Relevant History

Look on Contemplative Computing

Just a note: most of my blogging these days happens on my Contemplative Computing blog, though I also maintain an active (but not too active) Twitter account.

Trying out Blogsy

I decided to download Blogsy, a blog editor for the iPad, and give it a try. I've lamented the apparent absence of decent Typepad editors (indeed, I still pine for the old days of Ecto), but this one looks pretty promising.

via flickr

I spent yesterday at the Being Human conference in San Francisco, about which I'll have more to say shortly. It was a very interesting time, and quite well-done.

Is the Mac blog editor market down to Mars Edit?

Hard to believe, but it looks that way. I poked around a little with Ecto this afternoon, and it looks like it's now abandonware. I like Mars Edit well enough-- the Flickr integration is nice, in particular-- but there are some strange elements to it-- no dedicated button for links, for example, which I shake my head at every time I write something.

But it seems impossible to me that Mars Edit is pretty much the whole game now. Can that be right?

And where the heck is the good blog editor for the iPad?

This is why Woody Allen said "I am at two with nature:" Nature Wants to Eat You

The next time you need a break, check out Ed Yong's great new blog, Nature Wants to Eat You. Terrifying carnivores were never so entertaining. (I also never knew that Nietzsche said, "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss reaches up and bites your face off." I must have been reading an out of date translation.)

On Contemplative Computing

Recent posts:

• "Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear"
• Fred Stutzman on Freedom, productivity, and bigger/better/faster vs. smaller/better/slower
• Are there distraction-free graphics programs? Can there be Zenware for music?
• "Think of how unproductive Dickens would have been if he had to fight against Facebook"
• Quote of the day: Kenzo Awa on teaching vs. learning
• Nice mention in School Library Journal
• What was the first machine users considered an extension of themselves?
• The Slow Science Manifesto
• Derrick de Kerckhove on the Augmented Mind
• More on architecture, drawing, and thinking

Its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk

I notice that the last post here was about ten days ago, and I wanted to assure myself (and the two or three other readers) that I've been absorbed in working on my book, and so most of my posting is on the contemplative computing blog. Posts that have appeared there since Paris include:

• The street finds its own use for things, Berkeley edition
• Tony Perrettet on writing and distraction
• Alok Khorana on electronic medical records
• Another Zenware data-point: iA's Writer
• Do nudges work as public policy?
• Internet use and transactive memory
• Quote of the day: Hieronimo Squarciafico
• Coverage in the Francophone blogosphere

I suspect this pattern will continue, and at times I'll regret not having one blog for everything, but it's too late to stop now.

(The title of this post, of course, is from the classic Monty Python dead parrot sketch.)

Bye bye link posts

At a friend's suggestion, I've eliminated the Delicious links blogs posts, and replaced them with a list of recent bookmarks in the sidebar. Back to just prose here.

How to write about Other Places

When I'm not working on my current project (I suspect that "WTF Do Clients Really Do With Scenarios?" won't make the cut at a peer-reviewed journal, so I need to start thinking of a different name, or a version with less cursing), I'm starting to deal with logistics for the trip to Cambridge. Indeed, I'm beginning to suspect that I'll need as many months to complete the paperwork as I'll actually spend doing research. But it'll be worth it.

I'm also starting to wonder how I should write about the trip. Of course there's no question that I'll at least keep the blog going, and maybe try to wring some piece of travel writing out of the trip (something about journeying through high-tech England? scientific England? frankly, it'll be whatever the assignment editor wants), but I don't want to sound like a typical American mystified by, but ultimately won over by the cultivated charms and sophistication of Europe; I suppose James Watson's Double Helix is as good a model as any for writing about doing research in Cambridge... but there are probably other literary stereotypes I want to be aware of and avoid. I was made sensitive about this by a fabulous series of four short essays (inspired by Binyavanga Wainaina’s "How to Write About Africa") about How to Write About Pakistan, of which this one (by Daniyal Mueenuddin) is my favorite:

Lying in my bed at 7.48 a.m., laptop on lap. Too much writing in this position over the years has given me neck-aches. I’d do yoga if it weren’t such a non-Pakistani sounding activity. For a Pakistani writer to do yoga feels like questioning the two-nation theory. So I complain, which brings enormous relief and a sense of oneness with my subject matter.

When it comes to Pakistani writing, I would encourage us all to remember the brand. We are custodians of brand Pakistan. And beneficiaries. The brand slaps an extra zero onto our advances, if not more. Branding can be the difference between a novel about brown people and a best-selling novel about brown people. It is our duty to maintain and build that brand....

It took a lot of writing to get us here, miles of fiction and non-fiction in blood-drenched black and white. Please don’t undo it. Or at least please don’t undo it until I’ve cashed in a couple more times. Apartments abroad are expensive.

[To the tune of Blue Man Group, "White Rabbit (Feat Esthero)," from the album The Complex (a 2-star song, imo).]

Blogging elsewhere

I realized I've not been writing much here, but have been doing more stuff on my professionally-related blogs. So, here's a list of recent posts on Future2:

• Justin Fox on economists versus historians;
• Leon Fuerth on "Strategic Myopia: The Case for Forward Engagement;"
  
• Donald Michael and the problem of retrospection in futures;
  
• Baruch Fischhoff on "What Forecasts Seem to Mean;" and
  
• Green consumption and ethical behavior: The impact of moral balancing
  

And on End of Cyberspace:

• Google's cloudy Web clipboard;
• Car cost-sharing: finally around the corner?
  
• Laptops, classrooms, and discussion

Just don't want to seem like a slacker...

[To the tune of Michael Nyman Band, "An Eye For Optical Theory (from The Draughtsman's Contract)," from the album The Essential Michael Nyman Band (a 1-star song, imo).]

Time for a new blog banner

It seemed like a while since I'd created the last one, and of course I had more complex, pressing things to do this evening, so I created a new banner for the blog. This one is from a September 2009 picture I took in London during my customary evening walk.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1) (I give it 3 stars).]

Typepad Strangeness

There seem to be some issues with Typepad right now. Grrr.

[To the tune of Thievery Corporation Feat. The Flaming Lips, "Marching The Hate Machines (Into The Sun)," from the album The Cosmic Game (I give it 3 stars).]

LOLCats meets OCLC

...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.

Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that

females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.

It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.

The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.

However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.

Thanks, Anthony!

[Update: Made it onto Boing Boing!]

Style sheet is changed

Really just a gratuitous post to see how the changes look.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "Green Book," from the album Everything Must Go (I give it 3 stars).]

iTunes-Ecto script is back

I've installed the script that puts my iTunes "currently playing" information at the bottom of blog posts. This was a standard feature with Ecto2, but it disappeared with Ecto3, and I never bothered to look for it. I'm glad it's back.

Back to work now. I'll reconfigure my style sheet later to take advantage of the class tags.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "The Boston Rag" from the album "Citizen" ]

My friends are media geniuses

First I made it onto BoingBoing. Then Jess' Sad Guys on Trading Floors got nominated for a Webby. Then, I discovered that Princeton professor, Renaissance historian, fellow ex-American Scholar board member, and all-around nice guy Anthony Grafton has finally done something he can be proud of: his son Sam-- who I don't think is named after the character in Shane-- had a hilarious letter read on The Bugle, my favorite podcast of all time. (Bugle 70, near the end. It's the letter about penis-shaped helicopters. I've never heard John and Andy laugh so much at a letter.) Clearly our eventual collective dominance of all media is inevitable.

New banner

I've changed the banner on the blog. I really liked the Budapest picture, but I no longer look like the person walking down the street, looking for the e-mail with directions to Kitchen Budapest.

The new banner, in contrast, is from a picture taken this weekend at Hidden Villa. I was camping with my son (though obviously not roughing it too much); the trip was really wonderful, I wanted to commemorate it, and I was bothered by the increasing obsolescence of the old banner. So....

I'm not the only one who has trouble talking to today's youth

A very funny exchange among Wonkette writers over using the term "Bonus Army" to tag a post about AIG:

The five-minute silence after the joke is what makes it COMEDY GOLD.

The end of privacy

Enabled by a combination of Bluetooth and incredible stupidity.

This afternoon I boarded a train from Washington bound for Penn Station.... I, along with all of the other passengers, were sitting quietly when the man directly behind me decided to make a phone call using his bluetooth. He was talking so loudly that I think most people in the car were able to hear him.

His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates. I wouldn't have believed it except for the fact that he identified himself to the call as Bob Robbins, who I learned is the leader of the firm's Corporate & Securities practice section, and was talking to Rick Donaldson, who I learned was COO. What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!

The first rule of Fight Club, people....

Favicon

I finally got the favicon working for this blog. In case you're wondering,

=

Sometimes I think the more pixellated one more accurately represents me.

Korean finance blogger arrested for being right

A Korean blogger who predicted the fall of Lehman Brothers has been arrested by the government.

Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future....

For months, both the media and the authorities have scrambled to identify Minerva, who has uploaded more than 100 anonymous postings in Daum, the country's second-largest Web portal. He achieved a prophet's status after he predicted the collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, the crash of the Korean currency and the effects of the toxic U.S. mortgage crisis eventually engulfing South Korea.

Newspapers reported his predictions. The government scrambled to dispute his claims. Governing party lawmakers called for his arrest while financial market analysts admitted to avidly following his coverage. His commentaries typically attracted 100,000 viewers per posting....

Park Dae Sung's arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent - a crime punishable by up to five years in prison - came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.

As Robin Hanson comments, "Does anyone think Park would have been jailed for a mistaken optimistic claim, or that government officials will be jailed for making false claims?"

[via Overcoming Bias]

My friends are geniuses

Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The one upside to the downturn.

business, humor

What could they be writing about?

Apparently, Israeli security service Shin Bet has an official blog. I can't read Hebrew, so I have no idea what they blog about. Isn't this like MI-6 or the NSA having a blog?

According to the BBC, it's mainly for recruitment purposes-- kind of the CIA having a Facebook group or MySpace page:

The [four blogging] agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public.

The tone of the blog is chatty, at times even facetious....
A Shin Bet official told the BBC that the idea was to inform the public that the agency offers work beyond just stopping Palestinian paramilitary attacks.

The official said that the agency had been cheered by the feedback from members of the Israeli public - keen to find out more about the jobs within Shin Bet, the pay and even the food.

And I must confess, I really like the combination of Matrix-ish background and silhouettes instead of photographs. It manages to be hip and sinister-looking at the same time.

[via ISN]

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Glock Jam," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

New banner

Obviously irrelevant to the two or three people who get this blog's RSS feed, but I've substituted the old text banner for a new picture, taken in Budapest by my colleague Anthony Townsend. It was too good not to use.

Even with the heavy vertical cropping, I think it works pretty well. I just hope it doesn't slow down the page loading.

I now officially recommend blogging to all scholars

When I started this blog, I figured it would be useful. But it's not. It's proved to be incredibly valuable.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that my Budapest talk was written just by going through the blog, picking out quotes, and stringing them together using ideas I'd just tossed up in the occasional post; but it certainly was a lot easier to write the talk, having this digital notebook to draw upon.

I haven't actually given up on paper notebooks, but I find that I tend to write more about the organization of the book, and the management of the project itself, on paper. I do some Big Thinking on paper, but increasingly the bits and pieces start out in digital form, and stay there.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, postacademic, work, writing

Applescript for Ecto-Plazes integration

Last year I wished for a script that would grab my location from Plazes and include it as a Technorati tag. Tonight I discovered a script that doesn't quite do that, but still very nicely grabs your location and adds it to your post.

Not something I'll probably use much when I'm at home, but potentially a cool feature when on the road....

Posted from the end of cyberspace via [ plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Five things, in a bit

I see that Gene has tagged me with that "five things" meme thing. Okay, I'll do it shortly, after I take care of the very last revisions to this STS and futures article I've been working on forever but am now SO CLOSE TO FINISHING, and deal with this talk I'm giving tomorrow at PMI.

Tomorrow is a very busy day for talks: Josh Schacter is speaking at IDEO (I'm sorry I'll miss it), there's some great stuff happening at PARC, and a couple good things over at Stanford. Just one of those days.

[To the tune of Walter Wanderly, "Voce E Eu," from the album "Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 11: Organs in Orbit".]

Get me some of that

Today's Mercury News has an article about company's attempts to influence bloggers with free merchandise, cash, etc.. In December, Microsoft gave away a bunch of PCs loaded with Vista to well-known tech bloggers, and "marketing firms like PayPerPost.com, ReviewMe.com and SponsoredReviews.com routinely dangle cash -- as much as $1,000 -- before bloggers willing to write about a particular product."

The practice is raising the usual ethical questions (should I disclose that I'm getting money to write about this thing?), blog-specific questions (does the participatory nature of blogging make such efforts to secretly buy good press impossible?), and among many bloggers, the biggest question of all: Why haven't they called me? Personally, I'd love to write about my all-expenses paid trip to... just about anywhere, actually.

Though maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Last week at my kids' school, I had two different people recognize me from the blog. One of them had stumbled upon it while doing research about Peninsula, and appreciated having a view of a place that's hard to make sense of when you're on the outside. I'm not likely to get any new toys out of it, but I suppose one should be grateful for whatever influence one has in the world, expected or not.

[To the tune of Stevie Wonder, "Another Star," from the album "Songs in the Key of Life".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, menlo park, Peninsula School

Quote of the day

OMG tuna is kewl. (Muffin)

[To the tune of Abbey Lincoln, "Windmills of Your Mind," from the album "Over the Years".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, cat

Post 2501

This is my 2501st post on this blog. Wow.

I've been writing a bit less because I've got what my doctor calls a textbook case of carpel tunnel, and a replacement computer that's been a bit weird to work with. The machine was a 15" Mac, and I found using it strangely disconcerting: I've gotten so used to the extreme mobility of the 12" the larger computer felt just a bit too big to carry without thinking about it.

As for the carpel tunnel, 20 years of typing, slouching, and video games seem to have finally caught up with me. I've got the brace now, have cut down on the Lego Star Wars, and am starting to try to figure out other things I can do. Though if I could just get a wrist brace that did something cool, like shoot Spiderman webs or give me incredible strength, I'd be okay with it.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Playing with the layout

I'm starting to get tired of having to do a complicated little resizing/formatting dance when I want to post pictures from my Flickr account on the blog (which is very often), so I'm going to play with the layout of the blog. Though this might inspire me to turn Vox into my main travel blog site, as I keep threatening to do.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Ticket To Ride," from the album "1".]

Ecto feature I want

Grab information from Plazes about where I am, and give me the option to include them as Technorati tags on a post. If I'm online and able to blog, chances are my location is discoverable by Plazes.

Extra points if I can associate those locations with certain other tags (such as a city name) or Typepad categories.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album "The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, geoweb, travel, Typepad

Gombe Chimpanzee Blog

I've played around a little bit with Google Earth now and then, or geotagging my Flickr pictures when the mood struck; but one of my colleagues showed me something today that just blew me away: the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog.

It's the blog of the Jane Goodall Institute, and the blog itself basically consists of pointers to things they post to (or more accurately, content that you read on) Google Earth. Click on one, and you're taken to a spot on Google Earth, and the blog post pops up.

It's incredibly cool. As Gene puts it,

It's a pretty neat hack and visually quite spectacular, although I'm not sure the use model is quite right.... Very nice contextual presentation, the aerial imagery really adds significantly to the writing. I just wish the posts had "next" and "previous" links so you could stay in Earth instead of using the chimp blog as a remote control. That shouldn't be hard, right? Just put a couple of .kmz links in?

Now I have to learn KML. Great. Another markup language.

[To the tune of Deep Forest, "Sweet Lullaby - Deep Forest," from the album "Pure Moods".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, geoweb

Let's see if this posts

Having some trouble with Ecto....

The kind of thing you don't ever expect to read

A sentence like this:

The three Germans behind Ballonmoleküle give lots of information on how to make molecule models out of long balloons.

Hat tip to my colleague Mike Love!

The perils of treating a customer-blogger badly

Josh Marshall, the proprietor of Talking Points Memo, kept his car in a garage owned by Central Parking. It was stolen a couple days ago, after one of the attendants left the keys in it.

It may come to very little, but Josh is blogging the whole thing. The company certainly comes across as not really caring what customers think of it.

[To the tune of George Harrison, "Behind That Locked Door," from the album "All Things Must Pass (Disc One)".]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Smartspace

One of my Technorati watchlists pointed me to Smartspace, a newish blog (started in February, not long after this one) on

annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

Hmm, sounds like familiar stuff. And the banner is one of the most beautiful I've seen on any blog. Is that Hong Kong? Tokyo?

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, mobility, pervasive computing, place/space, ubicomp

My blog as a graph

Generated by Websites as Graphs:

I'm not really sure what this represents, but it's cool.

Via Fredshouse.

[To the tune of GrooveLily, "This Is Going to Stop," from the album "Are We There Yet?".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, internet, social software, visualization, Web 2.0

Congress has a blog

But they don't have a consistent editorial voice.

I wonder if it would win an award for Largest Group Blog?

Unfortunately, its has fewer surprises than an empty box of Cracker Jack. Ron Wyden thinks that intel failures aren't good. John Cornyn is against the concept of Congressional review. (Darned advocates of unilateral disarmament....) And Dennis Kucinich doesn't like bad stuff.

But what the Hell is Dick Morris doing posting?

And can proposals to make English the official language survive such poorly-crafted prose as

We have a national anthem and a national pledge, how 34 Senators think we should not have a national language is inexcusable to me and I think the House Conference Committee will agree.

Thank you, Sen. Inhofe.

[To the tune of Dobie Gray, "Drift Away," from the album "Best of Dobie Gray".]

Technorati Tags: politics

Whatcha wanna do, Chris? SPAM ATTACK, *$?%!F#&M$*!

I've noticed a serious upsurge in the amount of trackback spam I'm having to delete from this blog, and the couple others I manage. I tend to catch and delete it within a couple hours of it being posted, but I wonder how much effect deleting the trackbacks on this end really has? Does it affect cheap casino cruise ship tickets-dot-com, or natural xanax-dot-com, at all?

I think I'll just turn off trackbacks for a couple days.

[*With apologies to "Lazy Sunday."]

Technorati Tags: blogging

Japanese ambassador to Denmark blog, sort of

Japanese ambassador to Denmark Gotara Ogawa kind of has a blog: a series of letters about Denmark, posted on the embassy Web site. How many ambassadors do this, I wonder?

And how many ambassadors from Asian countries posted to Europe would write in English?

Actually, all of them, probably. Many could also handle French or German, I'll bet.

[To the tune of The Virgin Whore Complex, "Speakerphone," from the album "Succumb".]

Technorati Tags: denmark

More always-on-you computing

Liam Breck, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has a blog on "the always-on-you Web." Interesting stuff.

Though doesn't this always-on-you Web stuff lead inevitably to the dystopian Library of Congress in a sugar cube scenario?

Technorati Tags: blogging, mobility, pervasive computing, ubicomp

Searchscapes

Brazilian new media artist and NYU graduate student Juliana Yamashita (only in America!) has created something called Searchscapes, "an attempt to create a tridimensional map of Manhattan, using existing data from the web."

Each person constructs his/her image of the city. This image is made out of facts, memories, experiences, stories, news - mostly invisible data, and not only of architecture, buildings and streets....

The objective is to compare the city's "physical spaces" and "information spaces" (search results). This is an attempt to materialize information: to give it dimension and physicality.

[via cityofsound]

I for one welcome our new Corante overlords

The blog has become a part of the new Corante Innovation Hub. You'll notice a badge on the lower right hand side of the page, but otherwise I'm not doing anything differently. Dammit.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Design tweaks

Not being able to leave well enough alone, I'm experimenting with the layout of the blog. Basically I'm trying to get it simpler and more streamlined.

New blog: Virtual China

One of the things I'm trying to learn more about is what cyberspace means in different countries-- or more broadly, the ways people in different countries conceptualize the Internet as destination or medium. This is what inspired my collection of terms of cyberspace in Chinese, Danish, German, Japanese and Korean (and the hunt goes on-- if you're familiar with other languages, I'm happy to hear from you!), and more generally my attention to issues of language.

But of course, while language serves to help define the way people think about something as simultaneous compelling and abstract as the Internet, you also want to pay attention to what people, companies, and states are doing elsewhere. Fortunately, my colleague Lyn Jeffery, and former Institute intern Jason Li have started a new blog, "Virtual China," which will make this easier for at least one important part of the world.

Lyn has lived in China much of her life, and Jason is from Hong Kong, so they have mad language skills, a lot of knowledge about culture and business on the mainland, and just good eyes.

Officially, the blog is "an exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China," and is part of a larger research project we're doing (and Lyn is leading) on the future of China. The URL is http://www.virtual-china.org/.

The blog is still young, but it's got posts on Chinese plans for new top-level domains, massive multiplayer gaming, socialist realist Gucci advertising, and Web 2.0 in China.

Technorati Tags: Asia, China, future, IFTF

I link, therefore I am... citing Mark Amerika

As anyone who doesn't exclusively read the RSS feed knows, the description of this blog is a quote borrowed from MIT professor William Mitchell's book Me++ : The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.

This evening I got an e-mail:

the line in your header - "I link, therefore I am" - was originally used in the mid-90's by Mark Amerika in his hypertextural piece Grammatron.

Sure enough, those are the opening words, written almost a decade earlier.

A quick Google search suggests that lots of people have come up with the phrase. I wonder if one can find an earlier use than Amerika's?

[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Hello It's Me," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]

Excellent comments

We're back up, after a brief outage.

Also, a quick thanks for the outstanding comments and suggestions for alternate terms, arguments about whether there'll be another name for the warm blanket of connectivity and intelligence that will eventually surround us all, and claims that I'm just out of my mind. If I write a book on this, they'll all become useful primary material.

BUT... it goes to show that this is a subject that, in many disparate ways, lots of people have been thinking about, for some time. I had a sense of this already, but not of the extent of the phenomenon.

As Microsoft scientist Marc Smith puts it, if you're one in a million, there are 749 of you on the Internet, and you can find each other.

[To the tune of Dan Fogelberg, "Part Of The Plan," from the album "The Very Best Of Dan Fogelberg".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace

Trying a poll

I've added a poll about the end of cyberspace on the left. It may have brought down the blog. We'll see if it stays up!

Quote of the day

Cyberspace, as a word, caught on because it is immensely descriptive and intelligent. Cyber comes from cybernetics, which comes from the greek word kubernetes, meaning governor. So, cyberspace is the “governor of space”, which describes very well how a collection of processes control world communications.

Cyberspace has not expanded or shrunk; it simply has more access points than it had 37 years ago, that’s all. It’s still not a physical space, it’s intangible, but it has succeeded in shrinking the Earth. (Life's Weirder Than Fiction)

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, language