And He Blogs

Why are conversations important? Because many times they force you to see things differently and think about things in new ways. Now, who you choose to listen to is important as well. For this post I have just listened, quite literally, to Dave Winer. He is thinking out loud (yes, literally) about a service that allows people to record an audio “tweet”, complete with an imposed limit of a 200k audio file. Winer, by the way, is someone I listen too because he is a smart guy. He is one of the key players in the invention of RSS, and also a key player in the development of enclosures in RSS. Enclosures are the things that enables podcasts to work.

So when a smart person talks, I like to be there listening to him/her. I feel like I’m at a party listening to Dave and some colleagues flesh out this idea of a Twittergram. Is it going to work, or will it fail? These are questions that are unimportant now, and Dave feels that the naysayers should shut up for a while and let the conversation and the smart people get to work and see what happens.

The audio Twitter concept already works from the user standpoint, as long as they have Greasemonkey and the del.icio.us mp3 userscript installed . . .

Note the blue play button that appears when viewing a linked mp3 file in Twitter. That’s the del.icio.us mp3 script in action!

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Some interesting news was brought to my attention this morning, via Wes Fryer, that Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig will be shifting his focus from academic work, to what he calls the “corruption” of the political process. He states that “our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.” It became clear to me that this was no 180 degree turn for Lessig, but in fact directly related to his work on copyright and IP issues. He sees the constant renewal of certain copyright holdings (can you say Mickey Mouse?) as, to put it bluntly, idiocy.

Lessig’s post about his reason’s for tackling these issues is a must read. He emphasizes that corruption is in quotes when he talks about the political process. However, he is serious in changing the influence money has on the workings of congress.

“And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.”

He also states that we should be aware of the “corruption of professions”, implying that it perpetuates our political corruption. He is tired of “whining” about it and will work for the next ten years in this new direction. He says he realistically feels that the problem will still be there at the end of ten years’ time, but he will at least make an attempt.

He is also offering up his considerable volume of writings to ccMixter, the Creative Commons sponsored site that makes remixes completely legal. This is all a fascinating development from one of the great minds in academia, and the optimist in me thinks he might well suceed.

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Being a veteran flyer now, I have come to know that there is a wonderful game of hurry-up-and-wait played whilst waiting for a given flight. So we do things like load up our iPods with podcasts, music, etc. to while away the hours, or in some cases, days. While waiting for my flight back home from the NMC conference, I found it was a good time to clear some junk from my laptop hard drive. I got rid of most of the stray icons off my desktop, which I hate, but I still keep saving stuff that I download there.

Amongst the flotsam and jetsam that I came across, was a video file that came recommended from a couple of blogs I read. I proceeded to load it on the iPod and wondered if it would live up to its billing. It wasn’t like I needed more inspiration because NMC already had me buzzing. Listening to Sir Kenneth Robinson from the 2006 TED Conference speaking of the need to inject creativity into the educational process set me on fire. The story of Gillian Lynne, who couldn’t sit still in class as a child, and the perceptive doctor who told her mother to enroll her in dance school, is worth the price of admission. Lynne, for those who don’t know was the choreographer for Cats. It’s a recognition that some people have to move to think.

I’m still digesting this talk, and it’s good in so many ways. It injects quite a bit of humor into a serious subject, the idea that there needs to be a major restructuring in our approach to education. In addition, I discovered this interview that provides exquisite details of Robinson’s ideas. I’m not much of a reader of books, but I look forward to his book Epihany. Now I know why Gardner is thinking so much about dancing lately.

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And it’s kind of sad, ’cause I had a great time. Let me tell you, Indianapolis was a big surprise in a good way. Facilities were classy, and the city was cool in lots of ways. Oh and did I tell you we had a great time?

Lots to blog about, but I’ve had 3 1/2 hours sleep out of the last 40 hours. Soon.

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Watch video then you’ll know what to do next.

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This is something I hadn’t seen before. I am a member of the Virginia Credit Union and in a email from “service@vacu.org” I got a notice of recent phishing scams. The email had some telltale signs of its lack of validity - a broken image link and some typos. Clicking on the link brought me to an “lsccreations.com” web page, and Firefox spoke up and gave me the above error - “Suspected Web Forgery”. Nice.

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I rode the Virginia MS 150 this weekend, and had the opportunity to ride through the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry. At the finish line, I was having a conversation about the first named storm of the year, which we couldn’t recall. The person I was talking with seemed to think it hit sometime in April (which as it turns out isn’t unprecedented), while I guessed May 15th. Well, once again, Wikipedia to the rescue. It was freshly edited with information from YESTERDAY! It is still unbelievable that we have this resource. “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls!” Anyone remember where that line is from?

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Thanks to David Pogue for pointing to this cool Popular Mechanics video. It features the famous Jefferson “Jeff” Han who talked about the “multi-touch” computer at the TED conference back in February 2006. I’d love one of these “coffee tables” in my media room.

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This snuck up on me, just like June itself, but it’s the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I could give you my take on it, but this article does a fine job of describing the greatest album of all time (start the argument in the comments). I’d like to able to say what it felt like the day it was released, but at the time I was not quite three, and likely had more important issues to deal with. But, I know my brother, who is nine years older listened to it, over, and Over, and OVER. It was his obsession. It was unique in so many ways that it was a different experience every time you listened to it. Albums previous to this were just a collection of songs by an artist or a group. Sgt. Pepper changed the meaning of an album, and it’s refreshing to think about it 40 years later in this era of $.99 music downloads. So some time this month, attempt to sit down and listen to all the songs all at once. Preferably listen to the LP at 33 1/3 rpm on a Hi-Fi.

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