Congrats to Livia Labate on being voted for the IA Institute Board of Directors.
Kevin Fitzpatrick posted some good advice: Don’t hide your ideas.
Anandhan Subbiah, my manager at CIM, redesigned his blog.
And I was Burningbird-ed in reference to a post about Tim Berners-Lee’s new foundation initiative. The tech community seems not engaged.
The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.
arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation
BBC.com: Warning sounded on web’s future
The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme
Wow. Talk about timing!
Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?
Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on ‘truth’ be the prevailing ‘truth’ as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).
Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:
The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It’s all a struggle for power.
ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:
…dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.
USNews: The Campaign, “The Matrix,” and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:
Among historians, there’s a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.
Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:
For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like “politics,” “spectacle” and “entertainment” barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:
In my book “True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society”, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”–the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio–lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then ‘truth’ is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.
I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual ‘truth’.
Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common ‘truth’ ?
YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor
Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush – 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner
What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we’ve come to a core reason why computer programming is so… flawed – that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?
And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday “People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.”.
I’m just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.
I like what I see at Stack Overflow so far. Growing an online community of any sort can be tricky, but this collaboration engine looks smart. Additional info at Joel Spolksy’s. Hmmm… I might post a Java, Emacs, or Python question shortly to give it a whirl.
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
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:
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?
arstechnica.com has an interesting post on Dropbox: “How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux.
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!
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’.
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.