For the past few years I have been following a GLBT rights group, The Human Rights Campaign, and I recently read an interview they had with former Star Trek cast member George Takei (interestingly he has also been named as Howard Stern’s new side-kick). I thought the interview was interesting, especially in the viewpoint that Takei has about GLBT rights. Takei, as a Japanese American, spent part of his childhood in an internment camp during World War II. To him, the denial of rights (such as the right to marry) for members of the GLBT community is similar to the denial of rights to those Japanese Americans who were in internment camps. He specifically used the phrase “invisible barbed wires of legality” to describe how GLBT Americans are being treated as second-class citizens, a view not different from my own. Sean and I just got married in July and I know how happy that has made me, and how happy we were to be able to show our friends and family how happy we were together in a publicly recognized ceremony. I can’t imagine anyone telling me that I would never have that opportunity.
Archive for January, 2006
So, I’ve been watching the championship games today and I’m not sure how I feel about the Steelers win. I really wanted the Bengals to go to the Superbowl, and I was not pleased to see the lack of sportsmanship shown by the Steelers in that game, so I have been rooting against them throughout the playoffs. That said, I saw Big Ben play college ball when Miami of Ohio played Bowling Green a couple of years ago, and he is a good QB (plus having a MAC QB go to the Superbowl will be good for the conference). I’m hoping that Seattle pulls their game out - I had Hasselback and Alexander on my fantasy team and it’s nice to see players at the top of their game.
Other fun stuff this weekend - Friday we went over to Andy F’ s place for Sci-Fi Friday, Sat. I played my first game of Stratego (and beat Sean), and today I found out that Jenny’s guy (Irish Andy) might come to BG, so my plan for taking over my former apartment complex with my associates might be realized! So far my second cousin, Lisa, my labmate Thomas, and Andy F. have moved in to my former building, but I still have a few apartments to go. In other weird connecting news, Danielle and John were off to Buffalo today for Danielle’s internship interview at the Veteran’s hospital.
I was doing my typical blog/site hopping, moving from one story or article to another, when I came across Publishing 2.0. The first post I read over was Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s his opinion about how bloggers are convinced that blogging will bring down the current media giants. I agree with him that it may not be done the way some think.
He mentions in this post as well in one this past Tuesday that bloggers oftentimes do not do a good job explaining the blogging technology. When the majority of the population enjoy holding a daily newspaper or any other type of publication in their hands instead of reading the same articles on a screen, how are you going to get them to use a feed aggregator? Most people wouldn’t know what you meant, and so “bloggers explaining blogging technology” is only part of the issue.
When I was in college, I took a class titled Technology Systems in Socities. One of the instructors (there were two; they alternated every 4 weeks) commented that the purpose of the class was to educate us so that we could go out into the world as technologists; so that we would have an understanding of how technology and systems interacted with human cultures. Everyone who uses Internet and web technology should take the time to explain it to others, especially those who you want to use the technology; you are using the technology, thus you are a technologist… do something with your knowledge.
I guess I got a little off topic there, but it’s still relevant. As much as I like Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m not going to get people to switch to it just by talking about it; I need to show it to them and explain it. I put Firefox on Danielle and John’s laptop and showed him why I used it and certain extensions. I showed my mother it as well, and tried my best to explain its usage. I formatted my brother’s computer, and he wanted Firefox and GAIM on it. Chances are, had I not shown them the programs in the first place, they wouldn’t have used them.
As for blogging, I sort of knew about various things dealing with blogging, such as trackbacks and the like, but I had to dig my way through it to figure out what it all meant and how to work with it. Yes, I choose to host it on my own site instead of going with a specific host like Blogger or Xanga or LiveJournal, but I wanted to be able to easily backup my data and change things around if I wanted. Eventually I found drupal and have been using it for a month or so, and the modules available made blogging easier, but I had to research stuff and try them on my own.
All in all, I can see why he made the post he did, as well as the update to it. I personally don’t think that Web 2.0 will bring about a sort of communism, as he mentions. In a conversation with my father around Christmas, I said that, but then changed it to socialism, which I would now say would be more a derivation of socialism, such as democratic socialism perhaps.
I think Publishing 2.0 is worth reading. I know it’s now been added to my delicious “blogs” tags. This overall post may seem disjointed, but I spent about 5 hours on it, going back and forth between reading, writing, and working.
From a post on MercuryNews.com:
The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
I actually came across that site while reading a post about it at SearchEngineWatch.com. This site does a good job about talking about what the post on MercuryNews means, such as this isn’t about privacy, yet, but whether the government should/needs to ask the search engines for this information in the first place. After the initial article, there are 15 updates of varying nature, including one (Postscript 11) that attempts to show why the math part of this is based on is flawed.
Well, the slogan of the site used to be “a node of the world wide blogternet”. While the term makes sense, I really shouldn’t be using it. The best option would either be “a node of the Web 2.0″, or even “a node of the read/write web”. The second one is a better descriptor of Web 2.0, at least as far as my understanding takes it.
Part of the reason for the change was I was reading a post on Read/WriteWeb titled Lessig on the Read/Write Web, where they were summarizing an essay on FT.com by Lawrence Lesig. The synopsis was enough that I read the essay itself, which talked about the change in the Web from read-only (consumption by the public only) to read-write (consumption and creation by the public), and what this meant for those trying to perfect the read-write web and prevent the breaking of current policy, such as copyright. From the essay, the following paragraph struck my interest. “AMVs” refer to anime music videos, anime movie clips put to music.
But phenomena such as AMVs signal a new battle in the copyright wars that the architects of the Read-Only internet never contemplated. AMVs are just part of a growing and important “Read-Write” internet – a world in which content is bought, but not simply to be consumed. Blogs, photo journals and sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace signal an extraordinary hunger in our culture for something beyond consumption. According to a recent Pew study, almost 60 per cent of US teenagers have created and shared content on the internet. That number will only grow next year. As it does, these creators will increasingly demand freedom to create, or more precisely, re-create, using as inputs the culture that they buy. In a sense, this re-creativity of the Read-Write internet is nothing new. Since the beginning of human society, individuals have remixed the culture around them, sharing with their friends the product of these remixes. You read a book and recount its plot over dinner. You see a movie and ridicule its naivete to friends at a bar. This is the way culture has always been used. The only difference now is that technology permits these remixes to be shared. And that capacity in turn will inspire an extraordinary range of new creativity.
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