Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Gnomeward bound

Our house guests are none other than Dean and his sweetie Susan. Just finished giving them the town tour. Spectacular day. We went up on Camino Cielo (more or less the same tour as this guy took here, but in a rented Chevy rather than a way-cool bike). Up n the ridge were on top of Cloud Nine, Ten and Eleven. Literally. Blue sky above and puffy white at our feet. Nice.

Now I hafta pack for Gnomedex. I leave at 4am and I'm not close to ready. But first we're headed out to dinner.

Meanwhile, I gotta dig how fast and far the People Vs. Hollywood political conversation is spreading. Dave's blog today makes a nice jumping off point, but it fans out real fast from there. Like a fire. Which is exactly the idea.

Fan on, everybody.

A call to traction

Sheila sums up a bunch of the political stuff we've been talking about, and makes some very sensible suggestions for winning non-techie hearts and minds.

Woi-flying up over down under

The BBC discovers warstorming over Perth days after bloggers do the same.

Multiplying conversational exponents

Dave and Larry in a tree, b-l-o-g-g-i-n-g.

The implementation stage of Cluetrain indeed. Gives me chills. I love it.

Networked markets get smarter faster than most companies Cluetrain said.

Same goes for democracies and their governments.

We're not just doing grass roots shit here. We're moving the geology under the grass. Political tectonics.

What have you done? Larry asked the crowd at OSCon. I wanted to stand up and yell, "Hey! We created GeekPAC and AOTC!" But I knew both efforts weren't close to prime time.

But prime time is now to November.

So we've done at least one thing to grease the tectonics. We've made the AOTC index level a blog. (More will come; but this is our start.)

Rock on, everybody. Power from the people.

(I just looked up exponent in the dictionary, by the way. Makes even more sense than I had intended when I wrote the headline.)

[Later...] Timothy Phillips suggests two candidates on which we might test the power of our democratic battle station. Any others?

Nativity

Just remembered something else that came up in the phone conversation yesterday with Dave Winer: it's time to understand software on its own terms, whatever they are.

Is it like publishing? Yes, in some ways. Like music? Yes again, but only in some ways. Same goes for writing, manufacturing, and every other metaphor we can use.

But if software matters as much as the rest of those things, it needs to be understood anew on its own terms.

Once we get that worked out, then we can say exactly how copyright (for example) ought to apply.

Anyway, I just wanted to write that down somewhere before I forgot it.

[Later...] And maybe Larry Staton Jr. would rather I had forgotten it. He makes an excellent point. You'll find that and many other interesting conversational items by hitting the Discussions link over there on the left. The whole sectoin been unusually active lately.

Ism jism

Dan Gillmor: Customerism. Great concept. Except get this... it's Dave Sifry's meme-sized summary of Dan's post. I still think it works. Soon as he said it on the phone a minute ago, I knew what he meant.

It's like the first time I said "what we call consumerism is really producerism." People got it. Not that they used it or anything, but at least they got it.

But hey: maybe now it's time to start using all those new isms. Get carried away.

Gotta have it, cont'd

The Zaurus $10 zRadio. Use it to make the Sharp Zaurus PDA into a real live wi-fi radio.

Instant hack

Sifry's Snippets is Dave Sifry's new blog. Dig this: everything on the blog was posted from a Jabber client.

This happens to be on a Moveable Type blog, but it also posts to RadioUserland, Blogger and everything else that suports the Blogger API.

Here's the script he's hacked together.