The Click Heard Round the World

Pamphlets: the Blogs of the 17th Century

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker has a neat piece on the challenge of blogging and other new media to traditional journalism called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists." One of the most interesting bits compares the rise of blogs to the growth of pamphleteering and periodicals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 

Based on research collected in the book Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain Partisanship and Political Culture by Mark Knights, Lemann notes that it was the combination of a relaxation of government restrictions on publishing, the rise in the availability of the printing press, and the growing urbanization of the populace in England led to a dramatic increase in the volume and impact of pamphlets and self-published periodicals.

A poet, and you didn't know it

I was digging around the archives of my computer and came across a bunch of poetry I wrote in the 1990s.  Some of it is cringe-inducingly bad.  Several have not aged well, particularly my "cyber" series.  But a few stand out as interesting at least to me for various reasons. 

They all remind me of a long period of my life when I saw myself primarily as a poet.  Someday I would like to do more creative writing, but that irrepressible spark of invention that used to seize me back in the day has long left me.  Which makes me a little sad.

The future of tour guide technology, Part IV

This is the last in a four-part (I, II, III) exploration of guided tour tech.   In Part One, I mused about the potential for using ICTs to connect experts in particular disciplines with tourists visiting a particular site on an ad hoc basis.  Apparently this coordination problem has been somewhat solved by combining iPods and downloadable audio tours.

The Christian Science Monitor on April 12 of this year ran a story called "Download a Story, Then Tour Downtown."  One of the main advantages of the new crop of downloadable audio guides is that they break out of the standard tour guide fare.  Robert Pyles, founder of one of the services Audissey is quoted as saying, "We view our tours as the anti-tour. You get off the main streets, take an alley, walk through a building, get a real sense of the city."

SL book signing with Play Money author Julian Dibbell

Today Julian Dibbell did an in-world book signing and Q&A for his new book Play Money.  In an interesting twist, Julian not only is selling a virtual version of his book in Second Life, he  also has a two-for-one deal to get both the virtual and real versions of the book for 6250 Lindens (about $20.)

I bought both flavors, even though I have to say the Second Life edition  is kind of silly.  I don't see the point in peering over the shoulder of my own avatar to read a book.

Mole the Pirate?

We had a little scare with my cat Mole Negro, who has been having problems with his right eye. Ocassionally his eye clouds up and he gets some milky discharge that in the past has cleared up after a day or so. My roommate Paul alerted me that the day before yesterday Mole's eye had totally closed up. I worried that maybe Mole was losing vision in one eye.

Cindy took Mole to the vet yesterday, who said he probably had some low-level virus that crops up once in awhile. He prescribed some eye drops and sent him home.

So on the plus-side, my cat still has both his eyes and is in good health. On the minus side, I was getting used to the idea of renaming him Ahab and having Cindy stitch him a cute little eye patch. Not to mention, he would be the perfect pet for someone who sometimes goes by the name Slick Rik.

What WERE you thinking last night?

I love these kind of community policing / shaming techniques people employ in New York.  I have some insanely noisy neighbors in the building next to me, who I have been incapable of convincing to turn down the music after, say, 2am on weeknight.  I hope the folks on Elizabeth street had better luck than I have.

Must have been SOME party.

New site provides online tools for human rights defenders

I received in my in-box news about a new online resource for human rights activists called Human Rights Tools created by Daniel D'Esposito , formerly of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site is basically a set of links and RSS feeds to information useful to human rights professionals in an easy-to-navigate format. 

Human Rights Tools contains, for example, links to specific country profiles, tips on documenting human rights abuses, tech solutions for activists, and job vacancies.  The site certainly is a good start for somebody just entering the field, or in a related field like humanitarian aid. 

Visually, everything is laid out very clearly with a simple four-color palette and almost no graphics. This was intentional to support activists in low-bandwidth environments. My only suggestion would be that they need to provide links to information in languages besides English, por que todos las personas tienen derechos humanos.  Otherwise, I think Daniel and his team have done a bang up job.

FCC to review media ownership rules this Fall

The Federal Communications Commission issued yesterday (July 24) their decision on a new proposed rulemaking procedure on media ownership.  A press release details some of the key issues to be considered, including:

• Local Television Ownership Limit
• Local Radio Ownership Limit
• Newspaper Broadcast Cross-ownership Ban
• Radio Television Cross-ownership Limit
  
• Dual Network Ban
• UHF discount on the National Television Ownership Limit

September 22 is the due date for public comments, which can be submitted online or via the post. November 21 the reply due date.  In addition, there will be six public hearings held around the United States.

So it looks like a busy fall for media reform activists.

The future of tour guide technology, Part III

As I was posting the previous entry on guided tour technology, I was thinking that it was more than likely that someone had already developed this.

I was right. Not only has someone created a prototype of the kind of 3D-imaging, GPS-enabled, context-relevant goggles I wrote about, but they built it specifically for the city of Pompeii, which is where I had the original idea in the first place!

Kaneva entering the MMORPG market

I somewhat randomly came across the "World of Kaneva," a new multi-user online virtual environment still in development (i.e. vaporware.)  Kaneva itself is a channel-based hosting service for videos, blogs, photos and other multi-media content, still in the beta-phase.  They appear to be trying to dominate various kinds of e-business at the time, going up against YouTube as well as World of Warcraft. I guess that's one kind of business strategy.

The Worlds of Kaneva looks like a blend of Sims Online and Second Life.  The activities seem to be designed around socializing and commerce, rather than gaming and building, in an young, urban, hipster environment.