Monday, April 10, 2006

Quotes du jour

From a speaker here at the SB Forum: Most nonprofits suck at organizing people. Ever notice how well organized public radio listeners are?

From another (Josh Silver): We're all here because we give a shit. He then went on to list three things that are broken: 1) Politics, by which representatives are bought and sold; 2) Voting; and 3) Media — "the Orwellian fog" in which the masses are still opiated. Hard to disagree.

Wrong tale

Deborah Branscum on Disturbing Amazon Reviewers. I was unprepared for the amount of raw weirdness masquerading as chirpy reviews.

Rights idea

Paul Jones: What if every bit of Free Software carried the Universal Declaration of Human Rights within it?

I don't want teleportation for myself. Just for my bladder.

Last night, toward the end of Howard Rheingold's talk, during the Q&A, I couldn't wait any longer for a break, and decided to sneak out to a restroom. I was sitting up front, however, and I didn't want to walk out in front of the entire crowd. So I decided to skulk out by going behind the black curtain that concealed the backstage area. I quietly ducked back there, stepped over snakes of fat cables, squeezed behind the projector, and worked my way behind the other end of the black curtain, which hung flush against the wall behind the registration desk, where sat half a dozen student interns. It was dark, spelunking through this fabric cave, and it must have looked strange from the outside.

Upon emerging from behind the curtain, I said "I've tunnelled through!" Danah Boyd followed. What the hell is that? said the expressions on the students' faces, as they looked at the two of us.

All of which is a set-up for the headline.

Connections

Interesting talk by Howard Rheingold last night at the Santa Barbara Forum. I saw some encouraging connections between what Howard said about cooperation as a human trait, markets, and what I was trying to get at in the email I sent to Nat Torkington that caused a stir (such as here, here and here). (Also made me think about what Riane Eisler has been saying for quite awhile.)

Check out Cooperation Commons, and its blog.

Bonus links: Nice rundown on last week's F2C by Mary Godwin.

Also Dan Gillmor: We are all reporters now. (Sorry, that's not the original link; but I can't find it right now.) Next question: how do groups of reporters become the new newspapers? Or, better yet, how do they help the old ones before the ClearChannelization that sucked the soul out of radio (mostly by counting its beans rather than valuing its talent, and the passions through which that talent was invested) does the same to newspapers as well.