Censorware Blocks This Site. Simon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]
Hey, I’m hanging in a better neighborhood than I thought. Just checked McGee’s Musings at SurfControl to discover I’m blocked as well. Good to know that SurfControl’s rigorous methodology has carefully classified my blog as Usenet News. Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing your children are safe from my thoughts?
RSS = “push locally, pull globally”. (SOURCE:The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Reeling in what you want from the Web)- Excellent redefinition of RSS: “push locally, pull globally”. thanks
QUOTE
RSS, an acronym that doesn’t expand to any one definition, is better described as “push locally, pull globally.”Getting past blacklisting
Many news sites have adopted RSS as an alternative or replacement for e-mail lists, or listservs, which are more and more frequently the victim of unintended spam filtering. Many lists which send subscribers information in the form of electronic newsletters or messages find themselves temporarily blacklisted or they learn after a mailing that double-digit-percentages of legitimate subscribers never received the message.
That problem is avoided with RSS, because you don’t provide personal details to a Web site you’re following not even an e-mail address or password. Instead, the RSS news aggregator software, which is installed on your computer, regularly checks a special file on a Web site feed to which you’ve subscribed
UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]
This is a really nice way to describe RSS quickly.
Two things:In the paper Co-evolution of….
Two things:
- In the paper Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans, Robin Dunbar predicts that the maximum group size that humans can maintain as a cohesive social unit, based on the ratio of neocortex volume to brain volume, is 147.8 (100.2-231.1 at 95% confidence). Consulting the literature, he finds that there’s a trimodal distribution of group sizes: bands at 30-50 people, tribes at 1000-2000, and an intermediate one. The mean size of the intermediate level group societies is 148.4.
- The AOL Instant Messenger servers impose a hard limit on the number of people you’re allowed to put in your buddylist: 150.
(For more, and a better summary of Dunbar’s paper, read The Magic of 150. Malcolm Gladwell also refers to the number 150 in his book The Tipping Point.)
I’ve been looking for a good link to this paper from 1993. Although there is a wide variation around the magic number 150 it is a really interesting conjecture. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]
Good to have a link to some empirical support for notion that certain group scales are hard-wired.
J. Boyle on the 2nd Enclosure Movement. I came across this article as I was putting together the reading list for TP5: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.(pdf file) This is a terribly interesting article that uses a fair amount of the history of intellectual property thought and economics to raise the … [Furdlog]
More for my reading pile on intellectual property. Maybe I should have gone to law school after all.
Lego fabrication, stylishly explained.
Check out this amazing Flash pased pixelart/video-clip interactive tutorial explaining Lego fabrication: the perfect marriage of style and substance. Link (via Kottke)
[Boing Boing Blog]
A factory tour without leaving your browser.
Information on the Assembly Line. Rats…it’s a class night, and I’ve got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can’t do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols’ very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for… [IDblog]
Looks to be a useful resource.
Jonathan Zittrain, law professor at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center, authors “The Copyright Cage” in Darwin Magazine. Recommended reading. Thanks to Ten Reasons Why.
Very helpful to understanding today’s copyright environment
Mom passed away last week. I've gone back and forth over whether to post something here or not. What finally tipped it was this write up from yesterday's memorial service that my Dad put together.
Thank you all for coming today and thank you all for your loving care and support. Ruth is delighted.
She firmly believed that we are all created in the image and likeness of Christ so she was convinced that He too was a collector (pack-rat?) of memorabilia (Crayola art, cards, pictures, “Good” report cards, awards, diplomas, knick-knacks, various “can't live without” items from her many travels, etc.). As a result she believed her first assignment would be to clean out all His closets and storage spaces before she could set up bridge games and our rooms. So if you see muddy rain and hear noisy thunder don't be surprised. It's Ruth organizing the clean-up crews. Wear a hard hat. The hail may be rather heavy and odd-shaped.
Thank you again for everything and listen for her infectious laugh.
So now you have a sense for where my occasionally off-center perspective comes from. We're all doing ok. And my hard hat is close at hand.
Jeff Jarvis discovers
North Americauser created contentOK, his post-9/11 postings were the direct inspiration for my blogging, and I find his old journo crossover views on this medium fascinating. But occasionally Jeff Jarvis fluffs one, so I’m going to have to diss my blog-daddy. In this case, he happens upon the revelation that about 2/3 of AOL users’ time is spent with other users’ contributions, and riffs from there. Fine to speculate on the implications, but I’m here to tell you this is old news. Similar distributions of user time date well back into the proprietary days of AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Remember, I used to read usage time and income reports from the entrails of the CompuServe accounting system. This isn’t anything novel, nor does it have to do with the advent of blogs, social software, or anything else trendy. Same thing happened with crappy old ASCII forums, CB, and proprietary e-mail. It’s related to human nature, not the specific technology – so long as it’s two-way – and that in many ways is very good news.
We now return you to your previously scheduled new media speculation. [Due Diligence]
Glad to see someone out there who has been paying attention all along. You have to be very careful not to get caught up in the news business’s need to pretend there’s something new every day. Couple that with most people’s aversion to anything resembling a sense of history and you get breathless commentary on old news.
I once had the chance to hear the late Herb Simon give a speech on what constituted news. He walked the audience through a funny sketch of his gradual abandonment of the daily newspaper, the nightly news broadcast, the weekly newsmagazine, and monthly magazines as devoid of anything that resembled news. He finally settled on reading the annual update volume to the Encyclopedia Brittanica as being about the right frequency and perspective for his getting updated on what had happened that mattered during the year.
Staying in this context, I’m quite certain that Simon’s primary sources of information about stuff that mattered to him was his network of colleagues and friends, not “content providers” offering to keep him up to date.
What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale.
Just took the political compass test. I am right between the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Nice company. [John Robb's Weblog]
Looks like John and I are in the same general vicinity, as is Dave Winer. Certainly a more interesting way to think about things than a one-dimensional left-right analysis which always feels overly limiting. For another look at a richer way of thinking about political orientations you might want to look at Jerry Pournelle's “All Ends fo the Spectrum.”