May 2005 Archives

Hmm, seems like I could have added a pro-technology perspective to the proceedings (Geodog: A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon):

As long time readers know, I love the People's Republic of Berkeley, foibles and all, and have celebrated its wonderful quirks in my writing and photography for the last 3 years, and even been banned from Adsense for having done so. But sometimes the Berkeley scene and its inhabitants much-lampooned well-meaning but sometimes unthinking do-gooding missionary zeal and neo-puritanism is too much, even for me, and tonight's evening at the Berkeley CyberSalon was an example of such.

I recently read about the Berkeley CyberSalon on Scott Rosenberg's blog, and joined the mailing list based on his recommendation. It seemed like a good opportunity to hear about new ideas in technology as well as a good way to meet other people in Berkeley interested in socio-political issues around technology....

Read the whole thing!

I've become a little more understanding about the lame robotic invitations that are suggested by default by most social network services when you invite a new member. I've been told that providing the user with a canned invitation instead of requiring that the user write their own increases the utility of the invitation service.

At the very least, though, I still regard that moment of sending an invitation to be an opportunity to rise above the common sward and send a personalized note. I recently received a LinkedIn invitation from Mark Glaser that was witty and engaging. I'd have agreed to connect with him anyway, but it was a pleasure to read an actual message rather than a spammy-sounding sub-email type of communique.

Scot Hacker recently sent his wife a generic LinkedIn invitation and learned that it was not particularly endearing (birdhouse.org: LinkedIn Invitation: Decidedly Unromantic):

Every now and then someone sends me an invite to hook up with them on LinkedIn. I generally accept the invites, but have never done much with the service, aside from getting back in touch with a few old Ziff colleagues. Yesterday Amy discovered the site. We didn't find ourselves automatically in one another's networks, so I sent her invite. This morning I hear her reading her email out loud, in a voice dripping with sarcasm:

"You are a person I trust. I'd like to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn. I'm using it to discover inside connections I didn't know I had." And then, "Gosh honey, you're SO romantic."

Marriage tip: When sending a LinkedIn invitation to your life partner, edit the default text before sending.

So xourmas and I debuted our duo last night (May 23) in New York at an open mic at the Bowery Poetry hosted by the O'Debra Twins (aka, Your Psycho ex-Girlfriends). There is a lottery to perform and each act gets seven minutes. We went on around 12:45 and did our arrangements of two standards. Here's the setlist (for posterity):

Salty Dog
Take Me to the River

I am now officially addicted to applause.

Twice in the past two days I've been mistaken for Craig Newmark. It's kinda flattering in a way. Maybe he and I share a sense of style?

Quoting from Darknet: The Installments (at Joho the blog):

JD Lasica is beginning to post long installments from his entertaining new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. First up: The story of some teen film-makers. He'll also be posting new material. [Technorati tag: drm]

People for the American Way are preparing to create a telephonic flash mob if the Senate votes on the filibuster rule.

With the Nuclear Option's timing in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's hands, there won't be enough warning to send out an email alert the moment he drops the bomb on the Senate. But we can deliver a text message straight to your mobile that embeds a Senate phone number based on your state.

I'm at PDF2005 at CUNY in New York city today. I moderated a panel called "Tools and Ideas for Empowering the Edges" in the morning, so I'm off-duty now, able to participate as an audience member and on the really snarky backchannel chat.

Right now Micah Sifry is interviewing Andy Stern of the SEIU. More comments when I've had time to digest the people and ideas I'm encountering here.

I'm jetbluin' it to JFK later today for PDF 2 on Monday and I'm trying to figure out a few last-minute packing decisions. It looks like it will be mildly warm and rainy while I'm there, so I'll pack my raincoat. I guess I'll bring my leather jacket since it won't be too hot and it's important to wear black leather and look cool when you're in New York.

Then there's how to dress for the conference. There will be a lot of Washington professionals - consultants and journalists - there. So do I wear a suit? But keep the collar open? Or do I go as a west-coast hipster and wear my neighborhoodie and some t-shirt? How do I maximize my apparent billable rate without looking like a poseur or a phony?

Decisions, decisions.

Quoting from Everything is miscellaneous:

I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don't think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there's nothing there yet because I've had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn't an isolated act for me. So, I'll probably blog it here, using the tag "EverythingIsMiscellaneous." Yes, it's long, but tagging it "Miscellaneous" really would be misleading as an external tag.

I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day's draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I'd written the previous day, that wasn't a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I'm thinking I'll post drafts of chapters when I think they're readable. And then I will beg for comments.

[Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

I was just talking to a publisher yesterday about some (very preliminary) ideas for what might turn out to be my next book. When the time comes, I will be sure to try to include as open a creative process as possible.

Of course David's concern about how to tag book-related posts is interesting, as it implies a kind of meta-mobius entanglement based on the fact that (I suspect) his book will be to some extent about tagging and categorization itself, so the meaning of miscellaneous is relevant in several ways.

Clay Shirky congratulates his students who developed Dodgeball and have now sold it to Google

Gmail, Orkut, and now Dodgeball all touch this issue. Dodgeball in particular is built on a mix of three different kinds of maps: maps of location (118 rivington St), maps of place (a bar called The Magician), and maps of social environment ("I'm here. Where are my friends?") By mixing them, Dodgeball mingles informational and social aspects of a user’s life into something more valuable than either of those things in isolation.

Andy Baio suggests "some interesting possibilities with Blogger and Google Map."

Quoting from Conversate:

Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It's simpler, faster, more polite, and less annoying than group emails.... Try inviting friends to a conversation, no login needed. If you're intrigued, create an account, it's free-- you'll get buddy lists and more options.

(via Zephyr)

Quoting from Lucky Friday This Week:

There's a gathering of grassroots-media types and celebration of JD Lasica's new book, Darknet, at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.

It's after 5 so I'm now free to announce that John Wiley & Sons has acquired Sybex, the publisher of The Power of Many.

Here's agent Matt Wagner's take on the news (from One less independent?):

The tech book market has been brutal the last few years, so maybe it's inevitable that we're seeing another big acquisition. Word has it John Wiley & Sons is purchasing Sybex...

Up out of my sickbed yesterday I ran down to Lake Shore Avenue to pick up some Peet's coffee to send to New York to arrive there before me and to grab a light-baked Arizmendi pizza for dinner. Police cars and an ambulance had the street blocked off, which made crossing easy for once.

The member of the Arizmendi collective working the cash register told me what was causing the fuss. An elderly woman had been jaywalking and crossed behind a truck. The truck, sadly, was backing up and ran her over. From the general hush and the nervous clots of people on the street speaking in low voices, I gathered that she had died.

Returning to my car I heard at least three people pledge to never jaywalk again.

Andy Baio writes: Upcoming.org gets a wiki

not much there yet, but I'd love some help fleshing it out; feel free to add your feature requests

It's also 5/5/5, eh... kewl!

I've still got a nasty headcold, makes me want to sleep a lot.

The Mediajunkie server had a major crash the other day, but thankfully our fantastic sysadmin, Jeff Tiedrich managed to replace the munged drive and preserve everything we care about and transfer it all over. Now I'm in the process of noting the smaller errors that arise from the changed circumstances and fixing them one at a time. The perfect job to be doing on a laptop from a sickbed.

From the people who brought you Basecamp, here's a new web-based tool for personal information management, to do lists, organizer: Backpack

Gather your ideas, to-dos, notes, photos and files online. Set email and mobile reminders so you don't forget the little things. Easily collaborate with others.

No data lock-in, that's a plus. I want to try this. Right now I'm pretty comfortable with my VoodooPad desktop wiki, but that's not web-enabled (at least not in a way that's practical for me), so this seems worth a try.

Quoting from Some thoughts about extended feeds & microcontent

• Is a feed the right place for your data?

• Do reviews belong in the feed or in the content?

• How about calendar events—in the feed or in the content?

• If it’s just generated via template, why not both? Or is this where the law intends I should be conservative?

• Is anyone working on a Markdown of microcontent?

The first time I heard about BzzAgent was at South by Southwest this year, when I was on a panel about open source marketing and Jason Calacanis brought it up as a negative example, explaining that the agency's methods involved inducing agents to shill for their clients in the guise of ordinary social interaction. Invite your friends over to a barbecue, flip the new Soylent™ brand burgerlike patties on your grill, and casually mention that they are Atkins-compliant and contain fewer transfatty acids than the other leading genetically engineered cow-orker food product, or something like that.

Sounded bad to me, like a cheap parody of honest, enthusiasm-driven word-of-mouth advertising. Then again, Jason has been known to take extreme positions, so I wasn't sure I was getting a full view of this company and its practices.

Then, over the weekend, the blog world was brief... er... abuzz with news that Creative Commons had been taken on by BzzAgent as a pro bono client, an apparent marriage of light and dark. Suw Charman posted in her Strange Attractor Corante blog that this was a revolting development and Dave Balter, BzzAgentfounder hit back in the company blog with Bloggers as Liars. Shoot the messenger, much?

Apparently, BzzAgent sees itself as king of the hill when it comes to offline word-of-mouth and views bloggers as margin online blabbers who miss the big picture and spread lies. Somehow the idea that agents competing for points and rewards might disguise their flacking and shilling as ordinary conversations with their friends doesn't similarly strike the BA folks as dishonest. Frankly, I don't see how any of my friends could maintain their credibility if they were trading on our relationship to win the equivalent of green stamps.

Because Metafilter daddy Matt Haughey is the creative director or something like that for Creative Commons, the controversy got a full airing over there (CC and Marketdroids? WTF?), Suw responded with Apparently I am a liar, CC granddaddy Lawrence Lessig wrestled in public over whether to stick with BA or drop them and thus far I still haven't heard Balter enumerate the twelve alleged falsehoods he claims Charman included in her blog post that kicked off the hullaballoo.

OK, that catches you (and me) up to Sunday. Has anything new happened today?

Update: Balter has apologized to Charman and Corante, and Charman has accepted his apology. Anything else?

I've really been enjoying reading new stuff from Levi Asher nearly every day now that LitKicks has an subscribable feed. His piece today called Found Poetry reminds me how I always care what the text is everywhere. I don't like web addresses that have "template.php?query=splunge" in them. I like the words to make sense, to look good, to not be informative, or to be imaginative. When x-pollen was my personal blog, the archive was called tubers. Now that my personal blog is at xianlandia, which is named after the discolandia and similarly named Latino stores in New York, the archive is called te-amo, a brand of cigar often advertised in the signage of corner bodegas. (Bodega was an even earlier name of my journal.) Words mean things. I don't like it when they don't:

We sometimes find poetry in the oddest places.... Where have you ever found your own found poetry, if you have found any?