameras and using the 300D just feels right.

I'll still use my Hasselblad and my Nikon Coolscan 8000 film scanner for medium format work, but I think I'm going to dump 35mm photography and switch to digital for awhile and see how it goes.

Yesterday, I played with my camera and posted more pictures of the house and of Bo. Still messing around...

danah has a good rant in response to Cory's thoughts on technologists that create technologies which cause awkward social situations.

danah boyd

So, in fleshing out Cory's call to technologists, i'd ask all technologists to consider not only what problems a technology solves, but what new ones could emerge. Start thinking like a writer or an abuser of technology. Imagine how people could misuse a technology to hurt others. Consider who gains and loses power from such technology. It's a fascinating exercise and far more fulfilling than just thinking about who benefits from something. And besides, then you won't always be thinking "but the users shouldn't do THAT with this technology."

I commented on her blog.

Joi Ito

I agree with your point danah. On the other hand, a lot of the consequences of technology are not predictable and emerge as the technology develops and is adopted widely. I think that in addition to trying to have a vision about the negative effects of technology (which I agree is important) and trying to design around the issues, I think that identifying tensions as they arise and providing feedback to the toolbuilders is important. One of the problem of commercial enterprise is that technologists are often forced to sweep these tensions or problems under the carpet for the better good of profits or commercial interests. Also the cost of changing a design or an architecture often makes such change difficult. I think designing systems to assume they will need to be changed is important. This does get difficult as technologies mature. This is why I think the social software / blog space is interesting. We can still change a lot of the basic architecture of this space. So although I agree it is important to call our to technologists to think, I think that the dialog between technologists and people like you and Cory is more important.

In response to my thoughts on people inadvertently collapsing context because of a lack of understanding of the technology, Wendy Seltzer blogs about Technology and Norms of Publicity.

Wendy Seltzer

I wondered at first if privacy tensions would ease as more people became more technically sophisticated, but I'm inclined to think that gaps in understanding will just move with the tech, and social norms will follow still further behind.

When I am posting a photo album, I think about the situation, the people and decide whether to post a picture, ask permission or not even bother. I'm making a very deliberate decision based on my understanding of the technology and the social norms. The technology and the norms are evolving and the understanding of both is spotty. We WILL have tensions. I guess the key is to identify the critical irreversible risks and work just as hard in developing social norms as we are in developing technical solutions.

I just posted some pictures from the Creative Commons Anniversary Party. Thanks to Jonas and Cory for contributing their photos.

It was also my first party since my sobriety and I enjoyed myself very much.

PS: If anyone has any other pictures that would be willing to contribute to this photo album, please email me or post a link here. Thanks!

Mizuka and I went to see the last cherry blossoms last week and I shot some Provia 100 with my Hasselblad. I got sick of the poor quality of the Photo CD's considering the cost and bought a Nikon 8000ED film scanner so I could do my own scans instead. Here's my first attempt. I'm still trying to figure out how to get it right and it does take a lot of time, but you have control and obviously much more tender loving care than the people scanning for you onto Photo CD's. I've posted a few pictures on my .mac site. I can't figure out what the white space is that gets inserted when I publish from iPhoto.

Anyway, my iLife just got better thanks to Nikon.

Today I had dinner with Daiji Hirata, Tai Watanabe and Kazuo Shimizu. Daiji, Kazuo and Neoteny are investors in Tai's company MediaProbe which is working on an auto community site. Shimizu-san is probably the most famous auto journalist in Japan. He is invited by all of the big auto companies to test drive cars and write about all the cool new stuff. He's a BIG fan of the hydrogen economy and is the leading journalist in Japan on fuel cells. We talked about ECD and their hydrogen technology. The US lead in a lot of the electric vehicle research as well as a lot of the early fuel cell work, but Japan is clearly putting a lot of effort behind the hydrogen economy and Toyota is probably leading the pack in hybrid cars. I hope that my next car will have a hydrogen component...

Governor Domoto on the left and Merle Okawara on the right

Mizuka and I had dinner tonight with Domoto-san at her Chiba Governor's residence. Merle and Shin Okawara, Professor Hayashi and Mr. Satomi and his wife were there as well. Merle, I think, was the first women to take a company public in Japan. Shin brought Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken to Japan. He is actually famous for spinning friend chicken as a holiday treat with commercials of American's eating fried chicken for Christmas. That has turned into quite a tradition and now EVERYONE eats some kind of chicken on Christmas. John Nathan, who wrote the Sony book also did a movie about Shin and the whole Kentucky Fried Chicken thing...

Domoto-san talk about what a great time she was having. Being governor in Japan is much like being the president of a country. Chiba has 6 million people and she basically calls the shots. It's very different than when she was working in the central government. She also won as an independant so she has very little exposure to political pressure. I'm trying to work with her to get some sort of special project for Hydrogen in Chiba as well as trying to figure out how to work with the biomass energy folks.

We talked a alot about renewable energy, bio mass and food. The food was VERY good. It was all from Chiba. We agreed that we would all take a weekend trip into the countryside to see the rural area of Chiba and enjoy the flowers and the food sometime in Feb.

Merle, Domoto-san and Morita-san. Today's been quite a "strong-woman" day. ;-)

Shigeaki Saegusa and Yoshiko Morita

Saegusa-san invited me to join a lunch at Yoshiko Morita's today. Mrs. Morita is the widow of Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony. Saegusa-san is a family friend and was the composer of the requiem for Akio Morita memorial. She had seven of us over to her house for home-made sake kasu stew. sake kasu is a by-product of producing sake. Good kasu can only be obtained from a sake brewer. The Morita family business is brewing sake. Mrs. Morita explained that it was their main business and the whole electronics thing was a side business for them. ;-)

We talked a lot about cooking and I got a chance to brag about my Turkey recipe. She said that she always has Christmas Turkey made at the Maxim's in the Sony building based on her recipe. I told her I would send her my recipe.

Mrs. Morita is a very dynamic and interesting person. She is involved heavily in the arts, and loves great food and interesting company. She is also a great social dancer. When I first met her, she was doing a the jitterbug at Saegusa-san's birthday party.

It was also fun visiting the house that described in such detail in John Nathan's book about Sony. We talked about John Nathan who she liked. John is the father of an old friend of mine, Zack. John is also a well-known translator of Japanese works such as the works of Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe.

This is a picture of Suguru Yamaguchi smiling when I told him I'd blog him.

Today was the 4th NPA Security Council meeting. This is a committee focused on studying computer network related risks and countermeasures. We talked about last year's report and what we will do moving forward. This is one of the more interesting groups I am in since most of the people involved are fairly down-to-earth. There are people from Microsoft, Rakuten, Yahoo, JPCERT, Police, Foreign Ministry, the Cabinet Office, etc. I particularly enjoy these meetings because Yamaguchi-san who runs JPCERT is a very outspoken and intelligent guy who doesn't pull any punches.

I said that the US is taking a very different stance towards security since 9/11 and that many of the new security measures that the US are taking may in the long run end up hurting national security since a great deal of privacy is being breached, agents are being allowed to work with shady characters for short term gains which may end up being long term losses and the whole TIA thing may not work. I suggested that we do an extensive analysis of the US anti-terror measures and identify whether each of the measures are 1) things we should copy, 2) things we should ignore, and 3) things that are bad for the Japanese people. I urged everyone not to allow Japan to get suckered into doing something stupid in response to US pressure. In particular, I pressured the person from the Foreign Ministry to be aware of these risks.

There is a chart that the NPA (Japanese pdf) produced showing which countries many of the portscans and pings were coming from. Yamaguchi-san pointed out that this didn't necessarily reflect the source and I concurred.

I talked a bit about the financial services sector problems with organized crime and hacking and that we should focus on and analysis of organized crime rather than do general surveys of smaller crimes and hacker rings.

Just finished brining the turkey, drying it, and stuffing it into my fridge. This year, as always, I am using Cook's Illustrated as my guide. Cook's Illustrated is THE BEST cooking guide. It is extremely scientific and even a bit geeky, but really wonderful. Since last year, I have started putting it in the fridge uncovered to dry the skin before cooking it. This, according to Cook's Illustrated helps give you crispy skin. I started brining a few years ago after reading an article on Cook's Illustrated about the effect of brinig.

Cook's Illustrated

Jane Bowers, head of the Department of Foods and Nutrition at Kansas State University, says salt is used in meat processing to extract proteins from muscle cells and make these proteins more viscous:

“Brining turkey causes a change in the structure of the proteins in the muscle. They become sticky, which allows them to hold more water.” Citing a similar example, she says frankfurters without sodium are limp. “It is the salt that gives hot dogs their plumpness,” she says.

Tina Seelig, scientist and author of The Epicurean Laboratory (W. H. Freeman, 1991), says salt causes protein strands to become denatured, or unwound. This is the same process that occurs when proteins are exposed to heat, acid, or alcohol. “When protein strands unwind, they get tangled in one another and trap water in the matrix that forms,” says Seelig.

And Dr. Bill Schwartz, director of technical services at the Butterball Turkey Company, adds that when these unravelled proteins are exposed to heat they gel — much like a fried egg white — and form a barrier that prevents water from leaking out of the bird as it cooks. The capillary action that draws blood out of the meat and gives it a milky-white color also helps the brining solution penetrate deep into the meat, according to Schwartz. This accounts for the pleasant salty flavor even of the inner breast meat.

You need to pay to search their database, but it's worth it.

Karuna and her husband Horace visited my sister for dinner at our house and I got to say hi and chat a bit. Mimi and Justin did an interview of Karuna on Chanpon. Horace works for the US government and Karuna is now taking care of their new baby, Justin. Before that Karuna was an anchor for CNN on their prime-time news show and before that for other news agencies such as NHK. I remember when she was broadcasting Japanese news in English for NHK, all of the Japanese students in the US who watched her show became HUGE fans of hers. She's quite an amazing person. I first met Karuna at the American School in Japan when for some reason, my trig teacher decided that my algebra sucked and made me take an algebra class with the class below me. The only good thing was that I got to sit next to Karuna. Anyway, all of Karuna's fans can rest assured. Horace is a great guy and worthy of his new position as Karuna's husband. ;-)

Horace, can you do something about the treatment of Arabs immigrants in the US?

Howard and I have known each other for a long time. I visited Howard often when he was at the Whole Earth Review and I was hanging out in San Francisco with Timothy Leary and the gang. Howard turned me on to a lot of really interesting thoughts and was one of the first people who helped me started writing. Howard wrote THE book on Virtual Reality which influenced me and the rest of the world and I ended up working with (my now step-brother) Scott Fisher at Telepresence Research who Howard writes about in the book. After the Virtual Reality book, he wrote a book on Virtual Communities in which I appeared. (Maybe the first time I appeared in an English Book.) Howard has always been a great visionary for the future and I'm happy to be a part of it. When the www started to happen, my Eccosys team and I set up one of the first web sites in Japan. Howard writes about how this influenced his thinking. These days we talk about Smartmobs ubiquitous computing and the future of embedded systems. As always, community and empowerment are key.

Howard and I talked a lot about how to be an evangelist for the future. We talked about the issue of how to give credit where credit is due, but how it is often difficult to credit people who you do not know about or who haven't influenced your thinking directly. (As I've recently discovered once again, when Japanese diary community criticized my description of blogs.) Howard told me that there was a saying in the I Ching that says something like, "If you climb up on the wall, you can see farther, but you also become an easier target." This is extremely relevant. We talked about how some criticism is very important, no matter how hurting it is, to internalize, since it will help us grow. Some criticism is important in order to understand how people will view us, and some criticism should just be ignored. Sorting this out is quite a task, but necessary and important. We agreed that learning from your critics helps you fix sloppy thoughts as well as prevent mistakes in the future.

On the other hand, what's a pioneer without critics? One chairman of a large company I know said, "I don't trust ANYONE who doesn't have some enemies." I don't know who to credit this to, but "You can identify the pioneers because they are the ones with the arrows in their backs." Stan Ovshinsky says this often.

So, my conclusion? Give credit to those you influence you or are doing important work. Listen to the critics, be thick-skinned and keep on truckin'.

a bio from the ASE web page that I edited a bit

Leonard Liu, Ph.D.

Leonard Y. Liu was President of ASE Inc. since November 1999 and announced his retirement December 6. He was also the Chief Executive Officer of ASE Test and Universal Scientific Industrial Co. Prior to joining ASE, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Walker Interactive System Inc. Dr Liu has held other top management positions at leading technology companies, including Chief Operating Officer of Cadence Design Systems, President of Acer Group worldwide and General Manager of IBM's application enabling software business unit.

Leonard visited today and we spent the day brainstorming. Leonard is on my advisory board and is one of my most helpful business advisors. I met him through his daughter Peggy Liu. Digital Garage invested in his daughter's company and he invested in Digital Garage and later Neoteny.

Leonard was the chief hardware and software architect at IBM at one point and architected SNA and SQL. He moved from research to management and left IBM to become a well-respected serial turn-around/take-to-the-next-level CEO. Leonard is tremendously energetic and is extremely execution oriented and visionary at the same time. I'm always impressed with Leonard's focus and his willingness to spend time to coach me when I have something specific to talk about. I always felt very guilty taking big chunks of Leonard's time when he had a $3bn company to run, but now that he is "retiring" I hope I will get to see him more often and feel less guilty. ;-)

Dan Gillmor introduced me to Clay Shirky tonight and Dan, Noriko, Barak and I had dinner with him at LuLu's. We got in without a reservation. What a change from the old days! Clay is very cool. According to his web page:

I have been a producer, programmer, professor, designer, author, consultant, sometimes working with people who wanted to create a purely intellectual or aesthetic experience online, sometimes working with people who wanted to use the internet to sell books or batteries or banking.

He was supposed to talk this morning at Supernova, but didn't make it so I asked him what he was going to talk about. He said he thought that politics of the semantics was a very political issue and more relevant than the technical discussion. He also talked about the economic significance of the difficulty of switching protocols vs. api's and how important and political protocols were. He had very broad interests like me (unfocused?) and we talked about lots of cools stuff. He knows Marko who I wrote about earlier. Thanks for the intro Dan!

Just had lunch with Dave Winer. We talked about a lot of things and I don't know what was "on the record", but I think I can say we talked a lot about outlines. (Dave said, "everything looks like an outline to me," on the panel so I assume it's no secret.) I actually love outlines generally. My web page before my blog was an outline. All of the papers I write, I write in MS Word Outline mode, convert to html, run a script to strip the junk out and pour in my custom style sheet. So now that my blog is bloating, I'm looking for an outline mode to create a structured view of my entries and links to other blogs. I'm going to try using Radio Userland for this...

Ben and Mena Trott

Had lunch with Ben and Mena Trott, the founders and developers of Movable Type who were here for the Supernova conference. I'm a great fan of theirs because Movable Type was my introduction to blogging and I am very happy that I chose Movable Type as my blog software. (Thanks to Justin for making this decision for me.) Hirata in my office worked on the Japanese language kit for MT and we talked about some of the issues involved in localization and about the blogging landscape in Japan...

Slipped out of the conference to see Jean-Louis Gassée. I met Jean-Louis when he was running Be Inc. I was the first and last advisory board member of Be. Jean-Louis is a legend in Silicon Valley from his days at Apple and all of the cool stuff he's done afterwards.

He is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Allegis and is on the board of PalmSource and EFI. We talked a lot about personal networking technologies and shared our thoughts and vision in this area. He's such a cool and charming guy and I think Allegis is a PERFECT thing for him.

Barak and Minami joined me in the meeting and it was interesting because Barak had worked with him at Apple and Logitec so they had a lot of history... Frank got me back in touch with him. Frank used to work with Jean-Louis at Be and now works at and helps run one of our portfolio companies, AirEight.

Just sat down at Supernova. Supernova was organized by Kevin Werbach. This is the first one. The focus of the conference is decentralization. Topics include blogging, 802.11, network architectures, open source. It's a small conference with an amazing group of speakers and attendents.

The group blog is online and a great example of trackbacks. I think this conference probably has the highest density of bloggers of any conference I've ever been to.

Brewster showing us the Bookmobile

Brewster instructing us on how to print and bind the books

The Connection Machine at the Internet Archive data center

A rack of PC's running Linux at the Internet Archive data center

This morning I went to the see Brewster Kahle at his office in Presidio. Neal Stephenson had been trying to get us together and it finally happened. I was very excited to see/hear the whole thing. We started by seeing the Bookmobile which is this amazing thing that Brewster and his team did. They have 1,000,000 books from the public domain available in their database on the Internet. The Bookmobile cruises around and lets kids print the books and binds them. It costs a dollar to print one of these books so they can give them away. The Bookmobile has cruised around the US and was there during Larry Lessig's argument at the Supreme Court on Eldred v. Ashcroft. The Bookmobile is part of a much bigger project of Brewster's which involves creating a library that archives EVERYTHING. Music, the Web, video, everything. This is called the Internet Archive Project.

This amazing project involves archiving everything using low cost technology. The Connection Machine in the data center was originally running, but now it all runs on PC's with UNIX. There are over a 150 terabytes of data in the data center. There is room for a petabyte. Brewster is on the board of the Library of Congress and is also working with the Library of Alexandria in Egypt on this project. He is trying to recruit other libraries to swap content and mirror the archives. It is such a huge and important project that I couldn't HELP MYSELF... I'm involved. I'm going to try to figure out how to get Japan involved.

Brewster, for those of you who don't know him was one of the founders of WAIS (a great pre-web tool for indexing and publishing information that I used A LOT on my Mac) and Thinking Machines that created the Connection Machine, a massive parallel processing computer. He's quite a legend and it was a great honor and a lot of fun to meet him.

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive showing us books printed in the Bookmobile

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Howard Rheingold of Smartmob SmartMobs talking about the future of blogging...

I'm staying at Kara and Megan's house for three days (One more day left. Thanks Kara and Megan!) We had a few people over to the house the first night. Frank blogged about it much more promptly than I did. Met a bunch of new people. So many people, so little time. ;-) Thanks again to Kara for organizing and hosting.

Yesterday, I met Ryan Lackey who is the CTO of Havenco. I was one of the first investors in Havenco and had been working with Ryan for years and it was great to put a face behind the name. Also spent some quality time with Reid Hoffman, one of early PayPal execs who Frank introduced to me. We talked about PayPal, but also talked a little about his NEXT BIG THING which I am very excited about.

I also met Evan Williams and Jason Shellen of Blogger the day before yesterday. They were very cool. Unfortunately I took the restroom key with me by mistake. Sorry guys! (Not the best way to make friends...)

So I will be seeing David Winer and Mena and Ben Trott at Supernova tomorrow. I feel like a Japanese pilgrim visiting all of the Blog/Weblog shrines in SF. ;-)

Well, I got 10 hours of sleep last night. The most I've gotten in months I think. I'm charged and ready for today which should involve going to see Brewster's Archive.org setup and his Bookmobile. If I have time, I'm planning on going out to see RU Sirius who is buried somewhere in Mill Valley I hear.

Marc Canter in full-motion

John Markoff and Paul Mercer

Barak and Markoff gadgeting

Saw Marc Canter for coffee and got his pitch on the future of things. I had been staring at "still Marc" for so long on his blog, that when I saw "full-motion Marc" it was totally amazing! Marc was a bundle of energy and excitement and totally inspiring. I have to remember that all of these people that I blog with and chat with have bodies that move, talk and gesture. ;-)

Later, Barak, Jun, Minami and I had dinner with John Markoff from the NYT and Paul Mercer who founded Pixo. It was a great dinner, but we talked about and played with our gadgets WAY too much. ;-)

A picture of the Prince that I took with my P504iS just several hours before he passed away

As many people know already, H.I.H. Prince Takamado Norihito passed away the day before yesterday. I had just visited the Prince that day around 5 hours before he passed away. He had a heart attack while playing squash at the Canadian Embassy. He was only 47 years old. Several of us had visited him to thank him for accepting our request to give the opening speech for the New Business Forum which he had accepted every year for many years now. I was the vice-chairman of the Forum last year and the chairman this year. It is the role of the chairman to invite the Prince and the introduce him at the forum.

The Prince was a very approachable, intelligent and kind man. He liked technology and gadgets very much. He had recently published a book of his own photographs of his travels. Last year, in his speech he talked about cells phones and "wangiri". (Wangiri became a big problem this year. Wangiri is when people call and let the phone ring once and leave their caller ID on your phone to get you to call them back. It has become a type of spam.)

The day before yesterday, I was showing him my new P504iS phone with the two cameras and we discussed what sort of possible uses there might be for having two cameras. I showed him my phone and took this picture of him, which might be the last picture taken of him.

His death is a great loss to Japan and I will personally miss him very much.

Mainichi article

I got my P504iS today. It is the new i-mode phone with a built-in camera. They went on sale last week. Docomo's i-mode council upgrades our phones for us so we can play with the new features. (No wonder people are mad at me. ;-p ) Anyway, the one I got, the Panasonic phone has two cameras! One points at you and one away. There are also two color LCD displays. This is the perfect mobile photo blogging device. Now I have two cameras in my phone, a voice recorder in my digital camera, a camera in my computer and a camera in my Clie Palm. Do I need all of these cameras? Of course...

Okada-san is on the left and Suzuki-san is on the right

Okada-san and Suzuki-san from the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry came to visit today. The Japanese bureaucracy is one of the things I often criticize, but I really like many of the individuals. I first met Okada-san when he was working for Governor Domoto. He had been seconded by the Ministry to Chiba to help the Governor. I liked him a lot because of his straight forward and aggressive style and he was one of the main reasons I decided to work with Chiba. He recently returned to the Ministry and is now in charge of venture business and SME related affairs there. This was very lucky for me because this post is probably the most relevant post for Neoteny inside of the Ministry. He manages the Ministry activity for the New Business Forum that I wrote about and is also quite active in trying to create tax incentives for venture investing. We talked a lot about the laws that bog venture businesses down such as the registration license tax, bank fees, etc. Since Koji Omi, one of my favorite LDP politicians is now running the venture sub-committee inside of the LDP as well as the head of the tax reform group, it's a good time to push for some changes. Another change that should be done soon is a waiver of the minimum capitalization of new companies. One is currently required to have a minimum capitalization of 10mm yen. The new law that should go into effect at the beginning of next year will allow companies to be created with only 1 yen in capitalization. This should help entrepreneurs who want to start companies. Go for it Okada-san!

Mizuka and I went to the new Marunouchi Building built by Mitsubishi Jisho and had lunch with her parents. It was VERY flashy and expensive looking and jam packed with tourist types. Some restaurants are booked through the end of the year, which is rare in Japan. It is also probably one of the most expensive office buildings right now. On the first floor was a weird "XBOX Cafe" where people could play games and there were some huge screens running game demos. I guess if you have $40bb, you can afford to have a game cafe in the most expensive real estate in Tokyo. Also, everything was VERY high tech - steel, glass, concrete. It really reminded me of the Dogs and Demons book. All of the people lining up in front of the elevators watching impressive ads ABOUT nature on the HDTV displays...

The other amazing thing is that such a tall building was allowed to be built overlooking the Palace. In Japan, you are not supposed to "look down on" the Palace. I heard someone mumble, "Only Mitsubishi could do this..."

Anyway, it is obviously the "Thing to See" right now. It will be interesting to see what happens when all of the other new buildings open next year... Like the huge Roppongi Mori Building. Next year is supposed to be a big year that may crash the office building business because there are so many sky scrapers opening... What a strange thing to be happening during an economic crisis...

Floor of temple in Koyasan taken while listening to a speech by a monk about the mandalas

I'm really getting into Photo.net. I had been using it mostly for the discussion forums, but recently I created a profile and set up a portfolio. It tracks all of my equipment all the way down to the serial numbers. I scanned a bunch of my 6x6's into Pro Photo CD's and uploaded them to the site. I even got positive feedback on one of my photos! Photo.net which I think was started by Philip Greenspun is obviously a site built by geeks for true enthusiasts and is a real pleasure to use after trying all of the "commercial" photo sites. I think I've found my online home for my photography.

That's Yanai-san on the left and Hasegawa-san on the right

Had dinner at Gonpachi in Nishiazabu with Hasegawa-san, the CEO of Global Dining, Yanai-san, the CEO of Pia and Jun. Jun is my chairman and an outside board member of Global Dining. I am on the outside board of Pia. Jun and I introduced the two of them over dinner a few months ago, I think. Hasegawa-san took us to Tableaux, Decadance du Chocolat and Dancing Monkey last time. (All places he runs.) Yesterday, we had sushi at Gonpachi. It was totally packed. George Bush ate at Gonpachi when he was in Tokyo. The food was great and the place is huge.

Hasegawa-san is an a amazing guy and I'm a big fan. His company, Global Dining, runs Gonpachi as well other famous chains of restaurants including Cafe La Boheme, Zest, Monsoon Cafe, etc. Global Dining also runs Tableaux, on of my favorite restaurants. Hasegawa-san has a very unique management style for Japan where most of his staff are part time, but very motivated. He has a very open and competitive management style. Global Dining is also famous for being the first company to go public in Japan without a single college graduate on the board!

It's nice beening outside board members of companies that do real things like sell concert tickets and run restaurants. ;-)

Hiroo and Larry with the hand on the chin "intelligent" look

Had dinner with Lawrence Lessig again. Today Hiroo Yamagata, who is translating has latest book, set up the dinner with our small Japan chapter of CPSR. The guy on the left in the picture is Mr. Yamagata. He worships Bob and is an ordained minister of the church of the sub-genius. He showed us his card today. I really like Yamagata-san, but I first learn about him when he was translating Timothy Leary's book and objected to my writing the forward. Later he made fun of my in his column in Wired Japan. Being the masochist that I am, I hunted him down (Kobahen, the editor of Wired Japan introduced us over drinks) and I THINK we are friends now. Anyway, I'm a big fan of his twisted and intelligent style. (Larry, don't worry, the translation will be fine.)

Part of the discussion was a continuation of last night's discussion. Why aren't Japanese active? (As in "activists") Listening to the other CPRS folks talk about this made me think that maybe it was a bigger issue than I thought. There are many intelligent people who don't feel like making a big deal about stuff. How can you be AWAKE and still bear not to say anything? Reminds me of The Matrix

Walking with my FE 60-120 zoom lens on my Hasselblad 205FCC fixed to my tripod.

Decided to take a stroll in the park with Mizuka instead of blogging a day. It was a beautiful day. I've uploaded some pictures I took with my Sony Cybershot DSC-P5. I wish I had a better photo album online. Does anyone know of a good photo album server I can run on a Apple XServe?

Dr. Koyoshi Kurokawa is the most outspoken MD I know. He was originally at Tokyo University, but left to join Tokai University School of Medicine. This is a pretty rare career move. Kurokawa-san is working on starting several venture businesses and is also one of the most entrepreneurial MD's I know. He's so energetic and neotenous that I always forget how important he is. ;-) He is the chairman of many government science committees and is a regular at the WEF Davos meeting and other international conferences. Today, he dropped by with one of his young doctors to discuss a new idea for a venture startup. Kurokawa-san is the one who really got me thinking about the suicide problem in Japan...

Kazuhisa Ogawa is a well known military analyst and appears on Japanese TV quite a bit. He was originally a member of the Japanese Self-Defense Force in the Helicopter Division. He was key in Japan's response to the Peru incident as well as convincing the Japanese disaster relief forces that helicopters could actually be used to put out fires at night when they failed to fly during the Kobe earthquake. He is very smart and outspoken. We met when he was a guest for a magazine column I was involved in and we've kept in touch ever since. Now we have begun to work closely together again as computer privacy and security risks continue to involve physical and military risks more and more. We agree on almost everything and it is great to have a well established military analyst support my opinions. We make a pretty good team during government study group when we need to beat people up with a good combination punch. ;-) Today, we were plotting our next move...

Pete Wilson

I've joined the Pacific Council Task Force on Japan as a guest. The Pacific Council is affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations. They do reports on a variety of countries and this year they are working on Japan. The Task Force on Japan is being headed by Pete Wilson, the former Governor of California. We had breakfast today at the American Club and Mr. Wilson gave a great speech about Japan which was "off the record"... ;-)

I was originally asked to join this group by Mr. Toyoda of the METI who was the chief trade negotiator for MITI at the time. Mr. Toyoda and became friends when Dr. Ishiguro of Tokyo University invited me to join a study group for Mr. Toyoda on preparing for the WTO negotiations the year that AOL proposed a bunch of e-commerce related deregulations. It's interesting how my being dragged into a government study group to protect Japan against American IP and IT imperialism ended up with me criticizing Japan at the American Club. ;-)

Yesterday, I met the John Wheeler and Daniel Rosenblum from the Japan Society who are also working on US/Japan stuff.

It's great that there are all of these groups helping to try to save Japan, but it would probably make sense to coordinate and have each group focus on a different aspect...

Takasuka-san on the left, Funaki-san on the right

Yesterday, Matsumoto-san who is now the CEO of Neoteny Venture Development, Takasuka-san, the founder and CEO of Cybozu and Funaki-san the President of TIS and I had lunch. Takasuka-san is a really interesting guy who I met through Hato-san of Exceed. Takasuka-san was an engineer at Matsushita in the Management Information Systems group. He left Matsushita to found Cybozu. Cybozu makes a groupware package. The key to their success is that they did guerilla marketing to small groups in big companies that wanted to bypass the MIS group. Since the groupware products of big companies were invariably too complicated and a pain to work with, Cybozu was a great alternative that was priced low enough to get under the radar. They have been profitable and growing from their first year and have done well even after their IPO. TIS is one of the largest and most profitable system integration companies. They are headquartered in Osaka (as is Matsushita) but most of their operations and customers are in Tokyo. Sanwa Bank owned a big share of them for awhile, but have cut back in the wake of bank balance sheet reforms. Mr. Funaki used to work at Sanwa Bank and joined TIS several years ago to run it. TIS invested in Digital Garage and helped Digital Garage grow from a web company to an e-commerce company. TIS also invested in my Neoteny.

Had another breakfast of the World Economic Forum Blueprint for Japan 2020 team. I suggested that we meet at 7am every week since I doubted most people were busy at 7am. People grumbled, but I was amazed at the turnout. We had a lively discussion. It was sort of funny sitting in the Hotel Okura Orchid Room (a famous power breakfast place for the Japanese elite) discussing radical reform in English. Yu decided to conduct all of the meetings in English because the English language is more clear than Japanese. Which is fine with me and probably helps prevent the establishment from overhearing our radical views. Or maybe it draws more attention to us... hmm... Anyway, we're obviously not going to be able to hide so I guess no use trying.

Erik Bloodaxe... how Chris USED to look. ;-)

Chris Goggans posing next to the safe in my office. (The little Samurai thing is Jun's)

Had drinks last night with Chris. Chris used to go by the name of Erik Bloodaxe and was one of the co-founders of the "Legion of Doom", a notorious group of hackers, many of whom ended up getting arrested. He was also the editor of Phrack, a journal by and for hackers. Chris and I met at "Hacking In Progress" in 1997. Lucky Green convinced me to go and I think Chris was there with Bob Stratton. HIP was quite exciting. It was this amazing hackers conference with thousands of hackers in the middle of a forest near Amsterdam hacking in tents with ethernet strung around the whole place. We didn't have enough water, but there was IP everywhere... Anyway, Chris was there and it was the first time I met a hacker with real groupies...

Since then Chris and I have kept in touch and worked together several times where he broke into computers for me. (With permission of course.) He's become a regular in Japan since we started working together and now I get to see him a lot more. He has become quite well known in Japan for his practical manner and his skill. He has a great balance between being extremely professional and loving to break into computers. It's hard to find Japanese with this combination. It's either usually professional with no imagination or childish and imaginative... but I guess Chris is not entirely "unchildish"... Let's call him... "neotenous."

Anyway.. we go drinking occasionally and talk about "the old days", breaking into computers and other things that old hackers always talk about...

Having said that, both he and I have settled down QUITE A BIT since we first met. He's married and sits around watching movies and stuff... ;-)

Governor Domoto

Posing in front of the prefectural headquarters elevator hall with my daikon

Went to Chiba and had lunch with Governor Domoto of Chiba with whom I've become quite friendly lately. Chiba is the prefecture where William Gibson's Neuromancer starts out. Narita International Airport and Disneyland are also in Chiba. It is kind of a long train ride out, but I was able to pass the time having an IM chat with John Patrick on my i-mode AIM client that Neeraj made.

Domoto-san was her usual energetic self. I talked about some ideas I had for projects in Narita and Makuhari. I talked to her about ECD and renewable energy. Domoto-san is an environmentalist and she got very excited about the idea of the Hydrogen Economy. I also talked about blogs. Domoto-san was an independant who won with a rather grassroots election effort that leveraged the Net. She liked the idea of blogs and promised to try it out. I promised to dispatch someone from the Neoteny Blogging Team to help her out.

I often talk to her about how Mizuka and I only eat organic vegetables now. She gave me an organic daikon (Japanese Radish). It was a bit strange carrying it in the crowded train back to Tokyo... I'm looking forward to eating it. ;-)

Eno-san and Moriguchi-san meet for the first time...

Today, I went to see Eno-san and talk about blogs and other things. My good friend Hiroko Moriguchi was there working on a project (secret for now...) with Eno-san. It was the first time they had met. I love it when two people I really like meet for the first time. ;-)

Hiroko Moriguchi is very smart and very funny. It will be interesting to see what happens when we mix her taste with Eno-san who is weird, funny and smart in his own way as well. I look forward to seeing how their project goes.

Eno-san promised to help me recruit bloggers and to work on his own blog. I think we should get Hiroko to do a blog too. I didn't get a chance to talk to her about this, but next time I see her I will...

Had lunch with Dr. Fiorella Terenzi. She is an Astrophysicist / Recording Artist / Author. She recently created a line of jewelry based on astrophysical phenomenon. She is selling them on QVC. She said that some of her colleagues mocked her, but that reaching the masses and trying to appeal to them about the beauty of science was an important mission. I totally agree. I admire Fiorella and her desire and courage to break out of the ivory tower of academism and try to communicate. I feel that the art community, the science community and academic community in general shuns the popularization of their fields. I think that with the communications technologies of today, it is an utter waste to not try to communicate to the public, what is going on in art and science. It takes a great deal of courage, but I think people like Fiorella should be encouraged and supported by both the public and people in their respective fields. Fiorella has made space the theme of her music and other forms of public expression that she has been engaged in and is truly an ambassador from the field of astrophysics.

A statue from the days of the "Great Rebellion"

An amazing certificate from 1910 welcoming Henry J. Cole as a companion of the Red Cross, Knight Templar and Knight of Malta of St. John of Jerusalem

So I'm sitting here in the "business center" of the Portland, Maine airport plugged into a "PowerOasis". I was about the be stranded in Camden because there were no cabs or limos available to drive me the 2 hours from Camden to Portland at 4am in the morning to catch my early flight out of here to go to Newark where I would transfer onto a flight to Tokyo. Dan Gillmor came to the rescue. He drove Amy Jo Kim and me to the airport in the middle of the night/morning. I am glad I didn't get stranded in Camden, although it was a nice town.

I stayed the last night at the Lord Camden Inn. On the wall outside of my room, there was a framed certificate from 1910 from the Knights of Templar. The Knights of Templar come up in Robert Anton Wilson's book "Cosmic Trigger" as the order who were the protectors of the secret of the longbow I think... Anyway, I thought it was fake until I saw this amazing certificate on the wall of the Inn...

Outside of near the opera house, there was a statue with an engraving referring to the "great rebellion." I wonder when the started calling it the "Civil War." So I guess that used to "spin" even back in the old days.