Archive for the “General” Category

Fred Stutzman’s Freedom has gotten great and well-deserved press as folks realize that even Windows users can now exercise Freedom. Add to that Fred’s new release, Anti-social, which lets you work but not socialize and you have some very nice offerings for controlling your internet tendencies.

In the Economist, NPR’s Peter Sagal sings the Freedom song while the article’s author astutely observes:

“But in its severity and simplicity, Freedom (for Macintosh and Windows) may be the ultimate tool to ward off distractions: the virtual equivalent of retiring to a remote getaway, or going on a writers’ retreat, to get things done.”

The New York Post, famous for their understated headlines, screams “Fatal Distraction” as they warn us of the “attention-sucking vortex” that is the internet, that diabolic system of tubes and cite Fred’s insights that lead to both Anti-social and Freedom.

At Slate Video, Farhad Manjoo (True Enough) shows his love for Freedom:

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Miss Norma C Forde dies — end of a Laurinburg NC era.

In the early 70s, I often ate at Miss Forde’s Coffee Shop, but even better on special occasions I would be treated to one of her unique train cakes. The cake — actually several smaller cakes representing an engine, some utility cars and a caboose — was handed to me on a 4 foot long board covered with tin foil. She insisted each time that I bring back the board in good repair within a week. I always did.

On one occasion, Miss Forde upset by my waist length hair snuck up behind me with large pastry shears. Clicking them loudly and clicking her tongue to add to the sound and drama, she grabbed my hair into a pony tail. I leapt up and beat it to the other side of the table quickly. We made peace and she would often give me an extra cookie with my lunch.

She and her shop were landmarks of Laurinburg for decades.

Her obit here: http://www.laurinburgexchange.com/view/full_story/7483520/article-Norma-Cannady-Forde?instance=lead_story_left_column and here http://fayobserver.com/articles/2010/06/06/1001783?sac=Col

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A couple of years back, I was invited to and did attend the Microsoft Technology Summit 08. (Reports and notes here). My impression, that I discussed with several people but didn’t blog, was that there were two strong forces within MSFT that were at odds with each other. MTS08 put them both in front of us — us being folks who “were opinion formers who might not be fully aware of Microsoft technological offerings” or those of us so into Open Source or Adobe or Apple that we weren’t paying MSFT technology all that much attention — at this meeting.

Sam Ramji who at the time was leading MSFT’s Open Source efforts was the convener of the meeting, but due to some odd scheduling he was pulled off to budget meetings for much of the conference. Sam represented a part of MSFT that I liked, felt comfortable with, understood and respected. He has (and had then) start up cred, broad experience, was open to the ideas of others, listened as well as spoke, spent less time messaging than trying to understand what was going on in a wide sense. Props to you, Sam. In short, Sam represented what Jane Jacobs calls the Commercial Moral Syndrome. I came to realize that Sam was also representative of the Ray Ozzie forces within MSFT.

Then there were the Steve Ballmer forces. They were a perfect example of what Jacobs calls the Guardian Moral Syndrome. They came to overwhelm us with their presentations, their tech and their talk. “Of course, if you were at the MIX conference (a MSFT fanboy conf)” I wrote about this at the time. Then I was comparing Dewey and Lippman, but now I think Jacobs has it divided best. The Ballmer people were MSFT lifers, for the most part, straight to MSFT from school with no turns or byways or so straight that they had forgotten any other jobs or ways of thinking.

Now Sam has left MSFT (in summer of 09 if I recall it), but the division within MSFT remains. Most recently that division between Ballmer and Ozzie came to our attention through a report in Business Insider called “Everything Wrong With The Steve Ballmer Era On Display At D8.”

I feel validated. Thanks, Sam for having me out. Thanks, Steve for acting out.

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Poetry:
“Artichokes” in the Richard Krawiec edited “Sound of Poets Cooking” (as Van Morrison says to the crowd on one of his live LPs — “We’re cookin’ already”) (Due out later this summer)
“Dividing Waters” in “Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont” by Georgann Eubanks from UNC Press (scheduled for October, 2010)

About:
He’s So Original” article in Skirt (Raleigh) (in process)

Speaking:
Is Internet Addiction Real? Morehead Planetarium and Science Center Current Science Forum. Thursday, June 10, 7 p.m. Hint: Nope

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For the Win
Our friend Cory Doctorow has out his second Young Adult book, For the Win. His first, Little Brother, is on its second week on the the National Independent Bestseller list.

We’re looking forward to having him here to read at our local indy store, Fly Leaf Books, on Sunday at 1 pm. Fly Leaf has done a great job of getting the word out and of explaining who Cory is and what the book is about.

Over in Cary at Barnes & Noble, it’s a different story. Their synopsis of the book is completely backwards from that the book is actually about. They say:

His new teen novel, For the Win, incorporates online role-playing games into a real-life, global war. Teens are recruited and unionized by ruthless bosses to sabotage the global economy.

Err #FAIL

After a little conversation with Cory and his publisher Tor, B&N now reads:

His new teen novel, For the Win, features international teens organizing and fighting, both digitally and physically, for their rights, in a world where online games are a major driver of the global economy.

Much better

The book is about macroeconomics, video games and the labor movement. Yes, that’s right. But the HEROES are the Union organizers, the IWWWW, the Webblies (a name borrowed by Cory with acknowledgment from Scotland’s Ken MacLeod). The global and therefore macroeconomics discussed are about the importance of collaboration, of love of work and play, of pressures against workers many of whom are children and of the costs of resistance and why those costs however precious are necessary to pay.

Whilst I’m on misreadings, let me point out that there are positive misreadings to be had from For the Win too. Cory dedicates the book this way:

For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better nation.

This is a borrowing from another Scots author — one of my favorites — Alasdair Gray:

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Gray says that he borrowed this phrase from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee who wrote this couple in his 9th Civil Elegy:

And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization.

I love how each author took the sentence and changed it slightly each a personal misreading and owning of the line. Dennis Lee was Toronto’s first Poet Laureate. Alastair Gray’s quote is carved in stone on the new Scottish Parliament Building’s Cannongate Wall. Cory’s is a dedication of a book to his daughter. Canada -> Scotland -> Daughter of a Canadian living in England.

Those are the better misreadings.

Come hear Cory Doctorow’s reading, not misreading, on Sunday May 23 at 1 pm here at Fly Leaf Books.

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The recently appointed University Librarian at UNC-Charlotte, Stan Wilder, played host to folks from Rochester, Rice, Notre Dame, OCLC and Library of Congress who are working on the open sourced eXtensible Catalog. I was lucky enough to be asked to entertain err educate during drinks and dinner before the meeting really got down to business. Since I can’t juggle, I gave a talk on the End of Search, the slides (which may be familiar but not in this configuration) are here:

Don’t worry this was a brief talk. The bartender was there ready to pour when I stopped but he looked interested in the talk so I brought him into the conversation and we were all better for having shared his experiences as a part of our talk. Sorry no video.

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I pretty much took the month of April off this blog. The main reasons were so that I could focus on the end of semester and the great end of semester projects/reports from my students and so that I could fret about the WWW2010 Conference.

There was no fretting necessary about WWW2010. Kathy Greene, our conference Diva, and the wonderful professional conference organizers from YCC did such a fantastic job that no sane person could fret. A conference co-chair could be nervous nonetheless. Between Kathy, Doc Searls and I, we did a good bit of press contact and interviews. And thanks to Janna Anderson of Elon who organized the co-located FutureWeb2010 and her students, there is a lot of the conference — especially that which is of more general interest — on the web now. Janna also recruited Pew Internet’s Lee Rainie to lead interview/chat sessions with all of our plenary speakers and several others.

And I can’t say enough about my co-chair, Michael Rappa, who put a ton of time thinking from the very beginnings of our endeavor together about how to form the experience and to control expenses and who provided not only his wisdom and insight but some serious resources through his Institute for Advanced Analytics at NCSU.

Local to UNC, the great students in the School of Information and Library Science provided some very significant volunteer hours and good humor. Dave Potenziani organized the Future of Public Health panel. Fred Stutzman organized the Future of Social Networks panel. Penny Abernathy, Woody Hartzog (JoMC), Alice Ammerman, Kurt Ribisl, Deborah Tate (Public Health), and Anne Klinefelter (Law) all served as panelists at FutureWeb2010.

Papers and posters from UNC authors included:

What are the most eye-catching and ear-catching features in the video?: implications for video summarization
Yaxiao Song, Gary Marchionini, Chi Young Oh

INEX+DBPEDIA: a corpus for semantic search evaluation
Jose R. Perez-Aguera, Javier Arroyo, Jane Greenberg, Joaquin Perez-Iglesias, Victor Fresno

Using BM25F for Semantic Search.
José R. Pérez-Agüera, Javier Arroyo, Jane Greenberg, Joaquin Perez-Iglesias and Victor Fresno.
Semantic Search Workshop Best Paper Award

I did a little overtime work by chairing the Future of Media panel which included Penny Abernathy, Michael Clemente, Dan Conover, Sam Matheny and Doc Searls, sitting in for Michael Tiemann (who was held over at what turned out to be a very important software patent trial in east Texas) on the Open Source panel, being part of the plenary panel on Government Data with Tim Berners-Lee, David Ferriero, Andrew McLaughlin, and Nigel Shadbolt with Jim Hendler as our moderator.

As co-chair, I got to introduce some great and generous old friends – plenary speaker Carl Malamud and Bebo White as well as help handle the questions for Vint Cerf and danah boyd.

Greg DeKoenigsberg really pitched in and helped me create a Developers Track on far too short a notice. Thanks to Greg’s strong outreach, we had strong presentations and the right people in the rooms to here them.

[still writing this]

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Triangle Business Journal announces that the new Cheerwine distributor Pepsi Bottling Ventures will be making Cheerwine and Diet Cheerwine available in fountains that also serve Pepsi beginning in April. Look for the wine dark beverage be in NC and SC’s Myrtle Beach distribution areas.

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A couple of months back, I did a little interview with the Renaissance Computing Institute aka RENCI for their Renaissance People series. I’ve worked with them on a number of projects including their business incubator Launchpad and with some visualization examples (Jeff Heard’s neat-o spheres of ibiblio is one side project from that work).

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Open Government and the World Wide Web

The opening ceremony of WWW2010 will include a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web (data.gov and data.gov.uk). The panel features inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero; Professor James Hendler of RPI, who will moderate the discussion; UNC professor and Director of iBiblio.org, Paul Jones; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Executive Office of the President; and University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation.


Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk is a brief preview of that we’ll be talking about at WWW2010

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Our family joke: “He knows so little, yet he says so much” is meant to be a kind of zen koan, an insult at one reading and praise at the next. I get that kind of reaction when I come home and describe the talks and classes I’ve done. This past week was one example of many parts of my life colliding — not so much like legos that might eventually click into place, but like a grab bag of tinkertoys, legos and mechanos.

Not documenting everything by far (skipping Public Health presentations that I was only attending, class which you are welcome to check out, the WCHL community lunch, a dinner with the good INTRAHealth OPEN folks, and a murder mystery solved), but looking at two that have some documentation to present, I spoke at the UNC Law Cyberlaw class about FLOSS licensing — slides below — and at the Society for Collegiate Journalism National Conference at NCSU — great writeup by Tyler Dukes linked from the lovely dog picture below.
Serious Journalism

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Imagining the Internet

For the past two days, I’ve had the Geek Quote of the Day on The Great Geek Manual site. Both came from the new Pew Internet and American Life Report called “Imagining the Internet IV.” While I’ve imagined the Internet for Pew three other times, I don’t think that my imaginings have gotten such nice pass-along attention. Thanks, GGM. Also with great geek futurings is Fred Stutzman who will no doubt become quoted as well.

Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions.
– Paul Jones in the “The structure of the Internet” report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will loose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses.
– Paul Jones in the “The structure of the Internet” report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

One correction: The quotes are not in the Structure section of the report but in the Future of Intelligence section also known as “Does Google Make Us Stupid” My claim is that most of us don’t need Google for that ;->

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I got one of the best speaker’s gifts ever given by a conference thanks to Bess Sadler Of UCSD Stanford. She got RENCI’s Jeff Heard to do this very cool & beautiful visualization of ibiblio virtual host traffic. The X, Y and Z axises of these globes are the top 3 octets of the IP numbers of the sites accessing the various ibiblio-hosted sites. Don’t worry so much about the analysis tho; it’s a beautiful work of art. Thanks Jeff and Bess.

Groklaw's world

Here’s one globe representing the Groklaw World. More globes and a better explanation at Jeff’s RENCI Visualization blog.

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Possibly the last bottle of #cheerwine #nectorofTheTarHeels in Orange County

In December, Cheerwine was widely available in Chapel Hill. In February, there is not a drop of the dark cheery NC iconic beverage to be found in Orange County stores — and worse –; there are not even empty slots on the shelves; the shelves have been remarked as if Cheerwine never existed!

Until February (or perhaps late January), Harris Teeter was a reliable source for Cheerwine. But as of Saturday January 30, the Carrboro Harris Teeter had no Cheerwine. A check at the University Mall HT showed not only had the Nectar of the Tar Heels vanished like the poise of this year’s Men BBall team, but all traces of previous Cheerwine existence had been removed. The UMall HT manager was surprised as he stared at the stacks of carbonated corn syrup. “Well, it used to be right here with the other odd stuff,” he told the Cheerwine seekers. He explained that Cheerwine was carried by a beer distributor in our area — Long Beverage.

Monday took us to WalMart on 15-501 where nicely discounted cartons of Cheerwine had been nestled in the past. There again all signs of Cheerwine had vanished!

A stop at Food Lion in Durham on Hillsborough Road near 9th Street yielded one bottle which had been hidden among the 7 Ups on sale. Although the shelves were depleted from the #snOMG rush, it was clear that there were no spaces tagged Cheerwine. The manager said that a truck would be in on Tuesday and that she was sure Cheerwine would be on it. “They always have it — even the Diet version,” she insisted.

Twitter and Facebook friends pointed me again and again to the ambitious Cheerwine Finder project. But that shows a giant Cheerwine free cloud over Orange County. The nearest reported Cheerwine sighting was at a Sheetz in Durham on South Miami Blvd. (upside as one friend pointed out is that it is near the great 9N9 pho restaurant; the downside is distance plus convenience store pricing). Others noticed Cheerwine near Morrisville (where Long has a warehouse) or in Chatham County.

While this may not be related, Cheerwine crowned a Carolina coed the Czar of Chillocity beginning in January 2010. As of this writing, she has not responded to queries about the CHill Cheerwine Crisis. See her very helpful and informative letter below.

It’s not that Cheerwine sales are down. In fact as recently as July, Sue Stock of the News and Observer reported that Cheerwine was somehow resistant to the soda sales downturn in an article “There’s something about Cheerwine.”

The #questforcheerwine continues. From an Unofficial Report we learned that “Tar Heel Groundhog sees shadow and ignores it as he seeks out local #cheerwine source in Orange County, NC”

Hi Paul,

I apologize that it is impossible to find Cheerwine in Chapel Hill now! Luckly, there is an explanation for this. Cheerwine has just switched distributors for the triangle area and it should be arriving back in grocery stores very soon. We are now working with the local Pepsi distributor and Cheerwine can be found in the Pepsi section of the soft drink aisle. If you are craving Cheerwine today, go to Four Corners. They carry Cheerwine on their fountain. If you have any other questions please do not hesitate to ask. Thanks for being such an avid Cheerwine fan.

Cheers,
Lauren Odom
Czar of Chillocity

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Double news day on Wednesday.

I did some bits for and article in the Durham Herald-Sun on the iPad and education — even before the product was unveiled. I think this last part isn’t great for journalism, so you can see that I hedged my bets on what the thing would do or had I seen it and the DRM implications I would have given different quotes. As it was, I got to close the article with a whimsical quote:

“One of my goals in life is to be rich enough so that I could have an account with Apple,” he [Paul Jones] said. “That way, whatever they develop they can just take money out of there and send me what[ever] it is.”

Then I did a little on camera for the UNC Carolina Week Program about Facebook, Privacy and the new settings and controls. That’s not out yet that I know of, but I did shoot the crew as they were setting up.

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Just after hearing a great, if quick and concise, discussion “Toward Health Care Reform Through Electronic Medical Records” featuring Jonathan Oberlander, Tim Carey and Deniese Chaney at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health this evening. Louise Winstanly turned to me and said “Why not let banks to it?” This was not only a good insight but one in keeping with the class discussion that I had been planning for tomorrow in the School of Information and Library Science. Not about banks nor about health records, but about the sources of disruptive innovations as described by Clayton Christensen (for my class in this video from this past summer).

Banks, Louise had realized, have been experts at secure, reliable, authoritative transactions between institutions as well as delivering money and records to the correct individuals anywhere in the world. If an individual and the country of Qatar can trust the fiscal transactions handled by banking systems, then surely UNC Hospitals, Duke Medical, Medicare and you and me could trust them with health information.

In fact, if banks concentrated on what they did well — that is not the content so much as the secure transfer and reliable delivery — you could have access to your health records by just a card swipe from an ATM-like machine or on your phone or a computer display. Authorized entities could update the records much like direct deposit is done. They could download appropriate parts of the records much like drafting your checking account or receiving an electronic transfer.

Banks could err bank the records. The bank of your choice holding all or part of your records as you deemed appropriate.

The network and the controls and the security are already in place. The banks need not, let me say again, be concerned with the content, nor with the format of the records. Those are separate issues that could be decided by other entities be they medical groups, government, insurance or even individuals. Standard formats would make sense but banks need not even be aware of those standards to perform much of the work of interchange and transactions.

What does this have to do with disruptive innovation? Banks have a proven and transferable competency with technical infrastructure in support of secure transactions. Medical organizations do not. Yet we see medical organizations, governments and insurance attempting to create new networks right beside the world’s best networks for secure transactions. If banking networks were to conceive of themselves not as financial exchange networks bit instead as secure information exchange networks, then they would already be in the business and would by now own it. Less replication, less useless reinvention, less time to build trust (you may not trust banks as investors and makers of loans but you do trust the ATM), there is already a culture of cooperative exchange that is well understood. All of this is under very long term construction in the medical area and in fact may not be accomplished in my life time. Banks and banking networks would have to do more than turn the switch, but not much more.

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This Friday, I was at the funeral, burial, and an informal gathering of friends for the poet and teacher Margaret Rabb who most of us knew as Peggy. Peggy had a rich life much of which was spent on making other peoples lives richer. I knew her as a poet, but also as someone who worked in international health issues, put together documentary film festivals, was a lawyer (not practicing but much informed by her legal education), a mother, and an all round creative person and teacher who brought out the creativity in others.

Her obituary tells a part of her story, but it doesn’t say how hard she worked to complete her dream as a poet and teacher culminating with her last job as the head of the Creative Writing Program at Wichita State University.

Here is Peggy reading two late poems that capture her love of words, word play and of precise observation:

Low Owl Illusion

Transvestites in Waukegan

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Thanks to Google Alerts, I learned that I was cited in the Independent Weekly’s food section for my blog. Not this blog. In fact, not even a blog that I’ve ever posted too. Perhaps I should have posted to Jacob Kramer-Duffield aka JKD aka @jaykaydee’s Piedmont Review of Food a long time ago; it’s a great blog with good stuff to say about food.

Nonetheless I’m in the ink as the author of the Piedmont Review of Food as the writer for the Indy didn’t bother to try to contact me or JKD. If Claire Cusick had, then her article “Eat with your mouse instead of your mouth” would have been corrected like this:

Even Paul JonesEven a busy PhD candidate has a food blog. The local online pioneer and director of ibiblio.orgJacob Kramer-Duffield, an insightful researcher on metadata, also writes about food and drink at the academically named Piedmont Review of Food (piedmontreview.blogspot.com), subtitled “Food, beer, &c. from Carrboro, North Carolina.” He began in 2007 with these words: “This blog will be about food, which is to say it’ll be about a lot of things,” and he’s kept faithful to that vision, sharing recipes with annotations and verdicts, a review of a brown ale and a discussion of stevia that begins “What on earth is that stuff??!”

Overall with this fix a fine bit of a bigger article.

Still the article omitted the Best Food Blog of the Triangle! Grace Talks About Food. You must read and view Grace’s videos — especially on Hannah Montana Cereal

UPDATE: Just heard from Claire who is correcting now. And JKD has updated Piedmont Review of Food so it’s easier to see who writes it.

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