EU rejects full Hamas ban. Europe rejects US calls to outlaw the political as well as the military wing of the Palestinian militants. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
7:37:37 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Gates and Security. An anonymous reader writes "Orwell was wrong about Big Brother! Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates told a homeland-security conference on Wednesday ... ...[Slashdot] 
6:49:46 PM      comment []   trackback []  



IBM creates self-assembling metamaterial [Ars Technica] 
3:11:42 PM      comment []   trackback []  



American Apology Shirt:. "I was preparing for an international trip, and I thought, 'what can I do to tell as many people as possible in other countries that many Americans vehemently disagree with the policies of our own government?' So I made this shirt, and various wonderful people translated it into all of the official UN languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Buy one for your own international travels. A domestic version (US$16), without English, is also available for those who want to make a statement, but not to monolingual locals." [Follow Me Here...] 
3:11:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



When They Talk Tech, DC Listens. What do politicians know about technology? For the most part, only what their advisers tell them -- which explains the growing influence of science and tech whizzes in Washington. Meet four of the heaviest hitters. From Wired magazine. [Wired News] 
3:09:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



SpaceshipOne:.

"Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize. The 10 million dollar X prize is open to private companies and requires the successful launch of a spaceship which carries three people on short sub-orbital flights to an altitude of 100 kilometers -- a scenario similar to the early manned spaceflights of NASA's Mercury Program. Unlike more conventional rocket flights to space, SpaceShipOne will first be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet by the twin turbojet White Knight and then released before igniting its own hybrid solid fuel rocket engine. After the climb to space, the craft will convert to a stable high drag configuration for re-entry, ultimately landing like a conventional glider at light plane speeds." Astronomy Picture of the Day [Follow Me Here...] 
2:57:05 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole. TheSync writes "A Reuters/Yahoo story says University of Arizona and Russian scientists have detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' ... [Slashdot] 
2:42:21 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Controversial Issues in Psychiatric Diagnosis:. Christian Perring, a philosopher, reviews Advancing DSM: Dilemmas in Psychiatric Diagnosis. Edited by Katherine A. Phillips, Michael B. First, and Harold Alan Pincus.:

Those interested in the philosophy of psychiatry will find much food for thought in the chapter by Wakefield and First, "Clarifying the Distinction Between Disorder and Nondisorder." They explain that it is important to distinguish between mental disorders and other conditions including normal intense emotional reactions, social deviance, personal unhappiness, lack of fit between an individual and a specific social role or relationship or environment, and socially disapproved or negatively evaluated behavior in general. This is especially motivated by concerns within the psychiatric profession and the general public that mental disorders are being overdiagnosed, and ordinary human problems are being medicalized. They call this the false-positives problem, and they spell out the wide range of clinical, research and social concerns that it raises...

[Follow Me Here...] 
2:21:35 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Space impact 'saved Christianity':. "Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God.

Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status." BBC News [Follow Me Here...] 
2:19:29 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Do you love Led Zeppelin?. If so, stop everything you're doing right now and go get How The West Was Won. It's 3 CDs worth of live recordings from 1972 shows in Long Beach and Los Angeles, CA. Don't be turned off by past live horrors like the Song Remains the Same, this is outstanding. I've been listening non-stop and it's so good, filled with crazy improvisations and bluesy rocking. "Whole Lotta Love" goes for more than 20 minutes and at this writing it has 141 reviews at Amazon with an average of five (out of five) stars. We've got it on repeat here at the office and we're rocking out so much listening to it that we're contemplating exchanging the desks for bean bag chairs, covering the large warehouse windows with tapestries, hanging the beads, and packing the bong. From now on, we'll be coding by the light of the lava lamp. [muchas gracias a Jake] [megnut] 
12:58:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Ethics cost money. Ethics cost money - The Los Angeles Times discusses the effect of Levi Strauss's ethical standards on their place in a competitive marketplace. Can a company succeed when they place their morals ahead of their money? [MetaFilter] 
11:30:07 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Playing the doctor card.

I just noticed something.

It starts with Mike advocating Sex in Politics:

It would be a far better world if more politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it. Every minute Clinton spent banging Monica Lewinski he wasn't screwing the rest of us or the world. Every time she knelt before that mighty cigar - she was a heroine.

Because - unlike most Americans - She could take everything a politician could put out - and swallow it !

Result - the greatest economic expansion ever - a massive decline in the murder rate - the biggest corporate party that anyone has ever attended - and something close to world peace was achieved.

Monica Lewinski deserves a frigging medal for all that.

After she stopped seeing the president, this country started going to hell.

(Mike, you got your asbestos suit? You're standing in the blast zone, dude.)

Then there's Britt on the Democrats' cognitive linguistic trump card [~] the one & only equally strong & nurturant role model that can beat Bush's stern daddy act. The Doctor.

Think about it. Doctors, at least professionally, aren't afraid of sex. Thanks to professional training, good doctors are fearless around the whole damn thing. It ain't no big deal. Fucking is fine. Blowjobs are fine.

(I loved The Onion's story "Clinton Emotionally Ready to Start Getting Blow Jobs Again".)

Anyway, seems to me there's a connection between the Fear Thing and the Sex Thing.

Not fearing sex is great training for not fearing anything else. Including how you look and sound on TV.

The democrats need to be The Fuckit Party this year. They need to be straight and honest and remind Americans of what they're giving up to the droning fearmongers who run the country right now.

Here's Bush's weakness: He can't ad-lib anything but platitudes, and he sucks at that, too. Yes, he's a wartime president who looks and acts the part; but he has trouble talking his walk, no matter where he's going.

Of course, if he nails Saddam and Osama, brokers peace between Israel and Palestine, and gets a decent government working in Iraq, give it up. It won't matter how bad he talks. Deeds trump words.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
2:05:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking. In 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 1... 1... 1... "In this footage obtained exclusively by The Memory Hole, watch as the President of the United States sits and does nothing after learning that his country is under attack." Andrew Card whispers about plane #2, POTUS remains engrossed in book. (Warning: Quicktime, little kids reading slowly in unison for five long minutes.) [MetaFilter] 
2:02:40 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Transparent Web Caching Patented. John Public writes "BIND author and all-around Internet personality Paul Vixie and Mirror Image Internet have recently received US patent 6,581,090, ... [Slashdot] 
2:01:15 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Lightning Jets Blow Sky High. Scientists are startled to discover a new form of lightning -- gigantic plumes that shoot up from cloud tops nearly 60 miles into the upper atmosphere. Some compare the discovery to biologists finding a new body part, and wonder how they could have missed it. [Wired News] 
1:57:18 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Pulling Up by Their Sandal Straps. Ecosandals.com, an online retailer of sandals made in Kenya, is managing to survive the dot-com shakeout -- and is bringing hope to Kenya's poor. The Internet may change the world yet. Jennifer Friedlin reports from Nairobi. [Wired News] 
1:55:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Black Elk Speaks. The Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,--you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."

Black Elk speaks. [MetaFilter] 
1:51:56 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Orwell's Centenary. Today marks one hundred years since the birth of George Orwell. He may have died in 1950, just after finishing his master work, but he has remained culturally relevant ever since, and never more so than during the past two years. [MetaFilter] 
12:50:31 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Italy immunity law provokes fury. Prosecutors at the aborted trial of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi denounce his new immunity as unconstitutional. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
7:07:17 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Reconstructive suggestions.

In this morning's New York Times, Thomas Friedman busts the Pentagon for the obvious:

The Bush Pentagon went into this war assuming that it could decapitate the Iraqi army, bureaucracy and police force, remove the Saddam loyalists and then basically run Iraq through the rump army, bureaucracy and police.

Wrong. What happened instead was that they all collapsed, leaving a security and administrative vacuum, which the U.S. military was utterly unprepared to fill.

So Kevin Jones has good idea:

You know what I think we should do? Send the guys who created Burning Man over to iraq. They build a better society than the one they left behind every year out in the desert and then burn it down, cuz it's not about stuff or money. It's about creating your reality. And you can create a good one. A just one....

He also provides some helpful reminders:

The Venetian empire lasted for 500 years as a world power even though, or maybe because, they were founded on a fragile series of islands in a marshy lagoon. They were able to do it because 1. They knew they pissed in the pool from which they drew their drinking water and which they used as their principle defense. And 2. They were able to subordinate the display of the male ego into actions that benefited society as a whole; 'I will show you my power with this new library,' 'oh yeah, I will build a new gallery and hospital'.... men's need to strut was channeled, so the boys strutted like roosters in their clearly bounded preening pens and society flourished.

Second, the Dutch trading empire prior to William of Orange had perfected the highest profit and lowest cost international trade of any empire because they figured out how to respect the others they were encountering and do business in a way that both sides found satisfying so that their military expenditures were much less. They were the only ones the Japanese would do business with. Interestingly, these two intelligent empires were both resource constrained, so they compensated with life giving social structures.

The thinker who unsuccessfully lobbied for the Dutch to hold onto their trading IP as a competitive, but ollaborative, differentiator while ceding military power to the rising British empire was Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). He is credited as the founder of international law, which grew into the Hague.

We are an empire. You can have a good empire, with enlightened use of soft power. It's happened a few times in history. We need to make it happen again. Burning Man demonstrates the kind of civil-society-building power we could couple with our military power. We can't back away from being the world's dominant global power. But we can use all the kinds of power at our disposal to bring about the world we need to create in order to survive or maybe I should say ensure our mutual survivability.

Clearly speaking loudly and carrying the biggest stick isn't doing the job.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 
7:06:11 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Post-colonial African blues. Getting The Hell Out Of Africa: An excellent article by R.W. Johnson describes the forces now driving out many African whites and quietly despairs. Post-colonial blues are sad and riddled with guilt and lost hopes. How far does collective guilt impinge on the individual? What if there is no guilt at all? What is the white man and woman's place in 21st Century Africa? I wonder whether it isn't still too early to think clearly about the many delicate issues involved. But then an all-black Africa wouldn't be Africa. Would it? [MetaFilter] 
6:56:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Berlin marks Kennedy rally. The German capital celebrates the 40th anniversary of John F Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition]

--

The general sentiment in Germany towards the US has changed a great deal since the days of JFK. In fact, I'm not too sure whether the present climate on the European continent it is sufficiantly understood in America today.

To gain a sense of the widespread bitter emnity felt here toward the erstwhile liberators, one only has to glance through the countless comments posted in German forums around the web....

Who knows where all this will lead? 
6:39:06 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Vatican unveils virtual tour. The Vatican offers a virtual tour of the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo as part of upgrades to its website. [BBC News | Europe | World Edition] 
4:13:16 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Heart and Soul in the Machine. Synth legend Robert Moog built the first keyboard-controlled synthesizers in the mid-'60s. Thrity years later, he's updating his instrument. Read Wired magazine's interview with Moog about the timeless appeal of a finely wrought musical instrument. [Wired News] 
4:01:21 PM      comment []   trackback []  



radiolovers. radiolovers ~ listen to OLD TIME RADIO shows for free, online. [MetaFilter] 
1:54:11 AM      comment []   trackback []  



It's all for charidee.... Mitch Kapor reckons that by 2029 no computer - or "machine intelligence" - will have passed the Turing Test. If he's right, the EFF wins $20,000 on a bet.

In the well designed and conceptualised Dave Winer, Esther Dyson, Vint Cerf and Ted Danson!
All predictions here; All bets here

- discussions so far here.

Any Mefites willing to stake their rep on cherished beliefs? What do you want to publicly predict will - or will not - happen, and by when? [MetaFilter] 
1:49:52 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Schoolgirls taken by Ugandan rebels. Up to 100 schoolgirls are feared abducted in an upsurge of violence by rebels in northern Uganda. [BBC News | Africa | World Edition] 
1:31:13 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Chris Lydon: "In the booming energy of blog world, we are glimpsing the fulfillment of an Emersonian vision: this democracy of outspoken individuals." [Corante: aa Corante on Blogging] 
11:45:03 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Landing a Job Can Be Puzzling. Microsoft is legendary for running job applicants through grueling interviews full of brain teasers and bizarre questions. Now, other companies are following suit. By Amit Asaravala. [Wired News] 
1:12:24 PM      comment []   trackback []  



I am John's brain.. I am John's brain. Amusingly written, yet astutely raising an important point. What exactly are we to do about consciousness? Although clearly different theories abound, one must still ponder whether or not the problem is even solvable in the first place. Where then can we turn to for our solution? Why, bicamerality, of course. [MetaFilter] 
11:56:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Iraqi Moblogging. Salam moblogs. (More moblogging replacing/enhancing journalism) [MetaFilter] 
11:46:02 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Sketches at the Eyepiece. Sketches at the Eyepiece. Drawings of the Moon, the Sun, planets and other astronomical objects.
Also The Face of the Moon: Galileo to Apollo. A catalogue of rare books and maps, with images. [MetaFilter] 
11:44:15 PM      comment []   trackback []  



whichbook should I read?. Whichbook: a neat little flash app that permits you to select on a sliding scale up to four different features of a novel and then recommends a list of prospective reading to you. (Plain-text available here). (via sixdifferentways). [MetaFilter] 
11:43:36 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogging from Iran

With Big Media largely ignoring the ongoing unrest in Iran, the Internet is the place to track events. Fortunately, while Iraq only had one blogger when things hit the fan, Iran has hundreds both there and in exile, and many post in English. There's enough you want a site that's capable of filtering and interpreting the flow, as well as looks at the raw feed. Those tracking the closest include:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Winds of Change
• Pejman

If you want to go straight to the sources, Hoder has an exhaustive list of active bloggers.

The good folks in Iran deserve at least our moral support. They also deserve the chance to take back their freedom their own way, with their own hands. A tough conundrum with a nuclear time bomb ticking in the background. [Due Diligence] 
11:35:30 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Blogging in Brazil

BBC reporter Paulo Cabral is travelling along Brazil's São Francisco river, following in the footsteps of Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Each week day, for two weeks, Paulo will be posting a diary entry on the web, and responding to a selection of your e-mails.

[BBC News World Edition] 
1:59:02 PM      comment []   trackback []  

Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers. I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article, Savant for a Day, is making me reconsider. I'd like to see ... [Slashdot] 
10:07:19 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Astronomers take 3-D images of solar surface. Astronomers have taken the first three-dimensional photos of the photosphere, or solar surface. At... [spacetoday.net] 
1:08:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Greek Temple Architecture and Linkeriffica of Antiquity. Greek Temple Architecture: They were houses--houses for cult statues, storehouses of treasures given to the gods--they were not churches. Worship consisted, by and large, of animal sacrifice: killing animals and eating them, for the most part--and, hence, it was done out of doors. The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook's Accounts of Hellenic Religious Beliefs and Accounts of Personal Religion give additional flavor and context. Greek religious architecture evolved from wooden structures and was tradition bound--they built in stone as they had in wood according to variations on a traditional canon called the orders, first and foremost, the Doric Order , the Ionic Order and the Corinthian Order. Here are some restorations. I love restorations, on paper or models rather than at the actual sites. The first in a series. [MetaFilter] 
5:50:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Iran and its 10,000 Salam Paxes [BuzzMachine] 
3:55:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



"Blog your Music" online/offline event in France. BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:

We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.

More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.

"Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
2:40:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Blogs breed western corruption [Ars Techinca] 
5:40:14 AM      comment []   trackback []  



FCC Minister of Information.

The Evils of media consolidation will never get past our defenses. When the media fails to do its job at least there are humorists like Mark Fiore to help us laugh about it all.

[Corante: Amateur Hour] 
5:20:56 AM      comment []   trackback []  



The People's Mesh Manifesto.

Marc Canter has written a detail history of multimedia through his early developer/artist eyes, ending with a call to arms for what he calls the "People's Mesh"

Everything we need has been invented, now it's time to get it all to work together

One of the most exciting evolutions I see coming is how the technical and social standards established within the blogosphere will spread around the world.... [Corante: Amateur Hour]

 
5:15:49 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Gene Linked to Manic Depression. A newly discovered relationship between a flawed gene and bipolar disorder could lead to better treatments for the mental illness, scientists say. [Wired News] 
5:11:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Europe proposes right-of-reply. A European policy group is proposing that those who are criticised on the Internet should have a right to reply in the same space where the criticism appeared -- IOW, bloggers would have to give time on their blogs to the people they flame. I've always presumed that there was no legal interest in ensuring that people don't feel sad -- but rather, preventing real harm (which can be addressed through courts, should such harm be proposed).

The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization...

* "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."

* Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.

* "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."

* Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."

Link

Discuss

(via Lawmeme) [Boing Boing Blog] 
4:42:07 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Vipul Kashyap and emergent semantics.

Vipul Kashyap's home page says "I am a Fellow at the National Library of Medicine in the Medical Informatics Training Program. I am currently working on issues relating the Semantic Web and Medical Ontologies."

The part I found most interesting is at the end:

Some other areas which I am working on are Emergent Semantics which is based on the hypothesis, that semantics on the Semantic Web are more likely to "emerge" from various types of information available and interactions between participants as opposed to top down formal specifications. Towards this end I am taking a close look at statistical clustering and NLP techniques. Also of interest are techniques from cultural anthropology, such as consensus analysis and social networks.

Vipul is presenting a poster at WWW2003, so I might be able to meet him soon.

[Seb's Open Research] 
3:52:38 AM      comment []   trackback []  



PlaNetwork Conference: Networking a Sustainable Future.

I just got this in my inbox and thought it might interest readers of this blog.

Join Hazel Henderson, Douglas Engelbart, Joan Blades, Jeff Gates, Leif Utne and others at this exciting gathering of innovators from the world of IT,
environmental advocates, peace and social justice activists, independent media pioneers, and many others exploring how social networks, information technologies and the Internet can play a key role in accelerating positive global change. June 6-8 at the Presidio in San Francisco, CA. Special non-profit, activist and student rate: $95 for three days. Register now online at: http://www.planetwork.net

[Seb's Open Research] 
3:25:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Ridiculously easy group-forming via k-collector.

Communal topics and super-blogs. Matt on k-collector and shared topics: "If you click a topic name on my weblog now you don't get a local page but, instead, the dynamic k-collector page for that topic.  At the moment this is an aggregation of all the posts about that topic from anyone subscribing to the cloud." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

I hope to find time soon to compare this to the Internet Topic Exchange and investigate interoperability in both directions. More than ever do I believe that there is promise in loose community formation among bloggers. Many ingredients are there that weren't around only six months ago: more developers, many more bloggers (meaning more diversity and overlap of interests at the same time), and new complementary technology, such as the shiny new Technorati API.

Now, this is nothing more than educated guesswork, but I have a feeling that, say, a year from now, many of my favorite sources will not be personal blogs, but rather topical feeds that have been duly post-processed in some way by the collective intelligence of my microblogosphere.

While it makes me kind of sad to entertain the thought of progressively abandoning per-person subscriptions, I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with all of those tremendously interesting new voices without the help of more sophisticated personal relevance filters.

[Seb's Open Research] 
2:46:40 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Will social software encourage polarization?.

A good post and a fascinating discussion over on Don Park's blog on the potential adverse effects of social software, starting from his observation of how the Internet affected people in his home country:

Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world.  Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities.  One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not.  Their views are warped and often radical.  While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views.  Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.

[...] In a sense, social clusters form gravity wells which has its own local physical laws and is difficult to escape from.  Social softwares make it easier to create and grow such clusters.

Bill Kearney offers a counter-argument that I find cogent:

The fact that groups can form more rapidly will do more to devalue the ability of any one group or cult of personality. Yes, for those ununsed to the process it will be a terrifyingly vast expanse of rapidly changing groupings. Hang on, it's going to be a fun ride.

I guess the question could be summarized as "Does social software help people turn inwards or outwards?". (Personally, I don't think it can be answered without taking the context of use into account.)

[Corante: Social Software] [Seb's Open Research] 
2:45:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Distributed collective tweaking. Headmap: Declaration of Interdependence. A view of the future of the Internet and how it will impact the way we'll go about our business. Far-reaching, yet plausible if you ask me. (via Ming) [Seb's Open Research] 
2:44:32 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Wiki of all wikis.

WorldWideWiki: OneBigWiki. I didn't know there were that many public wikis. (And some are missing from the list - I should try to add them when I find time.)

[Seb's Open Research] 
2:42:16 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Marc Canter: The New Paradigm of Tools 
12:24:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Hellen Keller The Fraud?. Helen Keller: A Living Lie? A fascinating New Yorker piece by Cynthia Ozick that explores Helen Keller's writing career and all the questions of authenticity it raises. She was charged with being a "fraud, a puppet, a plagiarist" and she was defended by the likes of Mark Twain and Alexander Graham Bell. Ozick ultimately asks the question: "Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?" [MetaFilter] 
12:18:08 AM      comment []   trackback []  

News.Com: Why Europe still doesn't get the Internet. The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization. [Tomalak's Realm] 
1:25:24 AM      comment []   trackback []  

Europe To Force Right of Reply On Internet Communication. [Slashdot] 
9:28:33 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Internet and Chinese Ravers [Ars Technica] 
9:26:45 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Who What When 
8:32:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Conspiracy theory. Dave Winer puts the death of IE5/Mac into context, concluding it took Bill Gates ten years to erase the web as a threat. The timing of recent events bears out Dave's thesis, at least as far as Microsoft's INTENTIONS are concerned. A blow by blow analysis of who did and said what when. Were standards-oriented Microsoft developers dupes? Did the company tolerate their actions because implementing standards pacified the developer community? What happens next? Do consumers have a choice? [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 
7:42:28 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Watchblog: Coming From All Sides. Proximity Politics. One kind of proximity politics refers to new-found adjacency resulting from globalization which forces new dilemmas before citizens. Another kind of proximity politics refers to the coat-tail riding of aspiring politicians who try to trade on the fame, glory or popularity of others. Still another kind of proximity politics are practiced in attack ads, in which politicans seek to attach their oppenents' names to negatives without explicit accusations, relying instead upon a series of words or short phrases without the grammatical glue which might permit proper parsing or analysis. And the final kind of proximity politicsâ??probably the most positiveâ??are those practiced by WatchBlog, which calls paid to the inward-looking, self-reinforcing echo chambers of one-view political forums. Instead, the two main American parties and their myriad third-party siblings are posting to the same arena. It's the answer to the question, "How can people's minds be changed if they only seek out what they already agree with?" If the opposite camp is in the text column next door, maybe you can't help but to take a dose of what's turning out to be strong commentary largely free of carbon-copy rhetoric, cardboard cut-outs, and cookie-cutter opinions. [MetaFilter] 
6:42:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Africaserver. Africaserver. Contemporary African art and culture - San art from Botswana, Arms into Art from Mozambique, Dar es Salaam in Delft Blue - a cross-cultural comparison of favourite objects, Marthe Nso Abomo from Cameroon, a Rwanda Genocide Monument, and more.
Related :- Meshu, an artist and political activist from Lesotho who may have been southern Africa's first streaker. [MetaFilter] 
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