Category: Things I think about

Meaning; innovation; the change we want to see in our world

From the NTEN conference in Seattle, Leda captures something:

But no one else here is talking about meaning, or innovation, or anything having to do with the change we want to see in the world, and in our lives.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

She has more worth a read.

BellSouth to New Orleans: Let them eat cake

BellSouth Robot

The mission of The Emergency Email Network(sm) states:

“Provide notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner”

© 1999 The Emergency Email Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

…which is quaint, presupposing that during a disaster, you’ll actually have some form of internet connectivity. Ironic, given that this service (complete with robot teleaid) is linked to from the BellSouth website and that they’re suing the city of New Orleans to prohibit them from offering free 512KBPs wifi to its citizens. Something about the government not competing with private industry.

Okay, well, whatever. Clearly they have to pay the mortgage and clearly competing with the hurricane-ravaged government of New Orleans is a burden no monopoly company should have to deal with:

“Around the country, large telephone companies have aggressively lobbied against localities launching their own Internet networks, arguing that they amount to taxpayer-funded competition,” says the story. “Some states have laws prohibiting them.”

Yeah, alright, them’s the rules and all, ain’t they? I mean, Google has to abide by Chinese law in China…

MuniFiedSuch as it’s the case that the government’s been neutered from providing adequate network services to its constituents, it strikes me that it might just be time, oh, I dunno, to get up and make our own network? And hey, the work’s alreeady begun with community mesh projects like CUWireless and SFLan. So get on a bus and head to the upcoming National Summit for Community Wireless Networks. And add your thoughts, resources or capabilities to the shiny new MuniFied wiki.

I have barely a clue about the technical ins and outs of wifi, but if I know one thing, it’s that we can’t wait around and rely on the public or private sectors to get it right, make it open, make it free and then guard against bullshit maneuvers like BellSouth’s taken against the very communities that need this kind of connectivity the most.

The imminent rise of Microformats

Bill Gates on Microformats

It really is only a matter of time before this stuff really takes off. With Bill on the bully pulpit yakkin‘ with TimO about it, dropping references it during the Mix ’06 keynote, Ray Ozzie pimping them at ETECH, LinkedIn coming to the party, folks misrepresenting core ideas already… I mean sweet! I smell a movement on the march.

Update: Kevin “Quicktime” Marks has the transcript and more formats.

CivicSpace finds a sponsor, becomes magical

CivicSpace + CompumentorMeant to blog this yesterday, but you know how that goes.

Zack‘s full of big announcements this month over at CivicSpace, this time revealing that CompuMentor has assumed fiscal sponsorship of the 501c3 arm of CivicSpace (to complement CivicSpace, Inc., which provide hosted services a la Bryght).

So while his press release could use some Pinko Marketing love, I’ve gotta give him props for a great screencast of a project that’s been underway for sometime called Magic Groups (a mashup of Organic Groups and other Drupal modules). I’d love to use this for Barcamps and at it the CivicForge collection of tools.

So besides software announcements, I also discovered that they’re organizing something called Drupal Camp (in case you missed it in my asides). Less Barcamp, more seminar, but still worth checking out!

Free your iPod

Free your iPod - Support state-sponsored piracy

Those French, man, I tell ya… first they take a “principled” stand against Bush’s war (amounting to an “anything but what the US does” strategy) and now they’re takin’ on Apple and DRM.

Is there any rhyme to their reasoning or are they just taking on the causes célèbre et du jour? And are they even on the right side this time or just utterly confused? I know I am!

Riya goes beta, joins Web 2.0 fray

Riya LogoOk, so my interest in Riya is certainly not devoid of special interests, but I am definitely looking forward to the day when I can play around with their service (it currently doesn’t support Camino, Flock or the Mac — waahhhh!! (That’s okay though, Tara gave up on Flock recently anyway so we’re equally bummed about each other’s products… ha!)).

What’s cool about Riya? Well, privacy mumbo jumbo aside, Riya will be an exceptionally useful tool — that we’ll all eventually come to take for granted as much as we do decent text search (and as much as the government already lavishes the use of face-rec on its citizens). I can hear the grand kids now (no, that’s not a Freudian slip, sheesh): “Wait, you mean you didn’t have photo search?? How did you keep track of what your 6,000 buddies were up to?!”

So yeah, once they fix the platform limitations so that I can actually use it, I’m sure I’ll get a kick out of finding all kinds of bad shots of myself. Until then, if you’re on IE, Firefox or the PC, let me know how your first experiences with Riya go.