Author: AKMA

Since the Freedom to Connect conference concerned itself (among other things) with the FCC’s recent Reign of Prudery, many speakers went out of their way to emphasize their points with emphatic profanity. More than once, the speaker accompanied that with an explicit (or muttered) apology to me, as though I were unaccustomed to hear such language. (They don’t spend enough time around seminarians and teenagers — though Pippa tsk-tsks Si when his language turns colorful). Word: I’m not that fragile. Profanity provides vivid prose with some of its most vivid moments, especially when the profanity is well-rendered (though I’m not convinced that Matt really needed to adopt a metaphor that implies that men uniquely possess the physiology for technological innovation. . . ).

What of boasting? It is committed.

Josiah has heard from schools number two through four among his five applications, and Two College and Three College both wait-listed him, and Four College admitted him with a generous offer. That leaves Five College, a sort of wild-card; but not only is he a wanted undergraduate, but he’s wanted by more every institution to which he applied, and two of them want him enough to admit and fund him. You go, boy!

Margaret’s getting positive feedback from all around her; she’s doing great work in her classes, thinking hard with her profs and a wonderfully positive presence for her colleagues. She and Nate are studying hard and doing well, though since they’re both in remote locations, and since academic work involves fewer obvious occasions for laud, but they’re both spectacular.

Pippa continues making wonderful images with paint and pen and keyboard (Margaret and I cherish her email messages). At F2C, Dave isenberg brought out a t-shirt he’d been given by his print shop; it read in big letters, “God Bless America,” with an American flag imprint. He reckoned that the clergy delegate was the right conferee to get the shirt, so he threw it out to me. (This story does get back to how proud I am of Pippa.) I sat with the shirt displayed beside me through Thursday’s program, and brought it home, uncertain of what should become of it. When I explained the situation to the family, Pippa quickly pointed out some of the theo-political problems with the shirt; her first reaction was that it should be a prayer, but that instead it reads as a command. But she volunteered to take it, perhaps to wear inside-out or use for her painting shirt. Fifteen minutes later she came back. . . .

I’m so proud of them, it makes my heart pound. What, as Dick Leonard says, did I do to deserve this? [Don’t worry; you probably don’t know Dick. But he always used to say that when he lived with us, so the family always quotes him.]

Clay “They Ought Know Better Than To Mess With Me” Shirky calls in to Boing Boing with a demonstration of the corrupt incoherence of writing copyright protection into hardware and software.

Yes, those who make our lives marvelous with their creativity must be supported.
Yes, the advent of digital reproduction changes the fundamental conditions that apply to such support.

No, that does not mean perpetuating obsolete mechanisms to protect the vestiges of a [deliberately dysfunctional] legacy system of distribution and rewards.

Last night before dinner, another conference participant thanked me for a link I had made to her blog way back in olden times (when we blogged with quill pens). I didn’t remember the link at the time — it was two and a half years ago — but lo and behold, here it is (Hi, Sara)! It’s great to meet and converse with people with whom you have online history.

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As I was hunter-gathering at the continental breakfast bar this morning, one of the other participants here came up to say she had had a dream about me last night. (I took heart that she said “dream,” rather than “nightmare,” but I was still cautious as she began to tell me what she dreamt).

As it turns out, she dreamt that somebody came up to her, pointed to me and said, “That guy isn’t really a priest. He’s too cool to be a priest!” Now, for clarity’s sake I should emphasize that this doesn’t count as a conscious asseveration of my coolness (she’s obviously the sort of highly-intelligent tech observer who would never make such a mistake if she were fully responsible for her assessment of me) — but given the sorts of things that might ensue when somebody looks up and says “I had a dream about you last night,” this counts as one of the very most positive.

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Observant readers may notice that I haven’t kept up very well at tagging. I just realized a way to use MarsEdit, my present favorite blogging client (no disrespect to ecto, which I’ll happily try out some time, adriaan, but MarsEdit originally came bundled with NetNewsWire) to do better hereafter, using the “custom tags” feature, so I’ll try to reform my wayward habits.

But here’s a problem with tags: you can’t simply copy-and-paste them, the way you can with links. Copying and pasting links is very simple process; unless I’m missing something, creating a Technorati tag requires a separate step and a degree of deliberation about “how to tag.” The incorporation of categories as tags is a nice step toward this, but most category-users deploy categories that would be too broad to make good tags, and many people don’t use categories at all. At the moment, after the blush of excitement about the tag-powered, folksonomical Web has faded, that looks like an unacceptable brake on this new step. Brent, Adriaan, Firefoxians, SixApart, tool developers: please help us out on this, or tip us off that the overhead isn’t worth it.

Just before the Four Freedoms session, Jerry Michalski found me and pointed out that he had read the previous blog entry, and he had some good news: I wasn’t going to be expected to talk for twenty minutes. We weren’t going to occupy twenty-minute blocks of time at all, but would have about five minutes, followed by an open Q-and-A from the floor.

That clearly solved my awkward-duration problem, but left me a bit at sea concerning what I would say in my five minutes. I shaped my note cards for the twenty-minute slot, so I tried to summarize and skim. It seemed to go all right; no one hissed, or threw overripe fruit. Afterward, I had a couple of very provocative conversations; that’s all you can ask, I guess.

Heath “the miraculous Transcriptionist” Row seems to have blogged the session almost verbatim — bless you, Heath! And if you were listening, here or in the webcast, many thanks for your patient attention.

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[I wrote this last night — now I’m here, in Silver Spring, and we’ll find out just how wrong a twenty-minute slot can be.]

I have about twenty minutes, according to the Freedom to Connect conference schedule, which is precisely the wrong amount of time. In about five minutes, I can make a crystalline, sharp-edged case for something; in an hour or so, I can develop a careful, thorough analysis and argument. Twenty minutes is too long for scintillating, but too short for pains-taking. At least, that’s the way it feels tonight.

Luckily for me, I’ve heard David Weinberger at a number of conferences, and if I start feeling the audience slip away I’ll talk about shopping for a washing machine, or the Dewey Decimal System. That will not only occupy my fleeting minutes, but will offer me the satisfaction of watching David’s face as he realizes I’m using up some of his prime material, since he doesn’t speak at F2C until after I’ve gone! Hoohah!

I usually stay a long way away from the bloggers-vs.-journalists streetfight, but this morning Margaret pointed me to Jack Shafer’s column in Slate, where he excoriates LA Times critic David Shaw’s screed on the topic. I’m paying slightly more attention this morning, since tomorrow I head out for the Freedom to Connect conference, where I’ll spend a couple of days hanging around with bloggers and journalists (among other people).

As a long-time Talking Heads fan, I was pleased to see in Boing Boing that David Byrne isn’t worried about people downloading his recordings without paying: “I don’t see much money from record sales anway, so I don’t really care how people are getting it.” Later, he acknowledges that he himself P2Ps for music (“ I’ve also — I guess you could say — illegally downloaded some songs”).

So far, so good. He’s making me feel better, after I was disillusioned by his public enthusiasm for PowerPoint.

But in the same interview, he observes that he’s starting his own online radio station, since he wants to build an audience for music that lies outside the ambit of hits and favorites. He observes that back when one bought an album, one got both the music one anticipated and sought, and also other selections that one might not have chosen; Radio David Byrne will try to enrich its audience’s listening habits with both popular and more obscure selections. That’s good, too.

But does anyone else note the disconnection between the two sets of observations? If people weren’t obliged to pay for online recordings, wouldn’t they listen much more adventurously? I think we can prove this case, friends; certainly Alan Wexelblat over at Copyfight is on top of the reality-based analysis of downloading and sales (thatnks for that link, too, Boing Boing). On a purely anecdotal level, I hardly ever haunt the P2P filesharing world any more, but just informal filesharing with friends and mp3 blogs called to my attention my favorite recent recordings — and pretty much all the music I’ve bought in the past few months has come to my attention through some form of filesharing. I don’t buy music unheard any more.

So David, by all means run an internet radio station, but go further to connect the dots. If you want to build audience for unexpected music, distribute it for free, online, with a http://creativecommons.org/audio/ and see what happens to sales.

When Margaret called my attention to Accordion Guy’s Easter Day blog entry, I realized that I had to post the sketch Pippa drew for me the other day. Compare the two side by side; look carefully at the photo of the figurine; then ask yourself, “Does that Buddy really look so friendly after all, or isn’t there something a little ominous about the winking eye, the protruding cheekbones, the pointing finger?”

Technotag: pippa

Chris evidently has too much time on his hands, as he’s been Googlefighting again. He emailed me to point out this startling development.