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Thursday, December 11, 2003
Audioblabbing 
| | Listening live to the webcast from Harvard right now. Funny how default modalities change. I'm now so used to live audio/video chat that I'm expecting to be able to talk and participate. But it's like radio. Eavesdropping, sort of. Lots of people talking at once. I need a beer I just caught. Now they're talking about Chinese food. Making me hungry. Now they're singing Happy Trails. I think the meeting's over... Woop! Just cut off. Oh well. |
| | Speaking of radio, I had a good time listening to Ed, Ruby and Zephyr... wait a minute... I'ts on now again (8:35 EST)... |
| | Ed just said Zephyr, can anybody just download the software you developed for the Dean campain and just use it? |
| | Her answer: So far they haven't, which kind of surprises me. |
| | Dean aside, what's going on here is a democratic (small d) movement in the literal sense: one that is only beginning to happen. |
| | On NPR this morning, somebody from the Democratic (big D) party said most candidates expected the Supreme Court to knock down McCain-Feingold, and to be able to get big soft money. And that they had neglected the grass roots. Meanwhile, the Republicans had figured out how to take advantage of their grass roots, which can fork over $2000 apiece — and are doing it. Big time. |
| | The way for the rest of the Democrats to catch up is to clone Dean's tools and methods. Not hard to do. Tech aided democracy. |
| | Watch. It'll happen, regardless of how Dean does in the primaries. |
| | Ed's talking about the "Wireless wake-up call" in Korea, which changed the electoral process there in a huge way. And that it'll happen here, too. Inevitably. I think you will see an enormous amount of actual nuts & bolts organization on election day. |
| | Zephyr's talking about the human contact as the "core" of the movement. Not the technology. |
| | Of course, it's both. We don't even think about the telephone as technology any more, but it is. |
| | Zephyr: If you have a core of people who can spread the news... |
| | Ruby: The Internet is starting to turn the tables... |
You are where you give
| | The Real Color of Money tells the story about how much dough flows from your zip code to the pockets of pols. Interesting data. |
| | Try lookups foryour area — or any area — at the CoM site. |
Outlaw Radio
| | I just completed an attempt to duplicate some of the audio material I used for a recent live broadcast on Jazz 88 as enclosures in an RSS enabled weblog. I'm attempting to push it a little further by including Quicktime video in the RSS stream also. I'm trying to move in the direction you are pointing to: |
| | Subscribe to the weblog's RSS feed with an enclosure enabled RSS reader, and you get the material I used during my live broadcast last Sunday, November 30, 2003. It's a start in that direction. One thing missing is the scripting, much like an MP3 playlist (or SMIL) to then replay the RSS enclosures as a continuous stream...A SHOW! |
| | Does Vince have the perfect surname or what? |
From now on, I'm calling her Andrei
| | I was driving to pick up the kid yesterday evening when an Andrei Codrescu essay came on NPR. I've always enjoyed Codrescu. He edits Equisite Corpse (an outstanding online pub — take a look around if you're not familiar with it already) when he isn't otherwise busy writing delightful and wise poetry and prose across an endless variety of subjects. |
| | Anyway, his audio essay, Working for Nothing? was about the spider in his back yard. She made a multi-leveled, many-storied web that stretched from the ground to two oak branches... |
| | A meditation on personal industry and the onset of Winter, I assumed. But alas, no... |
| | I mention my front yard architect for several reasons. |
| | One, she seems a lot more interested in her creation than her prey, though I do not doubt she eats well in such a cleverly designed trap. |
| | Second, she conducts her operations unbothered by humans who mow very carefully around her and admire her work. |
| | Thirdly, she was very smart to build in a place that was sheltered enough from the elements, and open enough to elicit admiration instead of disgust. |
| | And fourthly, she was lucky. She squatted on a liberals' lawn. Now I should be so lucky. Or you. |
| | The only analogy in the human world is an Internet habitat called a blog. |
| | The blog is the grapho-egomaniac's perfect outlet. It's a daily, hourly or perpetual diary belonging souley to a writer and her thoughts. |
| | These thoughts are made public to the world every time a writer is at a keyboard. Which is, in some cases, twenty-four seven. |
| | Some people cruising by will read the postings and respond to them with thoughts of their own. Or even better, some admiration. |
| | And some move into the blog, reacting to the writer's every entry with one of their own. Like a family member. And all in real time. |
| | Eventualy a small community is born, with the blogger in the center of the web, entertaining or devouring the haphazard relatives or any number of guests. |
| | Today there are literally millions of blogmasters on the Web, each of them spiderlike at the center of their own world. |
| | Most of them believe doubtlessly that this is all the world they need and that they're the center, not just of their private world, but that of the world itself. |
| | In the real world Winter comes and even the greatest spider dies eventually. |
| | The blog will likewise go on, until the blogger runs out of room on the server and can't pay the bill. |
| | Then it's clear not only that there is a bigger world, but students of webs and blogs who watch and wonder about all the work. |
| | We've been watching a spider too, every evening, here on our front porch in Santa Barbara. By the time we go outside to sit and look at the stars before bedtime, she's built a new web, and sits in its exact middle, waiting for prey. |
| | In the morning, the web is still there, slightly tattered. The spider is back up under the gutter somewhere, waiting for darkness. |
| | I'm sure she'll be back out there again tonight, looking bigger and nastier than ever. The only difference will be her name. |
Platformations
| | Brad Spry is a new eponymous blog that explores its author's new computing platform: OS X. |
| | Me, I'm (hopefully) setting (in several cases, re-setting) up no less than four Linux boxen tomorrow. Should be fun. |
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