Alex Halavais summarizes very well in a recent posting on quotidian IT hassles: “when it needs to be something that is consistently maintained, and when I want to consistently be able to do something a bit more fun on a Saturday, I need to bite the bullet and leave it to the pros, even if—like paying someone to change the oil—it grates just the tiniest bit.”
These are, after all, productivity tools… and what matters to me is what can be done with them, not the details of how they work. “Now the dependencies start stacking up”, as he puts it.

I’ve been following the blogging of Alex Halavais (at University of Buffalo) for several months, and find his perspectives and initiatives especially interesting. His recent posting of the course information for his imminent BlogClass (“Media in the Information Age”) is a wonderful example of ballsy pedagogical self-invention, and just the sort of thing our little cabal of blog-to-teach-and-learn argonauts needs to follow, study, and adapt where practical and relevant.

Jon Udell continues to be a source of inspiration and an encouragement to keep exploring and expanding Web possibilities. His most recent column Prime-time hypermedia [and see the expansion at infoworld] hits several of my nascent interests, and reminds me of outstanding organizational/retrieval questions:

• “the two-way Web” that IS blogging isn’t obvious to everybody, but Udell’s is a nice clear crystallization that underlines the essentially communicative side that so attracts me. It’s a way to attract people to the MEDIUM of hypertext.
• …and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the LINKS are the big deal, and that the lattice of interconnections is really the important thing.
• Multimedia is a grand frontier –but the legalities have to be made not-a-problem, AND users have to have reasonable access, in aural privacy. And so I’m curious about evolving earphone technologies…
• Udell’s piece underlines how important the information management tools are. The person who is putting togethehr a message with included AV links needs to be able to FIND AGAIN the source stuff. Udell emphasizes finding the extracts via indexed bloggings… but once again we note the vital importance of personal information management…

I’m pretty much continuously amazed at the things I find in an ordinary day of reading blogs and following links. Case in point of the moment is the webnote app at aypwip. Implications are pretty staggering.

The whole issue of SOUND awaits my attention… Need to find out about .ogg files, and the whole issue of handling sound better. The example of the moment is from Maciej Ceglowski’s Idle Words (http://www.idlewords.com/2004/07/canada_day.htm), which includes a short bit on poutine which includes a link to http://united-states.asinah.net/american-encyclopedia/wikipedia/p/po/poutine.html which links to an Audio clip by a Québecois… a bit of fiddling with URLs gets me to The Canadian Encyclopedia, and to The American Encyclopedia.
This is absolutely exemplary of the possibilities of the medium, the command Maciej has of it, and the delights to be found in this realm.

I’m feeling the necessity for some guidance in the next steps in blog development, and I’m not sure whence that will come. There’s a tangle in blog setup, such that both this blog and the 132 blog are in the same Archive, and I need to separate them… but I also need to understand the options for layout and features better than I do. Some of that is template stuff, some is in the deeper waters of php and MySQL… and some has to do with the external identity of the blog (is it tracked by anybody/thing?)… a point that every user surely reaches, where the basics more or less work, but another leap in functionality is needed. If I could go to an MT workshop, or find the right tutorials… But really this is a general problem with moving frontiers of information technologies: we do what we know how to do, but sometimes need a boost to move to new comfort zones.

Continue reading →

fragments for a summary of the present state of my personal computing world

“The Net is a force of nature. It superconducts information and superdistributes awareness.” (part of today’s entry)

More than 20 years ago I wrote a song for a friend’s Bachelor Party. He’s a zoologist who does research on amphibians, so the text had to connect somehow with that specialty, and I put quite a bit of mental energy into research and production. This morning I had e-mail from him, asking if I had the lyrics somewhere… and of course I did. It seemed sensible to make them available to broader audiences…

This from blog entries at a conference on the Internet and China, at UC Berkeley

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig spoke about the “core blindness” on press freedom that exists in the United States. It is easy, he said, to see the core blindness in another culture, like China, with its well known attempts to monitor or limit access to the Internet. But it is harder to identify the blindness in this culture.
The American blindness, he said, is the corporate privatization of culture and speech. He described how copyright protection has grown in time, in scope, in intensity, and in what it affects. He described how creative people in the United States, whether computer programmers, musicians, or filmmakers, need to choose whether to obey the law or to be dissidents. “If they obey, they can say much less.” (posted by Wang Feng)