Some resources and links:
sacha chua: Emacs: Getting Things Done with Org – Basic
Charles Cave: Using Emacs org-mode for GTD
Linux Journal: Get Organized with Emacs Org-mode
EmacsWiki: Org Mode
brool: Using Org Mode with GTD
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Who is Clay Shirky?
For coworkers (you know who you are…):
Jeff Atwood says, It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It
Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky’s Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.
Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:
Clay Shirky is author of the recent “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (on my must-read list), and from his bio:
Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.
Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly’s bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.
Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality
Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing
Communities, Audiences, and Scale
Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.
Far more here.
YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:
For your average 401k investor – what can you do about today?
The news in the newspaper media and creeping on to TV news as ‘breaking’ (this was building for a while), is what sounds like real trouble in the investor markets.
If you were an average 401k investor, what should you do to try and save your retirement money?
My instinct, since I am not retiring any time soon, since I have a fixed rate mortgage and manage my debt responsibly, is to stand pat. But I wonder if that is the right path if you are about to retire? Or if you rely on your investment income.
Don’t look to the policial blogosphere either. They were too busy talking about ‘lipstick on a pig’ and ‘ominious photos’ to have discussed this. There are financial centered blogs – but as with all media – we subscribe to what fits our communities of interest. Hopefully you were subscribed to a good finance blogger. Not me. Wish I was.
Shout out to Metafilter, while a general interest link community, there have been a few discussions over the years indicating issues in the economy leading to today.
Update 7:01AM: Bloomberg TV just called it “the biggest financial shakeup since the Great Depression”.
Anyways, here we go.
Boing Boing: “America’s financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday.”
Wall Street Journal: Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters,
Merrill Is Sold, AIG Seeks to Raise Cash
NYTimes: 5 Days of Pressure, Fear and Ultimately, Failure
NYTimes: Bids to Halt Crisis Reshape Wall St. Landscape
Metafilter: Brokergeddon.
Interesting Economy Blogs:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong
Know more? Especially those that have advice to handle this economic situation that is occurring?
Dropbox sounds interesting
arstechnica.com has an interesting post on Dropbox: “How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux.
Song of the day: Living Colour – “Cult of Personality”
MTV.com: Living Colour – Cult Of Personality
Look into my eyes, what do you see?
Cult of Personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I’ve been everything you want to be
I’m the Cult of Personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I’m the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of PersonalityNeon lights, A Nobel Price
The mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You don’t have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I’m the smiling face on your T.V.
I’m the Cult of Personality
I exploit you still you love meI tell you one and one makes three
I’m the Cult of Personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I’m the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of PersonalityNeon lights a Nobel Prize
A leader speaks, that leader dies
You don’t have to follow me
Only you can set you freeYou gave me fortune
You gave me fame
You me power in your God’s name
I’m every person you need to be
I’m
The
Cult
Of
Per
Son
Al
Ity!
McCain is now ahead of Obama in Electoral Projections
Hey, I was Suburban Guerrilla-ed 🙂 Now back to the subject at hand…
FiveThirtyEight and Electoral-vote.com.
Meanwhile, truth is finally starting to trickle out of the newspaper press.
WashingtonPost: As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood
NYTimes: Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
But will the much more influential TV newscasts follow suit or keep the ‘controversy of the day’ story-lines that are to blame for turning so many folks off and away from voting (I know a number of folks who have grown disgusted these past few weeks and are not voting now – great work national newscasts).
David Weinberger on Echo Chambers: Echo chambers: The meme that will not die:
erhaps the persistence of the question is due to our shock at being shown who we really are. When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitized mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.
Sounds like some in the tech community are starting to wake up.
The Web is not built on love. It is a reflection of humanity. That is a vital difference.
The conversation at Doc Searls had a few folks circling in on some interesting conclusions about framing and what I call ‘attention influence’.
My friend Daniel Rubin, at the Inquirer thinks this is due to ‘stupid media tricks’. I hope he is including all of social media and bloggerdom in his definition of media. Memeorandum pretty much reveals that any media where controlling attention matters is subject to get involved in ‘lipstick on a pig’ activity. We’re in this together. It really is ‘We the Media’.
There is censorship and there is CENSORSHIP
BBC News: Saudi judge condemns ‘immoral TV’: The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.
Congrats
Congrats to Jeff Atwood – and yes, I took Emma to a comic book store for the first time yesterday 🙂 She and I had a lot of fun.
Social Networking for Babies?
I realize I post about Emma here and in a way am already taking part in something like this, still, there is something profoundly unsettling about this.
NYTimes: Twittering From the Cradle:
Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.
“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”
But does the world really need online social networking for babies?
Naked Man Shocked With Taser
How we treat the mentally ill says a lot about how we think of our fellow man.
Local6.com Florida: Naked Dog Walker Shocked With Taser
And caught on film: CNN: Women dies in ER waiting room, her condition thought to be nothing more than “agitation and psychosis.”.
And just a reminder from LiveScience.com: Why We Are All Insane