Dan Gillmor is asking contributors to Bayosphere to agree to a pledge before signing up. This is raising a few eyebrows around the web. This discussion is relevant to Philly Future so I opened up a a discussion there.

From the man who brought you The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999!):

…1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

…We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan made a huge splash with their hypothetical look at the future of news reading and gathering with their Flash presentation – EPIC 2014. Read their short, but interesting interview at unmediated.

reBlog makes it easy to republish your favorite RSS (down to individual posts) to your Movable Type, WordPress, or Bloxsom blogs.

I wish I had this back when Philly Future was driven by WordPress and a custom FeedOnFeeds implementation. It would have been a huge timesaver. Out of the box Drupal/Civicspace provides this functionality – one of the reasons we use it now.

Hmmmm… I almost left Bloglines for my personal FeedOnFeeds aggregator, but Bloglines’s superior workflow won out. I gotta try this with reBlog.

But remember to watch the porn.

2257 regulations are set to go into effect June 23rd that require web sites to keep physical records on all models, specifically their ages, that they feature. While this is meant to combat child porn, the industry itself is very concerned – something as simple as record keeping might destroy many porn outlets on the web and raids might start to take place over record keeping.

If I understand correctly, sites that feature RSS aggregators like Philly Future could be at risk. Publishers of other sites post pictures in their feeds. We feature feeds direct from Flickr as well.

If Philly Future is required to keep track of the ages of every picture we display from feed publishers we are going to have to disallow pictures – we just don’t have the resources for keeping records on every picture shown. More at he American Constitution Society for Law and Policy weblog.

Congrats to those who made the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 and the runners up. Not a bad showing.

Update: David Rogers calls bullshit and Howard expresses his doubts.

What makes Ars Technica’s A History of the GUI so fascinating isn’t seeing how far we’ve gone since 1968, but how little. A must read.

Hey, Come To This Site Often?

…MySpace has become one of the hottest properties on the Web. Only 20 months old, it already has 14 million unique visitors a month, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. That makes it far and away the most popular of what are known as social-networking Web sites. Friendster Inc., started three years ago and at one time the clear leader, has a mere 1 million unique monthly visitors. “We’re crushing it,” says MySpace Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe, 39.

The draw? It started with music. DeWolfe’s co-founder is president Tom Anderson, a 29-year-old musician and entrepreneur, and from the beginning the site has catered to musicians. Bands can create home pages, with photos, tour dates, and as many as four songs — all for free. Marquee names like the Black-Eyed Peas, My Chemical Romance, and ex-Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan joined. That pulled in fans and their friends, who all found that MySpace offered loads of options that other sites lacked. Now, MySpace has become something akin to the hottest bar in town, teeming with musicians and models.