Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 15:34 - Category: Unfiled ;
Skype allows you to make phone calls anywhere in the world from your PC for about 2 cents an minute. You can receive calls too, plus there’s voicemail and file transfer. Calls can be made to/from a Skype number or a regular phone number.
All you need is a headset (mine was $20 at Radio Shack) and you’re set to go.
If you have Skype, I’m polizerosbob.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 10:26 - Category: Unfiled ;
Time magazine said today that it would provide documents concerning the confidential sources of one of its reporters to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. agent, Valerie Plame.
The decision by a major news organization to disclose the identities of its confidential sources appears to be without precedent in living memory.
New York Times ‘deeply disappointed’ with Time decision.
All the more reason for blogs, podcasting, and creating alternative channels of media and distribution. Mass media often is too timid to even attempt to rock the boat, this craven decision by Time being just one more example.
Blogs and podcasts have an inherent political element even if a particular blog isn’t political. Simply by being a part of a now fast-growing alternative media system, blogs challenge the established media powers. In the next few years, as blogs and podcasts become part of the mainstream Net, it’ll be fascinating to see how this all plays out.
Maybe, in five years, we won’t need Time Magazine to tell us the news. Ditto for TV. Maybe we can do it ourselves.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 09:24 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
The Archive has a stupendous amount of information available, all free, legal, and available for download. Their Wayback Machine has 40 billion archived webpages starting in 1996. There’s 20,000 music concerts (of which 2600 are the Grateful Dead), full length movies, video, software, Democracy Now - and much more.
Ourmedia.org, which is just getting started, is providing way for anyone to publish their media to the Archive in a blog-like format with their own page to display it. Here’s mine. Just two photos so far, Eddie Vedder and Susan Sarandon speaking at an antiwar demo in Hollywood in March 2003.
My entries are published using Creative Commons, you can choose others. Everything published becomes part of the permanent Archive and thus part of the Internet culture at large.
This is an amazing idea. Check it out.
Bob Morris @ Jun 30th 2005 08:59 - Category: Unfiled ;
iTunes now supports podcasting, and the increased traffic is still melting down the normal distribution channels.
After trying multiple times on Wednesday to get Adam Curry’s latest podcast through iPodder or off one of his websites and getting dead servers instead, I finally well duh, did it through iTunes where it downloaded fast. They must have a huge pipe indeed … However it appears Apple, as it sometimes their wont, doesn’t play well with others.
Morning coffee notes from Dave Winer
It turns out that iTunes does export its subscription list, in a weird format I’ve never seen before. It is XML, so it’s process-able. But why not use the
standardsame one everyone else does?
BTW, I’ve been watching for any evidence of acknowledgement from Apple, haven’t seen any yet. Do they acknowledge that they didn’t invent this? Or do they only look out for the creativity of those who force them to? (Or their own.)
It’s important for the bigco’s to get that they’re receiving innovation, for free, from the small developers and bloggers they often have such disdain for. Whether they acknowledge it or not, however, let’s not us forget it.
Update:
Apple’s RSS Extensions Slammed By Podcasting Community.
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Bob Morris @ Jun 29th 2005 10:40 - Category: Unfiled ;
Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter?
A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter’s land.
The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America.
Bob Morris @ Jun 29th 2005 08:39 - Category: Unfiled ;
Invoking the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 five times, President Bush took to the airwaves Tuesday night in an attempt to bolster sagging support for the war in Iraq.
Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and Bush made the plans to invade Iraq long before then. So his entire talk was based on deception and lies.
Of course there’s no exit plan. They don’t want on leave because they covet the geopolitical dominance and the oil. But, like Vietnam, the U.S. will be defeated by a homegrown insurgency and driven out. If your city was invaded by a brutal foreign occupier, you’d fight back with everything you had too. This isn’t rocket science.
Pat Buchanan will be shown to have been prescient when, right before the war started, he said “This is the end of American Empire.”
But the cost will be a destabilzed Middle East, a world that widely mistrusts if not loathes the U.S., and thousands and thousands dead, maimed and crippled. Bush is simply an extreme example of, not an aberration from, an American foreign policy that for decades has invaded whenever and wherever it wanted.
And what was the Democratic response? Almost as uncomprehending as Dubya’s, that the U.S. needs to succeed in Iraq by some unspecified means. Dumb and dumber.
I caught House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Harry Reid in separate appearances on TV, both saying the identical thing: we “need a strategy for success in Iraq.”
What is called for is a little application of the Hippocratic Oath - “First, do no harm”. And there’s only one way to “do no more harm” and that’s to get the hell out. Now.
Otherwise it’s like asking Jack the Ripper to perform surgery on his victims to help save their lives, and saying that it’s his responsibility to do so since he’s the one responsible for the damage. Which is precisely the argument being advanced by the Democrats.
None of this had to happen. The nationwide antiwar demonstrations on Sept. 24 could be significant and huge. Let’s make it so.
Bob Morris @ Jun 29th 2005 08:36 - Category: Unfiled ;
Just 39% want to re-elect Arnold
Schwarzenegger has lost the support of nearly every segment of the California electorate, with a majority of voters now saying they are not inclined to re-elect him, a new Field Poll has found.
His fall has been spectacular and almost entirely self-created. He thought he could manage everything by himself using Hollywood-type spin and PR. He was wrong.
Bob Morris @ Jun 29th 2005 08:33 - Category: Unfiled ;
From Slugger O’Toole
In the indispensable media section of yesterday’s Observer Rafael Behr notes that there is a tendency amongst some mainstream journalists to want bloggers to shut up believing that professional journalism alone is the only legitimate watchdog of power. The failed LA Times wikitorial experiment in last week was simply the latest skirmish in the cold war between big US journalism and its blogosphere .
Bob Morris @ Jun 29th 2005 08:32 - Category: Unfiled ;
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2005 18:24 - Category: Unfiled ;
Apple’s iTunes now has a directory of several thousand podcasts, all downloadable. Wahoo! The podcasting world celebrated this auspicious event by having its servers melt down under the increased load.
From Adam Curry
Well, the big day is finally here, iTunes 4.9 is released! Of course Murphy snuck in overnight, looks like the akamaization of the podcasts isn’t working as planned, the whole world started showing up at our door this morning…
The engineers are working on it as we speak.
I can’t even get onto the mothership, iPodder. Either the connection is refused or nothing appears, a sure sign of servers being pounded by a huge load.
Dave Winer wonders if iTunes has a proprietary format
Does Apple not read OPML subscription lists? If so, it’s hard to say it’s a podcasting client. Do they export subscription lists? If so, in what format? If not at all, that’s lock-in, a Roach Motel.
A Roach Motel is where something goes in but never comes out, the opposite of open source. If so, that would be a dumb move by Apple.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2005 07:43 - Category: Unfiled ;
“A big turnout and police bagpipes drown out a Kansas group opposed to homosexuality” who were, grotesquely, protesting at the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq, a soldier who was not gay.
On the corner of a narrow street lined with Colonial-era buildings, the Kansas contingent tried shouting its anti-homosexual message at mourners who overflowed from the church. But every time demonstrators spoke out, the 14-man Boston Police Department bagpipe band broke into thunderous sound.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2005 00:12 - Category: Unfiled ;
From DailyKos comes this weak timid rationale for Democrats to protest the war without ever admitting the invasion of Iraq was based on lies, is morally and ethically indefensible, and in violation of international law. Protest Lite.
What is the primary reason DailyKos calls for Dems to now ‘protest’ the war? To win in the mid-term elections. I’m sure Iraqis living in bombed-out homes with no water or electricity will deeply appreciate such support.
Democrats have been loathe to talk about Iraq, as their palpable fear get in the way of leadership on this increasingly important issue.
So here are two ways to talk about the war that don’t betray weakness:
How is opposing the war showing weakness?
Promoting a withdrawal
We have a lot to be proud of over the past three years. We have freed the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and given them their first taste of freedom. Iraq held successful presidential elections earlier this year, and the nation is now run by a democratic-elected government.
Hogtwaddle. Iraq is controlled by the US with a puppet government. A real government would have the ability to tell the US to leave. They specifically do not have that right due to the “Constitution” the US rammed down their throats.
We have accomplished what we set out to do — bring freedom to Iraq and rid the region of the specter of Saddam’s terror.
As if bringing freedom to Iraq was ever the primary reason for invading a sovereign country based on deliberate lies. The US supports plenty of corrupt brutal regimes, like Burma, so spare me the bullshit about the invasion of Iraq being done for humanitarian reasons. When Democrats sound like Republicans, most people will simply vote for the Republican.
But now it is time to let the Iraqis take charge of their own lives. The future belongs to a free democratic Iraq, but it is a future they must fight for themselves.
Too late for that. Due to the imperialistic blundering of the US, Iraq will be destabilized for years and will probably eventually be governed by those deeply unfriendly to the U.S. Why should they trust the U.S.? An ethical principled protest against the war would say that rather than this slimy let’s oppose the war so Dems can get elected. Yo, the Dems in the Senate recently voted in lockstep with the Republicans 99-0 to continue funding the war AND for the odious Real ID Act. So why will voting for Democrats help end the war?
Afraid to call for withdrawal? Hammer on “accountability”.
We are facing a crisis in Iraq, and yet no one is being held accountable. Our troops don’t have enough men, equipment, or armor to effectively and safely do their job, yet those responsible for these deadly miscalculations remain at their jobs.
We must have accountability in order to win this war. Those responsible for so many catastrophic mistakes must replaced by more competent, more effective, people.
So these “more effective” people can do what, run the war better? Bomb more homes into rubble? Withdraw? Politely ask Bush to stop being a butthead? What IS this babble about accountability? It makes no sense and will convince no one. It also is de facto support for the war and offers no rationale for leaving. Ya, this approach will really get people fired up to vote for you.
The war will be the issue in 2006. I’ve already talked to several Democratic candidates who think they can get elected talking about social security and health care. Rubbish. That’s what Democrats thought in 2002 and 2004, and the war intruded both cycles. Given the way things are going over there, 2006 promises to be no different.
The American public has turned heavily against the war, despite the absence of an anti-war movement, despite the 24/7 cheerleading of the war in the cable news networks, and despite the lack of coherent Democratic opposition to the war. Democrats must ride that wave into 2006, and can do so in ways where they don’t sound like hippy retreads.
Hippies helped end the Vietnam War. That’s because they genuinely opposed the war and then did something about it.
I guess the author must be asleep, because the antiwar movement is alive and well today, and organizing for nationwide Sept. 24 protests. This DailyKos post is a precise example of the “lack of coherent Democratic opposition to the war” that it laments.
What is NOT an option is remaining silent on the war, as so many Democrats would obviously prefer.
Mouthing lame antiwar sentiments as proposed here in hopes of getting Democrats elected rather than genuinely opposing the war is a recipe for more Democratic defeats. Polls show that the populace opposes the war now. Yet the Dems in Congress continue to vote for the war. Replacing a few Republicans with Democrats who will vote the same way accomplishes nothing and will not end the war.
Were the Democratic establishment to genuinely and unreservedly oppose the war, then they could win and win big. But for this to happen, they would need to actually mean what they say.
Bob Morris @ Jun 27th 2005 09:19 - Category: Unfiled ;
The “Supreme Court ruled” last week “that local governments can seize people’s property by eminent domain and turn it over to private developers.”
“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power.”
— Benito Mussolini
Bob Morris @ Jun 27th 2005 09:00 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Supreme Court has given the entertainment cartel and emerging broadband duopoly just what they wanted. You, and innovation, lost.
The high court said that Grokster and other file-sharing companies can be sued if their products are designed for copyright infringement and don’t have safeguards to protect copyrighted material.
If the decision basically overturns the Sony ruling from two decades ago, we’re in trouble. That one held that a product with substantial non-infringing uses was legal.
Do you care? Or are you a sheep, baa baa, ready to be just a consumer of the crap Hollywood feeds you? Are you willing to let the phone and cable companies dominate tomorrow’s media, having built “their” networks on the backs of monopoly deals with government that they now leverage to capture entirely new markets? Baa baa.
If you care, fight back.
Whether you’re on the streets protesting the Iraq War or mobilizing the Net to oppose a Supreme Court decision, it’s all the same fight, isn’t it? The enemy is a concentration of power that cares little about what you think and they will invade countries based on lies or try to lock up the media so only their view is heard. (Check J.D. Lasica’s Darknet for more on this.) Silicon Valley libertarians and antiwar activists stand opposed to the same Borg.
Bob Morris @ Jun 26th 2005 00:09 - Category: Unfiled ;
“We want to take back our media”
It’s all about “the power of subscription.” The user, you, can now choose what you want to listen to and watch, when you want to do it. This is a completely different model from the current top down hierarchies of the music business and Hollywood where they push media at you and you are expected to consume. This is a paradigm shift.
Curry compared Gnomedex to Woodstock. An explosion of new ideas, good feelings, and huge creativity. How many in the audience were at Woodstock, he asked. Dave Winer, myself, and one other, as it turned out. Yes, it is the same feeling. When I sat in that field at Woodstock, I knew we were making history. I got the same feeling at Gnomedex. Something Big is happening.
RSS, blogs, and podcasting allow us to build entirely new networks that route around the tired old restrictive structures of mass media. We can create, promote, and distribute our own music, video, and ideas, and we don’t need wheezing media dinosaurs to do it. They know something is happening, but they don’t know what it is. Let’s seize the moment.
Listen to Curry’s podcast (mp3) of his keynote, it’s excellent.
Bob Morris @ Jun 26th 2005 00:08 - Category: Podcasts ;
During his keynote, Dave Winer got the entire audience to sing “Yellow Submarine” for no apparent reason that anyone could discern but it sure was fun. Adam Curry responded to this during his keynote by playing a mashup of another Beatles song.
Photographers in front of the stage and Curry during the playing of the mashup as 300 Gnomedexers yelled, danced, and acted silly.
At the end of Gnomedex, three uber-Geeks piled on the sofa on the stage. (l. to r.) J.D. Lasica of Ourmedia.org and DarkNet. Chris Pirillo, Gnomedex organizer. Robert Scoble, Microsoft tech evangelist and blogger.
In the interest of preserving this historical moment, we present in unaltered form the Polizeros podcast of the audience singing “Yellow Submarine” with Dave, recorded in appropriately tinny audio on the internal mic of my iRiver mp3 player.
mp3 (2:15, 795k)
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Bob Morris @ Jun 26th 2005 00:02 - Category: Unfiled ;
My friend Jeff Jobson in Seattle with his prize early 70’s Checker Medicar, only 98 were made!
It was manufactured by Checker Cab and had special high ceilings so a person in a wheelchair could sit upright in the back seat. His t-shirt says “Still plays with cars.” Jeff, who I hadn’t seen in ten years, opines that the current myopia in the Republican Party leads him to believe they have become “Not-Sees.”
Bob Morris @ Jun 25th 2005 07:38 - Category: Unfiled ;
From Dave Winer:
The schmoozing at this conference has been excellent. World class.
I have seen this happen before, at the beginning of booming markets. Like the Apple II. We had this kind of collegiality at the when the Macintosh market was just about to boom, in 1986. You could feel it in the offices of Wired on Third St in SF in 1995.
You can’t bottle the feeling, and it doesn’t last very long, maybe a year or two. But in these periods, when people are relaxed and excited and confident, you can really get stuff done. We’ll remember Gnomedex 2005 for that for many years to come. [Scripting News]
People I schmoozed with are - putting RSS feeds on cell phones, comic strips too. Mergng news aggregators with social networks so if your friends all read something then it assumes you want to read it to. Working on smart filtering so we only get want we want to get with the noise filtered out. These are just a few examples. There are hundreds more.
2-3 years from now - oh, those two broke guys with that little startup I met at Gnomedex 5.0, now their company is 500 people… I’m already working on ways that the Left can use all of to mobilize, propagandize, build demonstrations, and reach a much larger audience. More later!
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Bob Morris @ Jun 25th 2005 00:03 - Category: Unfiled ;
US acknowledges torture at Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan
The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.
Didn’t they loudly proclaim just a few weeks back that everyone was treated oh so nicely at Gitmo?
Italy seeks ‘CIA kidnap agents’
Italian authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 people they claim are agents “linked to the CIA”.
The suspects are accused of abducting an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for interrogation.
AKA kidnapping and torture.
And it’s all for naught. Bush vows he’s ‘not giving up’ in Iraq. Translation: The US has lost but can’t admit it yet.
Bob Morris @ Jun 25th 2005 00:01 - Category: Unfiled ;
Dave and Adam pose for gnomerazzi as Secret Service looks away.
Dave Winer opened Gnomedex with a keynote speech, Adam Curry closes it today with another keynote. Yesterday Adam noted he and Dave worked for four years on getting the enclosure field in RSS to work so files could be podcasted. He said they would excitedly announce on their blogs that wow, we just made it transfer a 100 MB file and the response was … crickets.
Not any more. Now mass media outlets are podcasting, with more coming.
Winer is a brilliant programmer and conceptualizer who can be abrasive, a role he appears to relish, even if he has the scars to prove it. Curry is a natural front man, enthusiastic and highly intelligent. They have fundamental differences on what podcasting should be, differences put aside at least temporarily so this conference could be everything it could be.
Winer is concerned commercialization will kill podcasting. Curry says bring on the commercialization, in fact, I’ll help put ads into your podcasts, if you want them, and hey, everyone was afraid commercialization would kill the Net and today the Net is far bigger than anyone ever thought it would be ten years ago. His keynote today should be illuminating.
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Bob Morris @ Jun 24th 2005 17:26 - Category: Unfiled ;
The next version of Windows, Longhorn, will support RRS - the framework of blogs and podcasting - in a big way. What’s more, they are releasing their new RSS specs into Creative Commons, which means it will be open to all. Lawrence Lessig blessed it in a video thanking Microsoft for doing so. This is an serious big deal earthquake.
Internet Explorer will support RSS feeds that will be searchable. These feeds will reside in a common open repository that any Windows application can use. Part of their new RRS spec includes lists.
What does this mean to the non-tech user? Lots.
You’ll be able to -
Do a MSN search, say “antiwar podcasts”, and effortlessly turn it into an RSS feed that you can access in your browser, Outlook, Word, or whatever; a feed that is updated everytime a new antiwar podcast appears.
Amazon wish lists that are searchable and sortable so you can track real time what everyone wants for Xmas.
Download calendars from websites and have them appear in Outlook or any other calendar program, with the dates and times automatically updated if they change.
Create screensavers out of photo blogs.
Microsoft demo’ed the above apps today in their first public showing of IE 7.0. These apps already exist!
Here’s another idea. You are using Craigs List to look for an apartment. How about having a list of apartments that interest you automatically uploaded to your cell phone. Using RSS, this can happen.
Yeah, Microsoft is a Borg. Do they have their own agenda? Well, of course they do. But their initiative to release the new RRS spec into Creative Commons makes things open for all, and this is truly a big deal that will have impact for years to come.
PS More later. My brain is full right now!
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Bob Morris @ Jun 24th 2005 17:23 - Category: Unfiled ;
The wireless net here at Gnomedex is part of the Bell Harbor Convention Hall, a facility operated by the city of Seattle, and the net has run fine through many a conference. Chris Pirillo, organizer of Gnomedex did warn them, saying Gnomedexers would be creating a serious stress test of their net, so they better be ready!
And so we did. Half an hour after the conference started, with 400 attendees online with their notebooks, we used up all the IP addresses. They added more networks. Didn’t really help. The nets are mostly up but very slow. 400 normal users is one thing. 400 blogging geeks running news aggregators, uploading and downloading podcasts, checking email, etc. put a stress on a net that even this net in Seattle, the most wireless city in the country, couldn’t handle.
Bob Morris @ Jun 24th 2005 00:03 - Category: Unfiled ;
You could just walk into a conversation and you knew what they were talking about. Lots of video bloggers, podcasters, techies; some from startups, others from Microsoft or Feedburner or a CGI company or whatever. Most have multiple interests and/or blogs. A smart, creative crowd.
I was happily surprised by the positive reaction to Polizeros, which I described as an antiwar blog. Several already read it, others really liked the idea. As far as I know, Polizeros is the only political blog there.
This opening reception was last night. Gnomedex starts today for two days of solid non-stop talks and panels about the future of blogs and podcasting. Panels include “Tomorrow’s Syndication” , “Today’s Citizen Media”, “Tomorrow’s Open Source”, with keynote speeches by Dave Winer (who invented blogs and RSS) and Dean Hachamovitch of Microsoft who is expected to make a major announcement about Microsoft, RSS, blogs, and podcasting.
Blogs allow everyone to have a voice. We fly under, through, and past the radar of major media. Someone in a position to know told me he mentioned Daily Kos, the biggest of all the political blogs, to someone at a large newspaper and got swearing in return. It wasn’t even about Kos’s progressive politics. It was about this little upstart of a blog that now gets more hits (450,000 a day) than the newspaper’s website gets. That is the power of blogs.
PS On the bus shuttle from the airport the driver said Boeing was the largest employer in Seattle, 48,000 employess, with Microsoft at 16,000, yet their payrolls are the same, so “either someone is overpaid or someone is underpaid
Bob Morris @ Jun 24th 2005 00:02 - Category: Unfiled ;
Rumsfeld: US not losing Iraq war
Meanwhile, Bush approval sinks further
Most striking: A startling 60% of registered voters disapprove of Bush’s handling of the economy, with 63% of Americans rating the national economy as “bad, very bad, or terrible.”
Bob Morris @ Jun 24th 2005 00:01 - Category: Unfiled ;
Protest anti-immigrant racists in Baldwin Park
Stop attacks on immigrants!
No to SOS/Minutemen/KKK!
This Saturday, June 25, 11 am
3875 Downing Ave
(Corner of Ramona & Downing - Free parking on Ramona)
Baldwin Park, CA
More info at ANSWER LA, one of the many groups mobilizing to be there.
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