Dustin the Turkey in Happier Times
Dustin the Turkey is out of the Eurovision Song Competition. Ireland’s Best will have to find another outlet for world (or at least continental fame). Although a proven success with 6 albums out and a very catchy entry, Dustin failed to capture enough votes to make the first semi-finals.

Dustin, you’re no Lordi!

BarCamp RDU
Yes the Third BarCampRDU is on its way. Over 200 people preregistered already. Details and signup here.

Want to help BarCampRDU?

Dave Johnson sends this note about sponsorship and volunteering:

As you may have already heard, BarCamp RDU 2008 is in the works. We’ve already opened registration and started blogging about the event and now we are pleased to announce BarCampRDU 2008 to potential sponsors and volunteers.

BarCamp RDU 20008 will be held on Saturday August 2, 2008 at the Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, NC. The purpose of this message is to act as a “save the date” and solicitation for those interested in sponsoring and volunteering for the event.

About sponsorships:

Even before making a public call for sponsors, BarCampRDU 2008 has fulfilled 50% of its sponsorship goals, but we still have $2500 outstanding that we need pledged. If you or your organization would like to sponsor BarCampRDU, please contact Dave Johnson at dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org. The minimum sponsorship is $300.

About registration:

Registration for BarCampRDU has already been announced far in advance and we already have [over] 200 attendees registered on the wiki.

Organizers committee:

If you’d like to join the organizing committee of BarCampRDU, please contact Wayne Sutton at wayne at wayne-sutton.com. The organizing committee meets periodically and ensures that tasks are completed for BarCamp. Please note, being on the organizing committee is not a nominal position - it requires significant work, so please only volunteer if you can commit to this effort.

We’re very excited to announce this event. With a location and sponsors, we’re well on our way to another very successful BarCamp. With the support of the community, organizers, volunteers and sponsors, we’re positive we’re going to have another great event.

George Brett alerts us to a very through and deeply serious appreciation of Steve Cisler from NetTime.

A series of miscommunications lead to me being at the NC Legislature this morning. Tucker was presenting his work from his Digital Media class in support of the Career and Technology Programs in the Public Schools. But the bigger surprise was that the elumenati were there with their Dome Theatre.

I spent this past Thursday and Friday out at IBM RTP from their 2nd International Conference on the Virtual Computing Initiative which has for the past two years taken the place of IBM University Days.

The VCI is an open source implimentation of machine image virtualization that began a few years back at NCSU as a way to use virtualization to allow both research and education (aka labs) computing to operate together on the same hardware (albeit differently scheduled). The NCSU Virtual Computing Lab has been proven several times over now and has been implemented for other schools including NCCU and ECU locally and in support of K - 12 labs in Virginia (by folks at Virgina Tech).

One interesting development is NCSU’s work on using VCI to make a 3-D environment, in this case Croquet, highly scalable and efficient.

David Rose at KnowThe MusicBiz.com explains that “Record Labels Are Not Venture Capitalists.” Sorta like the battle between two evil empires? Not according to David.

Steve Cisler in 2007

I just heard via twitter that an old net.friend had died.

I met Steve Cisler at INET 93 when he was working for Apple as their digital libraries guy. Steve saw the Internet as a great place for public libraries even then. He had been involved in WAIS, Gopher and other projects already having helped the Blacksburg Electronic Village get started with an Apple server.

For a while I saw a lot of Steve and then our paths diverged even though I was becoming more of a library person and he was becoming more of a technology person. Luckily for us all, Steve kept his librarian identity as his technology skills and his abilities to evaluate how technology works in the human worlds to the too soon end.

But to say that Steve was a technology person misses many points.

In 2004, Steve took his “Unconnected” trip across the USA during which he visited with unconnected people and remained unconnected himself. Luckily his Unconnected blog — kept by someone else — kept us in touch with his travels and we can still read his reports today.

Steve started another blog in February 2005. Originally for a conference at Santa Clara University, “Digital Divide or Digital Commons: Toward Global Knowledge Sharing,” the digitalcommons blog continued long beyond the conference until December 2007.

Steve was very excited by the One Laptop Per Child, but he also had reason to have that enthusiasm tempered by his experiences in the Third World as is seen here in an article he posted on the OLPC News in October 2007, “A Short Movie About Information and Communications Technology.”

Steve identified himself in this way at the iCommons wiki (hosted on ibiblio):

Steve Cisler is a librarian who has worked on community network projects in the 1990’s and has worked on ICT projects in Guatemala, Ecuador, Jordan, Uganda, and Thailand, as well as rural parts of the United States. From 205-2006 he chaired a working group on “Piracy in the Pacific Rim” for the Pacific Rim New Media Summit during the Zero One art festival in San Jose, California, in August 2006.

He works for the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University and has started the KnowledeX project to network social entrepreneurs who have participated in training at Santa Clara University. He is also interested in the organizations and institutions such as public libraries which strive to open the world of knowledge to all users, but still operate inside the existing copyright regimes. In other words, groups that are on the borderland between open source/information and proprietary information and knowledge.

His web log is http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons.

No surprise in many ways that I would learn of Steve’s death via the latest connecting technology from a mutual friend, Howard Rheingold and later verified by Andy Carvin. Steve was connected to us deeply even when he was unconnecting.

Some of Steve’s friends have been posting their memories of him here.

Marc Andreesen, Ning founder explains why Ning, Friend Connect (aka GFP) and the Open Social protocol are all part of the same big web-connected package.

See my post from yesterday.

Google Friend Connect logo
It’s about time for this! Google Friend Connect is out (sorta, you can ask to get to try it out as I just have).

I wrote in “Open (source)ing the doors for contributor-run digital libraries.[PDF]” Communications of the ACM. Volume 44 , Issue 5 (May 2001) and in a Japanese edition [PDF] in 2003 that “By adopting not only the open-source tools, but also the open-source philosophy encouraging community interaction and contributor involvement, digital libraries can open new horizons to new communities as well as greatly improve traditional services.”

While GFC doesn’t necessarily fully fulfill the open source software side of the equation, it does allow for stronger community interaction and contributor involvement including ways to get at trust and rating and other social tools to help as I wrote “produce real and effective collections and more importantly real and effective communities in the best democratic sense.”

If implemented correctly, GFC should work as a reverse Ning. Ning wants you to build your network on their site-hosting service. A great and flexible platform and good for many people, but suppose you already had a very effective and broad-ranging site like ibiblio.org. Then, it would seem, you’d rather add the social aspects to your site.

This does all that I was asking for for ibiblio.org over 8 years ago! Yes, we’ve applied for the preview release. I’ll let you know if we get it — or when we get it.

And I have some ideas for some features to add…

Today:

At BBC “Great tits cope well with warming”

At NandO “Easley supports college for aliens” later changed from ‘aliens” to “illegal immigrants”

Brit Band uses CCTV cameras and FOIA to produce music video.

Despite the fact that technologies are formed as much socially as by engineering, folks — who have a better idea!!! — can’t wait to build a technically more perfect Facebook and/or Twitter. More often than not they are confusing the socially constructed use with the engineering improvements that might or might not be needed or desired.

One group that gets it is Craig’s List. They admit that their techologies aren’t so great. They are old. But they are loved by the folks who are in the Craig’s List culture. Challenges come and go but the dedication of CL’s community is yet to be topped. CL is true to their focus, their community, at the expense, more often than not, of engineering or portability etc.

Fred’s post “Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux” goes out to answer Michael Arlington and Dave Winer and others who really think they know how all this should work. Worth a read.

In other Twitter news, I’ve been convinced by my tweeple to put Twitterific to the side for a bit and try Twhirl. First downside, Twhirl doesn’t update my IM status which is where all of this seemed to come from in the first place. But it is very nice as an interface and does other cross posting fairly well.

I also ventured for a bit into Alertthingy, but it was so alerting that it was alarming. I need more serious friend boundaries to drink from that firehose! We all need that Dunbar-defined social grooming, but this ape would have been groomed til he was completely bald! Which takes us back to Fred’s post.

Roger McGuinn gives a tour and demo of how he records his songs for Folkden.com at Growing Bolder.com.

David Menconi alerts us
to a Parthenon Huxley (aka P. Hux aka Rick Rock aka Rick Miller) music video for his song, “Come Clean.” That set me off looking for my fav of all time P. Hux song “Buddha Buddha” which he sang with Don Dixon and Rob Ladd in 1985 as an opener for REM. (Yes I was there).

The Daily Tar Heel gets props as one of the top seven college news sites from Innovation in College Media.

One of my tweeple, Will deBock
has created a nice demo of VoiceThread about how he and his sons spend their Saturdays in Vermont.

Our friend Maria took 5th place (out of 22) in her first Sports Car race in her Mini. Hubby Michael sends this picture.

Designed by Terry Waugh and shown all together at Triangle Modernist Houses by George Smart.
Our house in 1952Our house in 2003

I was clearly outside my demographic today at the Superchunk and Arcade Fire concert/rally for Obama in Carrboro. It was a great concert and community gathering of my tweeple, those I twitter with locally. I twittered til my battery ran out (at #superobamafire). @dcm, @tarheelcoxn and @arsepoetica all posted pictures. I think I missed seeing @HoboZero there but he too has great pictures.

Squishy also has great pictures, but he doesn’t twitter or if he does he hasn’t told me.

Before and afters, Fred and Chelsy were wonderful hosts at their house giving an impromptu grilling party to a bunch of hot tired and delighted tweeple.

Summer-BoggessLynn Boggess paints with trowels. Standard issue trowels that he machines into service for applying and removing oil paint on canvas in plein air along the mountain rivers and streams of West Virginia.

Saturday, I was at Tyndall Galleries enjoying a new show of Boggess’ paintings, large oils that more often than not still smelled a bit wet and rich as if you were just in the studio with them. The thick layering of paint means that the shadows on the canvas move as if you were watching the scene through a very clear glass or across a cool mountain creek. The paintings up close are textured pieces of oil paint architecture, but at a short distance they are more real than any photograph and with the shadows alive.

As I left the opening and went to the parking lot, I saw a bunch of folks from the show gathered around a truck. There was Boggess explaining his trowels to other artists. We all got to hold his instruments, then he took out his easel. You can see him using it here.

That easel is a piece of work on its own. It must be strong enough to how a large canvas against the wind and adjustable enough to work on almost any mountain-side river bank. It must be portable and compact. It must expand and hold the paint and tools — no brushes. It must be simple to set up and adjust. Boggess has all of that done well in his homemade contraption.

On Tuesday, @RogerMcGuinn tweeted that he’d be backstage at the Orlando Bruce Springsteen concert on Wednesday. Most of us knew or at least hoped that that would mean he would be on stage as well.

I was disappointed that the concert was way down in central Florida, but youTube came to the rescue. Roger tweeted one upload location, but here are McGuinn and Springsteen playing “Turn, Turn, Turn” and “Mr Tamborine Man” .

I live tweeted Fred’s and Don’s talks today with hash tags. Fred’s as #fred and Don’s as #openlibrary. Links take you to the tweet-streams. More on Open Library here at their demo page.

Not that you would be using it these days, but Kevin Gamiel reminds me that he created and released GopherBook 15 years ago today! What was Giopher Book? A ToolBook-based Gopher Client for WinSock that’s still available for download here.

Anne Waldman at the Bull's Head
The Daily Tar Heel captures the audio portion of Anne Waldman’s poetry reading that the Bull’s Head yesterday. Here it is [article with audio links].

Waldman, Ed Sanders, Bill Morgan and Robert Cantwell will be speaking this evening at Wilson Library’s Rare Book Collection as part of the “The Beats and Beyond: Counterculture Poetics, 1952-1975″ exhibit opening.

This afternoon, Fug singer, author and poet Ed Sanders was singing an ode to Obama — “like the oak tree of Lincoln in the forever of America, someone has come like a giant of promise” [lyrics here in PDF] But Sanders also read a long piece about the last days of Bobby Kennedy saying that was the last time he had had so much hope in a candidate for president. “Robert Kennedy Recites from Agamemnon” [PDF]

About the second that I walked out of the Sanders and Anne Waldman reading/performance, Dave Menconi posted the ways to get tickets to the Obama rally featuring Superchunk and Arcade Fire in Carrboro (at 2 pm on Town Commons). Barak Obama may or may not appear there.

No sooner did I get home then I found from a call that President Bill Clinton would be in Hillsborough at 1:45 p.m. Orange County Baseball Field.

A Republican friend told me over lunch yesterday, “I think I have tickets to the Democratic candidates debate if it happens. I’d like to see them duke it out. Then I’ll feel even better voting for McCain.” No evidence of McCain coming to NC anytime soon though — and the debate? It won’t happen as it turns out.

UPDATE: Just got a Hillary RoboCall to tell me about the Bill Clinton appearance in Hillsborough tomorrow.

Lester, Beats, Writers Conference and Adcock are all on this coming week.

Patrick Herron will be reading and talking about his poetry and that of Lester on Tuesday April 22 at noon - 1:15 pm at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240. Patrick Herron is a poet, musician, artist and information scientist living in Chapel Hill, NC, USA. His doll Lester is the author of the book /Be Somebody/ forthcoming in March 2008 from Effing Press (a 2003 review from Ron Silliman here). For more on Patrick and Lester see this blog entry

Anne Waldman and Ed Sanders will be reading their poems at UNC’s Bull’s Head Bookstore at 3:30 pm on Tuesday April 22.

Waldman, Sanders, Lawrence Ferlinghetti biographer Bill Morgan and Robert Cantwell will present a panel “THE BEATS AND BEYOND: COUNTERCULTURE POETICS, 1952-1975″ on Wednesday April 23 in Wilson Library beginning with a 5:00 pm Reception and Exhibit in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Room followed by the 5:45 pm Program in Pleasants Family Assembly Room. More about that event and very hip poster here.

On Saturday, April 26, from 8 a.m. until 5:45 p.m. in the Elliott University Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is the 2008 North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference featuring at keynote talk by poet Linda Gregg. The full schedule is here.

Sunday April 27 at 3:00, Betty Adcock and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan will read their poems at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.

At the TriLUG meeting last week, I gave a version of the “3 Laws and 5 Big Ideas Behind ibiblio” Matt Frye ran the show and David Black and Nick Goldwater recorded that April 2008 meeting. Here’s the video:

You need this! I did and I didn’t know it. Fred has released Freedom. Freedom isn’t free — first you must have an Apple then you should donate $10 to Fred. He says:

Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for one hour at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, to allow you time and space to code, write, or create.

Many studies have found that hour-long chunks provide optimal work flows. At the end of one hour, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. Freedom enforces freedom. If you quit Freedom, you will need to restart your computer to re-enable networking.

UPDATE: Fred explains Freedom further on his blog.