Accept no substitutes

Month: March 2007 (Page 4 of 4)

Mentally contaminated: Doctorow and Jones

“Mentally contaminated: Doctorow and Jones” is now a feature on Red Hat Magazine. Watching the video which is produced with some smart interlacing of Creative Commons material from the Prelinger archives is almost as much fun as being there making the tape. Thanks, Bascha.

More Cory Doctorow in Chapel Hill here (video 2007) and here (video 2004). Cory at Duke here (video via iTunes 2007) and here (Random Signal audio 2007).

Jones and Eben Moglen here (Red Hat Magazine video 2007).

Thursday at 3:30 – Science and Culture and ME

Paul Jones
When: Thursday March 8, 3:30 p.m.
Where: 118 Hanes Art
Who: Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org

What: “Participatory Digital Libraries – Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends”

Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org, will present “Participatory Digital Libraries – Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends,” in which he will talk about experiences and futures of Contribtor-run Digital Libraries and repositories, focusing on the ibiblio experience.

This will be an update of his paper “Open (source)ing the doors for contributor-run digital libraries.” Communications of the ACM. Volume 44 , Issue 5 (May 2001).[PDF]

Also you can hit my wiki and participate in the talk in advance.

If you prefer the Japanese language version of the ACM paper, here it is [PDF].

Newspapering and Decolumnizing

Two local announcements that reflect the turmoil and opportunities on the print/online news business:

Kirk Ross announces
the Carrboro Citizen which will appear in print March 21. The Citizen will include articles from the UNC J-School produced Carrboro Commons as well as material from Kirk’s blogs, Exile on Jones Street (state politics), Cape Fear Mercury (coastal and environmental), The Mill (Carrboro centered). Yes there will be paper and there will be blogs. Kirk has added a new category to his Exile blog called Newspapering to track the Citizen’s progress.

Meanwhile Ted Vaden at the News and Observer is busy explaining what has happened to their popular columnists. Suddenly they all have different jobs. After 30 years of columnizing Dennis Rogers is on the road reporting on military families under the title of “Home Front” (various puns and ambiguities ignored by Vaden), sports columnist Ned Barnett has become Sunday Editor but no new columnist has been announced in his place, and after 10 years G.D. Gearino will no longer tell us about Life, he’ll be out reporting on Lives.

Vaden shills for Sills as he quotes her here: Executive Editor Melanie Sill says the purpose is to better align positions with the newspaper’s changing mission, which is to move “from a newspaper with a Web site to becoming a newsroom that publishes in print and online.”

I’m not sure how dropping the unique branding of a newspaper is part of becoming a website. In fact I’d argue the opposite. Columnists are the most personal and blog-like part of a paper. Quick to respond. Quick to raise a hackle. Quick to get strong engagement as a public conversation.

The Citizen goes from blogs to print and News and Observer goes from blog-like to bland-like whilst losing brand.

One other oddity: The News and Observer blogs have become very active and very informative on all kinds of subjects that otherwise would see only limited ink. Now the blogs provide a regular slot in the paper as well as rich and unique online resources. The Chapel Hill reporter today isn’t afraid to ask where in interview will take place and he gets good results in the form of information and in reader conversation.

Now that’s one good way to use the online newsroom. What JR called for at the News and Record when he called for more transparency. Mundane in some ways; invaluable in all ways.

CS 380 Talk on Monday

Last semester, I visited the CS380 class to talk about problems with copyright.

I’m back at it again on Monday.

The wiki for the talk is here.

I’ve asked the students to read Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Chapter 1 is an Introduction and a Summary of the book by chapters that will give a great overview. Chapter 8 “Adapting Policy to User Innovation” is the meat of our discussion from a policy and law point of view.

Both chapters and in fact the whole book can be bought or downloaded for free from Eric von Hippel’s site.

I’m also asking folks in the class that have questions and/or issues that they’d like discussed to post them here as comments.

Note: I acknowledge that I copy myself here, but I also assure you that my talk will be similar but not exactly the same.

OM, American Indian Museum, Spot of Bother

Three completely unrelated topics in one post.

Spent the day today at the North Carolina Eastern Regional Odyssey of the Mind Tournament where Tucker’s team finished first in their division and in their problem and will be going to the state tournament March 31.

Spent Friday after the WebWise 2007 Conference at the National Museum of the American Indian which I highly recommend for many reasons — the great displays, the intelligent interactivity and access, the wonderful architecture in plan and in detail, the novel ideas about curation, the fantastic artifacts, the broad inclusiveness of First Peoples cultures.

During my conference down time and during my brief travel time, I was able to finally read Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother [NPR]. I had enjoyed his first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and I wasn’t expecting a repeat. In fact, I was glad that Haddon chose to do something entirely different. Spot isn’t in the first person but it does focus on a different character from chapter to chapter which allows Haddon to visit some very different functions and dysfunctions that gather in the web of family, aging, changing and discovering varieties of love and responsibility — and to be very very funny all along the way. Some one in a review criticized Haddod by saying that he combined the attributes of Anne Tyler and Nick Hornby. I see that as a positive and I see Haddon as different from both. His view of family is verified and varied by his explorations of what love might be to each and to all. Great book and a fun read as well.

WebWise 2007 LiveBlog

Found it! MuseMatic.net is a group blog on “the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM’s Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade.”

Fred-mania in Wired

Fred got Del.icio.us to whack Sybils back in September via entries in his blog. Now he gets a well-deserved citation and credit in Wired “Herding the Mob: On the Web, we let strangers tell us who to trust, what to read, and where to go. Which means your good name can be worth real money. And reputation hacking can be big business.” By Annalee Newitz (see page 2 for Fred).

Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service, also allows users to vote on the most popular articles of the day; a link to a story counts as a vote. Like Digg, the site, owned by Yahoo, is ripe for crowdhacking.

Last September, Fred Stutzman, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, followed a link on del.icio.us to an identity-management startup called my:eego. Curious, Stutzman began checking out the users who had recommended the service. The first 16 all had exactly the same linking pattern — they had bookmarked two other startups, and their accounts contained no other information or links.

Hours after Stutzman blogged about the Sybil attack, del.icio.us deleted the accounts of the link spammers. Had the Sybil gone unnoticed, however, my:eego’s scheme might have worked. Legitimate users like Stutzman would have visited my:eego and possibly bookmarked it, creating more buzz on del.icio.us until the misled crowd had provided the link swarm my:eego was after.

Chatting Design with Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks
Flying is more like riding an expensive bus. And regional jets are like those minivans in Turkey into which you are crowded with an odd assortment of people — called Dolmas(h) or stuffed.

But there are some advantages.

On the flight up to the WebWise Conference, I got to talk a bit with software pioneer Fred Brooks, who many of us know as the author of the Mythical Man-Month and the man responsible for Brook’s Law as regards software development.

Those of us who were delighted and influenced by Mythical Man-Month will be exited to know that Brooks is at work on a new book of essays. This time about the Science of Design (as regards software intensive systems). What is that? I’m aware of the field but am now reading up in anticipation of Brooks’ book or perhaps books of essays to come.

One good introduction to Fred’s explorations into the “The Design of Design” is this video and other links from his 2002 talk at CMU which is itself an update of his Turing lecture.

I wish I had thought to ask Fred more about how Design Thinking with its seven stages fits into the thinking about the Science of Design. Fred did say that he wasn’t convinced that there was a “science” there quite yet.

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