Accept no substitutes

Month: October 2006 (Page 3 of 4)

Dancing back at the Weave, but …

The News and Observer is reporting that dancing and hooping will be back at our favorite Third Place, Weaver Street Market at Carr Mill in Carrboro. There is a policy now that has a long list of restrictions including:

“2. Solicitation and distribution of literature or handbills is prohibited except as specifically authorized as part of a Weaver Street Market event.*

*WSM will sponsor a monthly event for non-profit-making organizations with values consistent with its mission to have tables and make their literature available according to guidelines set forth for this purpose.”

[I am trying to imagine handbill day at the Weave now.]

“3. Loitering is prohibited.” [staying a bit too long is part of what a third place is about, isn’t it?]

“5. Unauthorized performances and unauthorized large or publicly advertised gatherings are prohibited. “Performance” means any activity intending to attract or having the effect of attracting a crowd of spectators, or that’s volume disturbs others. Performances need to have the advance written permission of Carr Mill Mall.”

[Does this mean Weiner Dog Meet Up will be called a performance?]

Fred and other SNS Entrepreneurs at SCU

Fred writes that he’ll be moderating a panel of Social Networking Systems enterpreneurs at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley tomorrow night. He has tickets so if you’re in the area, drop him a note soon.

* Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. student, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, author of Unit Structures, co-founder of ClaimID.
Panelists:
* Steve Loughlin, Affinity Circles, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer
* Keith Rabois, LinkedIn, Inc., Vice President, Business Development
* Jeff Roberto, Friendster, Inc., Sr. PR/Marketing Manager
* Jim Scheinman, Bebo, Inc., Vice President, Business Development and Sales

Who talks about what? Jones and Silverstein

October 19th, I’ll be at Berry College in Rome, Georgia as part of the “Expression and Repression” series. I will try not to be repressed. The wiki they set up has me talking about (so far):

  1. What is Net neutrality and why should we care about it?
  2. How has copyright law in the United States been subverted by commercial interests, and what should we (as a society, as a people) do about it?
  3. What do you feel is the future of online file sharing, i.e music,videos and books, and its role in our society?

On October 26th, Googlist Craig Silverstein will be speaking to a growing crowd (almost 400 tickets delivered so far) on:

  1. Making more information searchable, with a focus on google book search and google scholar
  2. Making information more useful, with a focus on ‘expert ranking’ schemes such as google co-op/google health.
  3. Making information more accessible, with a focus on mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.

Citizen Journalists shine light on Congressional Spouse-hirings

The Sunlight Foundation‘s Family Business Project asked citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll.

In less than 2 days, “Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 437 members of Congress, and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member’s campaign committee-totaling some $641,200 since January 1, 2005.”

The organizers at Sunlight can hardly believe it themselves — and they promised to start the verification process on Monday.

Sunlight Labs
offers a number of cool tools for watching Congress and they promise more.

If you have skills, they are looking for an intern.

Round up

Ed Cone reports that Matthew Gross has joined the John Edwards One America Committee as an advisor for online communications. We had a good dinner discussion with the Edwards, Ed, Matthew, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman and about a dozen other bloggers a couple of weeks back. Elizabeth Edwards is particularly aware of internet communications on a very personal level as she describes in her new book.

Jonathan Dube at CyberJournalist is blogging the Online News Association conference, “An American Forum: The Future of News is Here, Now What?”

Technorati shows the trends of blogging about Apex, NC’s toxic fire and lists the blogs of citizens (and of newspapers).

ConvergeSouth in Greensboro is next weekend. It really looks great, but I’ll be just back from DC (see next para).

I’m off to DC at the end of next week for the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust meeting. The last one in Granada was quite a good event. Less site-seeing for me this time because of time constraints, but if there is one thing I should do in DC say late Thursday evening or Friday afternoon lemme know.

One side amusement, I picked up a nice tuxedo that fits great and looks pretty good at a giant formalwear outlet — called the Formalwear Outlet— just outside of Hillsborough for a very very good price. They have lots.

Apex fire – not Bhopal yet

Last night there was a fire in Apex, NC. That would have been innocent enough, but the fire was at a hazardous waste storage facility in downtown Apex. The inaptly name EQ North Carolina, where the EQ stands for Environmental Quality, fire released a large and lingering cloud of chlorine gas leading to the evacuation of 16,000 people.

Kirk Ross at Exile on Jones Street notes that the Town of Apex has a webcam right near the site and that WRAL has aerial photos and more. I note that both the News and Observer package and WRAL use internet mapping services — Yahoo! at N and O, Google at WRAL.

Kirk also lists the violations for which EQ NC was cited in March of this year and for which they were fined $32,000.00.
EQ NC failed to (partial list follows):

  • Maintain and operate the facility to minimize the possibility of a sudden or non-sudden release of hazardous waste constituents to air, soil or surface water which could threaten human health or the environment;
  • Immediately carry out the provisions of the contingency plan whenever there is a release of hazardous waste or constituents which threatens or could threaten human health or the environment;
  • Not store a container of hazardous waste that is incompatible with any waste or material stored;

What a day — can there ever be too much coffee?

8:30 – NHPRC Electronic Records Symposium. Talk by Seamus Ross (good coffee and scones)
10:00 – Informal interview with Carolina Digital Library candidate (passable coffee and bagels)
11:00 – Formal talk by Carolina Digital Library candidate – some interesting points: reshelving of books at his library dropped 40% in five years! Use of serials in the Humanities down 50-odd% In the Sciences 60%.
12:00 – Administrative Board of the Library (drip coffee brewed there and Chicken Zambra)
13:30 – meeting with Associate Provost (offered coffee and wisely declined)
15:00 – Working Group on Expertise, Science and DemocracyPatrick Hamlett of NCSU on expertise and deliberative democracy using the Danish Consensus model (coffee discussed as a theoretical possibility)
17:00 – Lolly-paloosa! Celebration of Lolly Gasaway‘s tenure as Law Librarian. She’s now the Law School’s Associate Dean. (Wine. Little lambs ribs with mint. Crabcakes. Yummmm.)

Note: I’m not sure that I should be naming job candidates here on my blog so’s that’s why I was a little mysterious above.

Bad Blog Numbers

New Yorker finds funny math about blogs at “an online poll conducted by AdAge.com”:

A report last week by Advertising Age Editor at Large Bradley Johnson noted that about 35 million workers–or one in four people in the U.S. labor force–spend an average of 3.5 hours. or 9%, of each work day reading blogs.

A much-needed break.

ROTFL! 1@/\/\3rz not 1337

BBC gives us the shocking news: “Geekspeak still baffles web users”.

The article tells us “So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.” Not that Brits need to know that but would it help if they knew that the meaning of RSS has changed with each release beginning as RDF Site Summary (for RSS 0.9 and 1.0), then becoming the more luser friendly Rich Site Summary (for RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) before being renamed Really Simple Syndication (for RSS 2.0).

Whilst your garden variety Brits are not so 1337, those who use the net are Open savvy to the point of rejecting the iPods for more Open MP3 players:

Regular surfers are, according to the survey, gadget-hungry. Interestingly, although 68% of those interviewed possessed an MP3 player, only 20% owned iPods – the biggest selling digital music player.

The iPod may be less popular with surfers because there are fewer online music stores from which music can be purchased, said Mr Burmaster.

“The whole ethos behind the internet is about open access and for people already online, being able to access music from a variety of sources is important,” he said.

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