Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Flying low
I'm driving up to San Francisco for OSBC. Back tomorrow. Kind of a whirlwind thing. Wish I'd rememberd to book a flight earlier when it was cheap. Driving is the only choice at this point. At least it's flexible, sort of.
The legend blogs on
Jay Rosen examines what really happened (as best we, whomever we are, can tell) with the Trent Lott Thing. A sample:
Free from the craziness of the 24-hour news cycle (and from some of the reflexes in press think) the blogs, their users, and the links among them work as a second filter added to the news flow. The blog sphere sifts through information, rescuing facts and arguments from the cycle’s strange habits, while loosening up the lines of debate.
Bonus books: Nicolas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy (the entire thing is available online in .pdf, and it's excellent), and Andrei Cherny's The Next Deal.
They only polled the living, but still
Staying in the game
Cam is now with the Kerry campaign. I guess Tony is still on the beach. In an unrelated matter, Tim went to Sun.
Speaking of (and with) Tony
Tony Pierce makes clear that the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act isn't just about Howard Stern, or even "obscenity":
howard stern was right this morning. rolling stone wants to put him on their cover and write about his problems with the fcc and at first he was going to do it, but then he realized that this wasnt His problem, it's Everyones problem. for 20 years hes been doing his show and the public has been eating it up.
nothing that he does is obscene. it's about sex a lot of the times, but that doesnt instantly make it obscene.
the radio waves are the public's airwaves. how public is it when one company owns 80% of it? how public is it when a few republicans are dictating what can be broadcast? how public is it when the number one broadcaster is suddenly deemed obscene the same month he comes out against the president of the united states?
i know a lot of my elected officials read this.
and some officials, like senator clinton read this too.
if you fools dont start fighting the repubs on this issue and on the issue of free speech and of the issue of censorship and of the issue of assholes bulldozing their quote unquote morals all over my shit im going to not only vote them out but vote you out too.
where is the main democratic voice standing up and saying, oh no you didn't!
Even this isn't obscene.
Going into business sale
The ever-inventive and playful Rei Kawakubo's latest probe into the bleeding edge of the buying psyche. She's just opened this store in Berlin, Germany. It's the first example of provisional retailing by an established fashion house: the store plans to close in one year, even if it's making money.
The rest of joe calls Tony Pierce to mind.
Thanks to Jim for various links today.
Vision aerie
Every so often I'll run across something that was lost when my hosted server got wiped out last summer (after which I moved to the excellent Rackspace, which does a great job). The latest, just restored, is NYC Wi-Fi Trip, May 2003. The highly placed apartment from which many of the shots were made is Britt's. It looks down on the neighboring penthouse of Norman Osborn, the Spiderman villian and occasional Green Goblin.
Here's Ming & Britt, working on XpertWeb... The excellent alt.coffee with its 8-track desktop and hardware ossuary restroom... fun with street signs... I could go on, but I don't have time.
The whole gallery accompanies my report on wi-fi in New York, which ran in last September's Linux Journal.