Author Archives: Karl

Congratulations to Dan Gillmor

Posted on by

I want to offer my heartfelt congratulations to Dan Gillmor, who has announced his upcoming launch of the Center for Citizen Media, a nonprofit whose goals are to “study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.”

My fellow co-workers will attest that I am an honest critic to a fault. So when I say that among those I have had the pleasure of working with over the years, few have impressed upon me such a degree of integrity, honesty, and vision – well it means something.

Follow the link for details.

The people have spoken?

Posted on by

First, here at home: The New York Times publishes an editorial on Diebold and The Business of Voting: Paper trails are important, but they are no substitute for voting machine manufacturers of unquestioned integrity.

Diebold is inching ever closer to mainstream news coverage. Speaking of questionable voting systems….

Washington Post: Sunni, Secular Groups Demand New Vote.

If the vote in Iraq was not rigged, then so far the early analysis isn’t pretty at all: Independent: Iraq’s election result: a divided nation:

…The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.

Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.

The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.

The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.

…Iran will be pleased that the Shia religious parties which it has supported, have become the strongest political force.

…”People underestimate how religious Iraq has become,” said one Iraqi observer. “Iran is really a secular society with a religious leadership, but Iraq will be a religious society with a religious leadership.”

…The break-up of Iraq has been brought closer by the election. The great majority of people who went to the polls voted as Shia, Sunni or Kurds – and not as Iraqis. The forces pulling Iraq apart are stronger than those holding it together.

Fan created guitar tablature – illegal?!?!?!

Posted on by

A friend at work sent this along over the weekend: BBC: Song sites face legal crackdown:

The US Music Publishers’ Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006.

MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.

He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the internet but were “completely illegal”.

Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can “throw in some jail time I think we’ll be a little more effective”.

Lo and behold, my favorite tab site on the web shut down in reaction to it: Powertabs.net.

Back in 1998 this happened to OLGA, it went overseas and relaunched. OLGA has a solid claim on being the first collaborative file archive on the web – 1992. Guitar tablature written by fans, for fans, in plain text. It is still running today. But probably not for long.

Make archives people. Quickly.

Strange, Weird, Fun, Linkarama

Posted on by

LATimes: At Inland Base, Scientologists Trained Top Gun: As Scientology’s highest-ranking figure, Miscavige, 45, has found in Cruise, 43, not just a fervent and famous believer but an effective messenger whose passion the church has harnessed to help fuel its worldwide growth. “Across 90 nations, 5,000 people hear his word of Scientology — every hour,” International Scientology News proclaimed last year. “Every minute of every hour someone reaches for LRH technology … simply because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.”

Did you watch the Apprentice on Thursday? Come on. Admit it. Okay then, be a snob. If you missed it, you missed awesome live television. Randal revealed himself the dick he was on winning. Richelle and me were speechless and friends at work argued over if he was right in doing what he did.

Stephen Lynch: Kill a Kitten

Edison Hate Future: edison say: hate keep you young. edison is A HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS OLD

O RLY?

Spoken Word by Ernie Cline: Genuis.

Google Video: Car faces a 747 backwash. CRIKEY!

An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer: A Christmas Carol:

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don’t say when.

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas Day you can’t get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore.
There’s time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.

Relations, sparing no expense, ‘ll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
(“Just the thing I need, how nice!”)

It doesn’t matter how sincere it is,
Nor how heart felt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What’s important is the price.

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry merchants,
May ye make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high,
Tell us to go out and buy!

So, let the raucous sleighbells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don’t stand underneath when they fly by.

Joining in moral support for Six Apart

Posted on by

At Philly Future Howard asks a good question, Blog Service Downtime: How Much Is Too Much?. Blogger.com, Bloglines, TypePad and others have suffered growing pains these past few months and this week users of TypePad, suffered an outage that due to its scope, caused concerns across the web. One I share with Dave Winer is how this underscores the importance of interop between blogging tools.

As is typical, the negatives get shouted loud and clear and sometimes hard realities, and positives that should be heard get lost in the uproar.

Building systems that people rely on is hard. Building systems that touch the public even harder. I’ve been there (indeed I *am* there) myself. But as Brent says, building weblog systems is especially difficult, “It’s not just hard work, it can be tough on the psyche too – you’re talking about weblogs, which people feel are an extension of themselves. It’s not some boring abstract thing, not at all, it’s about people’s passions. Their lives, really.”

The folks at Six Apart have handled this outage admirably in many ways:

1. No one lost data.

2. They are back online!

3. Six Apart, and Anil Dash in particular, was fantastic at reaching out and being communicative about what was going on, as it was going on. A rare thing for any company. A lot of grace under pressure.

Read Anil’s in-depth interview with Niall Kennedy for example. Niall is community manager for Technorati, which has dealt with, and has solved, scaling/performance issues themselves, so the interview is from one who has faced similar circumstances. Frank and informative.

Personally, while I am a do-it-yourselfer, I have recommended TypePad as a great blog hosting service for folks who need more than what Blogger.com provides. I’m even more likely to do so now.

Update: Correction: I had incorrectly stated Six Apart was giving a 45 day refund. They gave that option to users who suffered with TypePad’s previous service outage. I hope they consider something similar this time around.

Where have conservatives gone?

Posted on by

Atrios says the news today is a test, because anyone that claims to stand for the principals of conservatism should be up in arms over it.

Well here’s California Conservative: Homeland Security: Spies & Lies:If eavesdropping on our thrilling telephone conversations, listening to us rant about politics or use vulgar epithets in reference to certain public officials, is required to prevent another 9/11, “bring it on.” We got nothing to hide. Who does?

Is this the real face of conservatism these days? Is the party of small government is now the party of big brother? The next few days will be telling.

Anyway, make sure to read the Washington Post: Bush Authorized Domestic Spying and the NYTimes: Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.

It’s not like folks didn’t suspect this wasn’t the case already, but why did it take so long for it to be reported? Will Bunch has a theory.

I hate ‘stop energy’

Posted on by

I have a bit of a broader definition then Dave Winer who coined the term: Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception.

Stop Energy, to me, is defined by one or more persons using fear, uncertainty and doubt to draw energy from one or more persons attempting something positive – especially when there is room for more than one effort or approach – and especially when solutions are not agreed upon.

That’s what I saw spring up in response to Structured Blogging‘s announcement of plugins for WordPress and Moveable Type. There maybe interesting arguments as to why it might not fly – but in this instance – the only way to find is by trying.

I’m biased of course. I think microformats and ideas similar will enable community empowering tools in the future. So I think the work of Shelley Powers and others holds a lot of promise. I can’t wait to experiment honestly.