Tasty Spam No. 7

From:
Jacob <kirojinamm@kaspar.com >
Subject:
Good job offer
Body:

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Understanding in the modern world

SkyTV shows Moblog photoI found out about the London attacks this morning when my roommate told me about them on the way into work. Truth be told, I was out with friends last night and didn’t have direct access to any kind of news sources, so I was quite surprised when he explained what’d happened.

So today, when I started exploring what had been posted online, I was struck by how I went about looking for information versus how I ultimate found anything of substance. I started at a major news outlet earlier in the day and was disappointed by not only the detachment in the writing (“objective” journalism, they call it) but by the meager pictures available. I mean, I’m a visual person and I thrive on being able to see things — in order that I might gain a better understanding of what actually happened.

Only this evening when I sought to understand things more completely did I turn, almost accidently, to Flickr. I hadn’t really considered Flickr a citizen journalism site, but as I landed on the tags page, I realized that this community of people, equipped with cameras and living in the open could be my eyes on the scene — and would help me comprehend what happened with their photos. And beyond what Reuters could provide, I could go back before the attacks and learn about the very individual lives of each witness in their photostreams.

In addition to that, I stumbled upon an ad-hoc community of well-wishers setup within Flickr, called the 7/7 Community, whose specific focus is on the bombings.

What’s interesting in all of this and in my discovery process is that these various technologies and tools that are able to bring me so much closer to such a foreign reality are starting to become more widely used and disseminated throughout the general public. People are not only coming to web to share, to communicate and to understand, but there are finally there are tools to help express and capture reality as it unfolds. Even a year ago, this kind of local civic engagement over the web would have been very hard to pull off.

An uncertain result, however, as pointed out in this post on Radio Open Source (discovered in one of the Flickr groups) concerns how a number of Flickr photos are turning up across the world in the mass media. While I am a strong believer in participatory culture and citizen reportage, the mass media seems to be coopting this emerging trend by reappropriating such content without, in my view, being a good contributing citizen itself. Let’s face it: the media doesn’t “do” open source and yet they’re greedily snatching up the contributions of regular folks to sell their papers, magazines and so on… I know that this material needs to get out there and the more people who see it the better, but something about it simply doesn’t sit well with me.

I guess until initiatives like Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere or media “escrow” repositories like morgueFile become more ubitquitous and well known, citizen journalists will have to tough it out on their own, finding a voice that stands out starkly against the lulling hum of the industrial megamedia machine and developing an organic community of readers who are themselves active participants in creating, telling and retelling the stories that matter to them, and to us all.

The cult of the vagabond hacker

With the success of hacker meetups like SuperHappyDevHouse and HackNight, it dawned on me that there need not be a specific, pre-planned event in order for hacker-types to converge in a physical location to hack on problems that are of interest them. This can, and perhaps should, happen in a much more ad-hoc, spur-of-the-moment manner and be just as successful and integrative. Additionally, there is a role for folks (like David Weekly, host of SHDH) who want to encourage this kind of behavior, especially those who understand that they can benefit from it.

I envision cults of traveling hackers, venturing from one city to the next, war driving and shacking up at homes and offices, seeking caffeine, a decent work environment and space for sleeping bags. Such places need not be permanant destinations, but rather convenient, temporary quarters for such hacking gatherings. Stay-overs may last as little as a day or may carry on over a week; indeed, it’s doubtful that more than a fortnight would even work for such a situation (for that, perhaps we would need hacker hostels).

Results from these events would be contributed back to a “code trough” where other intrepid hackers could either pick up the work or could remix it towards other projects, following the open source model. And the hosts would of course get some kind of working product out of the exchange or could continue to offer space in order to encourage the completion of the work should it not be finished in time.

Would hackers actually work on projects that they themselves didn’t come up with? Well, given the free room (and board, potentially), supply of caffeine (or other hacking supplement) and connectivity, the tradeoff seems more than fair for those hackers who want to work but also want to explore the world.

If such a networked, Meetup-like system were developed and I knew that I could plan a trip across Europe just stopping off at such hacker havens and not pay for anything but transportation, I would surely do so! Indeed, by pushing the social component and randomness of this kind of situation, you would be exposed to new and interesting people with diverse ideas, approaches and experiences that, it would seem, would contribute to creating fundamentally more interesting and valid products that solve more than just your own personal peeves. And if you happen to take a project with you on your travels, you get the compound benefit of having a myriad cross-section of the hacker subculture looking at and refining the ideas in your project as well as contributing effort hours towards getting something done!

I’d love to see such a system emerge and if anyone wants to offer up their home, office or… backyard? for this kind of event, let me know. Perhaps we could see something like this off-shoot from OSCON in August?

Tasty Spam No. 6

From:
Julie Woodward < julieMesser69@osselmann.de >
Subject:
guess who 🙂
Body:

you craze me exhaust me you mattress me resumption me you itinerant me psychobiology me you blumenthal me bratwurst me you arcade me loam me
you alone me strict me you orthant me warrior me you pale me petrochemical me

Living the vida cognito

The Vida Cognito

It’s been a fairly gradual transition for me, and certainly many many have come before me, but I’m getting the hang of living dangerously in the open, or at least letting more “meta data” about me intentionally slip into the ether, even at a time when one’s identity and data are in increasing peril.

For example, I’m now sitting in a cafe somewhere in California. Like I’ve done many times before. The difference is that when I arrived here, two very interesting things happened.

First, I signed on to Plazes. As it turns out, no one had yet identified my geolocation to the service, so the little app was smart enough to know to take me to a “discovery” page so I could fill in info about where I am… here’s the result and a detailed map (in case you wanted to order a bombing run).

Next, I signed on to Adium. As Adium connected, a little AppleScript ran in the background and set my away status to the Plaze that I had just identified. Now my friends know where I am, in real time. Freaky!

So the other thing that happened occurred as I googled for a link for the Arc Cafe (apparently it doesn’t have a website of its own yet). The first result lead me to a review on a new service called Yelp. Ordinarily, I’d take the info that I need and go, completing the Plazes profile, content to have left some meta-breadcrumbs behind for the next Plazes participant to stumble upon.

But Yelp hooked me in, got me to create an account and even poke around a bit, leaving my first review! It seems only a matter of time before more and more of me will be trickling out in the web in interesting ways.

Consider this: even without Google, you can see my photos, read my blogs, see where I’ve been and what I’ll be doing next, read my reviews (more coming soon, I guess), see who’s talkin’ about me… what I’m listening to, what sites I’ve bookmarked… man, the list goes on and on!

Someone else has already made a page cataloging their extensions into the web. Perhaps it’s time I did the same…

The advent of cellular music services

Cellular Music: the iPod iTunes iPhone

Every now and then, I see the convergence of a number of technological innovations coinciding that leads me to certain conclusions about where the industry is headed. It seems quite logical, given the recent press, that your cellphone will soon sport more than cameras, but full-featured iPod-like digital music players. It’s true that some phones already have this ability, but it’s much more of an after-thought today than an actual iPod competitor. But I have a feeling that that’s all about to change in the not-too-distant future.

Let’s take a few things into consideration (even if Om was all over this last October). First, we hear that Motorola has an iTunes-compatible phone coming. Then we hear thatNokia is going to be using Apple’s WebCore in its phones. Next, Ericsson teams up with Napster to offer digital music downloads to directly compete with Apple et al. Obviously, Apple is beefing up its distribution mechanism over mobile devices with WebCore… and at the same time, dumping podcasts into iTunes 4.9, which itself uses WebCore a great deal. See where this is going?

It certainly seems that the combination of downloadable mobile music through an excellent interface is around the corner… how podcasts fit into the picture isn’t clear yet, nor is it clear whether Apple will actually be designing its own phone. It is certainly an exciting time to be watching this segment of the industry… and probably not a good time to invest in a new phone, yet.

Tasty Spam No. 4

I kid you not, this is some real Tasty Spam that I received quite some time ago that I just had to share! (And in case the DOJ is watching, I don’t condone terrorism and have therefore tried to obfuscate any useful details from this email.)

From:
complainst@onlinenic.com < complainst@onlinenic.com >
Subject:
How one can become a terrorist?
Body:

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Safari coming to a cell phone near you

Nokia gets AppleIf anything leads one to conclude that Apple is making a move into the cellular telephony market, it’s the new deal that has Nokia dumping the newly open-sourced innards of Safari into its phones. A significant development for many reasons, not the least of which is the choice of Apple’s browser code instead of Mozilla’s…. or even Opera’s (a fellow Scandanavian company) for that matter.

Whether this will lead to the fabled iPod iPhone, one cannot be sure, but with the iPod Photo already out there, it’s only a matter of time before they toss a phone into the mix and make take the iPod to the obvious next level.