Jay and Ryanne came over to my place and interviewed Jamais a couple months ago.

Here's the end result:

DATE: TODAY - Saturday, March 22, 2008

TIME: 11am and 3pm SLT

Come see my pal Cylindrian Rutabega - along with the ChangHigh Sisters - performing LIVE.

I haven't seen the ChangHigh sisters personally yet, but for those of you, like myself, who are interested in both music artists, and the latest set design and visual performance art in the Second Life space, I hear they're pushing the envelope, and I think you'll be interested in checking out this show.

I'll be at the 3pm show, if you want to meet up there.

Cylindrian was very excited to be branching out a little from the traditional "music gig," and over into a new kind of artistic realm.

Here's a little more from the notecard from Cylindrian:

"ChangHigh Sisters will not only dance their beautiful firedances of an exotic and seductive nature, but will in the show, present the virtuals worlds first 2, 3, 6 and 7 acrobatic pyramids and will jump up in their rotating trapezes and show the harmony and elegance of an almost unseen kind ever before."

Click on the image below for a teleport.

Wow my worlds collide again. I just met Aubrey last October.

Now, he's on the Colbert Report.

(sidenote: I have an 45 minute interview of my own with him that I'll be putting up soon, but I really wanted to present it just the right way. I told him I wanted the "homer simpson version" of what the hell he was talking about, and by golly, I think he gave it to me :-)

Stephen's skepticism actually does a really nice job of framing Aubrey arguments too! Nice work Stephen!

You can find out more by picking up a copy of Aubrey's book too.

Learn more about Aubrey's SENS platform.

All hail The Colbert Report.

Jay headed over to Brewster's to check out one of the $100 laptops. Pretty cool.

Man there's nothing like
someone's First Vlog post.

You never forget it :-)

Chris Paine gets a mention in the opener of a new Time Magazine article about GM's
Green Motors.

No one would mistake Chris Paine for a General Motors shill. In his 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, the filmmaker laid out a damning case against GM for unplugging the EV1, the electric vehicle it manufactured in the 1990s and then discontinued in 2003, preferring instead to produce high-margin but gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. "They were a technological leader, and they fumbled that leadership away," Paine says. Ask him about the U.S. carmaker now, though, and Paine sounds almost admiring. "Their new hybrids are making a difference, and their plug-in technology is a real advance," he says. "GM is making some really good moves now."

Hey LA-based tree hugger peeps!

Time to come out in full force tomorrow evening in Santa Monica for a
March to Save The Trees in memory of Gandhi's Birthday.

Chris Paine, and old friend of mine, and Director of the awesome film, Who Killed The Electric Car, has been helping to organize a series of Tree Saver meetings that have been going on over the past few weeks to save over 50 Ficus trees scheduled for removal under the guise of being diseased (extreme disagreement over this point by experts in the community).

There's a Tree Saver Blog where you can get more information about it all.

Below: The Tree Savers Crew

Here's more about Who Killed The Electric Car too! Lots to talk about on this front in the days - and years, to come: Press/Reviews of Film Why Electric Cars Are Better Cool Scenes From The Film I found on YouTube Trailer Buy The DVD

More info here.

There's an interesting collection of old friends (and one new one) at this event Tuesday night, so I'm gonna try to make it.

I've known RU for years before we ever started working together (via Ron Turner at Last Gasp, who published the graphic novel I edited for Timothy Leary -- Link to phone message from him about the book that I love to link to :)

Recently, I co-hosted an RU Sirius show last October with guest Dan the Automator w/RU and Jeff Diehl -- and also produced the Songs From the Commons Podcasts from 2006 for RU's Mondoglobo.net.

Meanwhile, I just reconnected with Howard Rheingold last week, after about 4 years (!) and took a nice walk out on Mt. Tamalpias, and talked about Second Life, Twitter and Facebook for two hours (and inspired Howard to increase his twittering i think :-)

BoingBoing's David Pescovitz I know well from the old days with Cory when he lived here in San Francisco, and thus I have not seen David for years - so I can't wait to...and...

Jamais Cascio has been a great twitter friend for a few weeks now that I look forward to finally meeting in person...

Let's see if I can make it out of my cave Tuesday night!

See you there!

Kent Bye just recently relocated to San Francisco from Maine, and the Bay Area will never be the same :-)

Just found this cool vid of Kent Bye and Jay Dedman walking through San Francisco discussing the role of citizen journalism's influence on big media and their continued state of denial regarding its obvious impact.

Translation: Turns out that people's opinions do matter after all!

Update 4/13/07 - Kent explained to me that "That vid is actually from NYC way back in October of 2005. :)
Jay shot it and was cleaning up his archives during VBW07"

Front Page of the Sunday Chronicle Baby!

My pal Kevin Burton on the cover of the SF chronicle...the article discusses the new Web 2.0-ish model of just working out of coffeehouses, rather than renting office space...

I knew Chris Paine way back in 1993, when I was working with him on Telemorphix's 21st Century Vaudeville. He was a really sweet, smart, and very creative guy with big ideas about everything. Nice to see him pull it all together to create his little masterpiece, Who Killed the Electric Car?.

Chris Paine On The Daily Show (Quicktime, 15 MB)

Dabble Record for this interview

WHAT: 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Debate
WHO: The RU Sirius Show
WHERE: Off-Market Theater, 965 Mission Street (at 5th), San Francisco
WHEN: Sunday, September 10, 2PM
COST: FREE

http://laughingsquid.com/2006/09/05/ru-sirius-show-live/

Over the last year, RU Sirius and Jeff Diehl have been hosting the amazing RU Sirius Show, a weekly podcast that launched in June 2005 as part of The MondoGlobo Network. It’s featured a stunning line-up of guests, discussing intriguing topics and cultural phenomenon.

This Sunday, September 10th, they will be producing their first ever live show, in the form of a public debate: “9/11: Considering All the Claims”. The show starts at 2PM and takes place at the Off-Market Theater in San Francisco. Admission is free.
9/11: Considering All the Claims

The producers of The RU Sirius Show bring you 9/11: Considering All the Claims. During this rare, FREE public presentation, you will be able to examine all the issues at one event on Sunday, September 10th, 2006.

The backers of the “shadow government” camp have many issues that they believe were not addressed by the authorities in investigating the attacks; the backers of the “Bin Laden-did-it” camp have questions of their own. Both sides have accused the other of perpetrating wild conspiracy theories and hoaxes upon the public, so we thought we’d provide an open examination and critique of the major points, especially given recent polls that show 42% of Americans suspect the government had a hand in causing the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Joel Schalit, a Managing Editor for Tikkun Magazine, will be representing those who are skeptical about the “conspiracy theories.” Fred Burks, who served as a foreign language interpreter for top officials in many countries, including Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, will be representing the “pro-conspiracy” view.

RU Sirius will host the panel along with RU Sirius Show co-host Jeff Diehl.

Posted by Lisa at 12:46 PM

Steve's daughter Genevieve is directing a play Saturday night at the Berkeley Rep. The Chronicle gave it a great review in last weeks pinkie.

Doors open at 7:30. Two one-act plays. Joey Buttafuoco is first, then the other one after a 10-minute intermission.
Teen Council's Target® One Acts Festival

Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, 2071 Addison St., Berkeley. $5-$10.
(510) 647-2972 www.berkeleyrep.org

Danah was on Oreilly Factor and Bill actually wasn't a complete dick. Go figure :-)

Wow. They call her a cultural anthropologist. Looks pretty cool on the screen. That's fer sure.

Nice job Danah.

(Hey I wanna be a cultural anthropologist! Maybe I can call myself that when I finish my masters...)
Update! Hey I'm not trying to be a smartass! I'm just jealous :-)
Sure, Danah looks like an ordinary anthropologist in this clip. But the few times I've met her, not long ago, she always had an extra sparkley dress or stripey pants or a huge floppy hat or something far from ordinary. It's like she's gone undercover.

My friend Steve Michel asked me to take a sec to remember his friend. Hang in there buddy :-)

This just in from R.U. Sirius:

Does transhumanism suck? Will humanity be transformed in 2012? Are
smart homes stupid? Should the editor of a webzine be interviewed by
his publisher about his own book if that book is a history of counterculture?

NeoFiles Vol.1 Num.11

This just in from Ryan Junell:

From: ryan junell
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 18:54:42 -0400
To: free.eddie@texasmonkey.com
Subject: FREE EDDIE!

the rnc video project is in a weird spot... while I was inside the convention hall last night holding up a sign that said "girlymen for arnold" (I voted green in cali, btw)... project producer eddie codel was following the action at one of the protests when he got fenced in by cops arresting everyone on the block. they arrested over 1000 people last night and have detained them at the piers for now over 20 hours.

honestly, I don't know what to do. he has not even been BOOKED yet (I called central booking). I'm about to file a missing persons claim on him because he is really nowhere to be seen.

THE BIG FUCKING PROBLEM is that I think they are holding these protestors in cages down by the water for as long as they can possibly do it so that they don't return to the streets to protest the second they are let out!!! this is BULLSHIT!!! what happened to due process!?!!

anyways.... I think you guys should know this and if you have any insight to the situation please let me know. I'm pretty sure the mass media has agreed to choke this story but there are literally thousands of people protesting this convention. sunday's march was without question over 400,000 if not a full half million. seriously.

eddie is an inspired political activist. we started working together six years ago on an event series about independent publishing on the internet. he's gone on to do work with indyvoter.org, the matt gonzalez campaign, and a ton of other non profit benevolent projects. he's got a heart of gold and a really awesome and gnarly sense of humor.

I feel bad now that I convinced him to come to nyc and work on this project over burning man this year (he didn't need much convincing). right now he could be delirious, tired, smelly and around the coolest people in the world out in the desert instead of delirious, tired, smelly and around the coolest people in the world in the guantanomo by the hudson.

throw money his way via the paypal link at www.junell.net or do a search for "girlymen" on ebay and donate there. or just drop him a line and let him know he's a kickass fighter! eddie@eddie.com

and watch this:

http://in8.com/fucknewyork/Resources/fucknewyork.mov

Here's
an interview that was published last month in OpenP2P.com with Brewster Khale.

"Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

Here is the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad:

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2004/01/22/kahle.html

Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive and People's Technology
by Lisa Rein
01/22/2004

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian for the Internet Archive (IA). He is also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The IA started out as just that -- a non-profit organization dedicated to taking snap shots of the entire Web every six months, in order to create a searchable archive.

One of the main goals of the Internet Archive is to provide "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." It sounds like a lofty task, but Brewster is firmly committed to it, and truly believes that it is achievable. Anyone in his presence for five minutes or more is likely to feel the same way, because his enthusiasm is quite contagious.

Brewster started the IA in 1996 with his own money, which he earned from the sale of two separate Internet search programs: WAIS, which was bought by AOL, and Alexa Internet, which was bought by Amazon. He has been spending his own money to keep the institution going for the last six years. Recently, in the summer of 2003, he was fortunate enough to receive some grants and corporate sponsorship.

Newer IA projects include creating an open source movie archive, creating a rooftop-based WiFi network across San Francisco, creating an archive of the 2004 presidential candidates (offering every candidate unlimited storage and bandwidth to serve up video), and creating a non-profit documentary archive.
Let's Start with the Internet Archive

Lisa Rein: What's the story behind the birth of the Internet Archive? How did it start?

Brewster Kahle: The Internet Archive started in 1996, when the Internet had reached critical mass. By 1996, there was enough material on the Internet to show that this thing was the cornerstone for how people are going to be publishing. It is the people's library. People were using the Internet in a major way towards making things available, as well as for finding answers to things. And, of course, the Internet is quite fleeting. The average life of a web page is about 100 days. So if you want to have culture you can count on, you need to be able to refer to things. And if things change out from underneath you all the time, then you're in trouble. So what traditionally has happened is that there are libraries, and libraries collect up out-of-print materials and try to preserve and make open access to materials that aren't necessarily commercially viable at the moment. The Internet Archive is just a library. It just happens to be a library that mostly is composed of bits.

LR: How did you get the funding for it?

BK: The funding for the Internet Archive came originally from the success of selling a couple of Internet companies on the path towards building a library. So the original funding was from me, based on selling one company, WAIS, Inc. which was the first Internet publishing system, to America Online. And then Alexa Internet, which was a company short for "the Library of Alexandria," to try to catalog the Web. So all of these were trying to build towards the library, and these companies were sold to successful companies and so that gave me enough money to kick start the Internet Archive. At this point, it's funded by private foundations, government grants, and in-kind donations from corporations.

LR: So AOL bought WAIS and who bought Alexa?

BK: Amazon bought Alexa.

LR: What are some of the grants? Didn't you get some good grants lately, during the past year?

BK: Oh yes, we've been very fortunate in this phase of the Internet Archive's life. The Sloan Foundation gave us a significant grant towards helping get the materials up and able to be used by researchers all over the world, and the Hewlett Foundation also gave us a sizable grant to bring more digital materials from a lot of non-profit institutions to give them permanent access.

For instance, a lot of organizations create documentaries that maybe are shown once or twice, but they're not permanently available. But their general approach was to have things to be available. So by having a library be able to digitize and host these materials, we hope to bring a lot of non-profit materials up and out onto the Internet so they can be leveraged and used by people all over the world.

Brewster Kahle speaking at the O'Reilly 2003 Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, CA

LR: How many people work here at the Internet Archive right now?

BK: There are 12 people full-time here at the Internet Archive -- probably 20 if you count, all told. There are a lot of people that come through. We've got a programmer from Norway and a programmer from Iceland here now. We had a programmer from Japan that sort of came through and helped intern and shared the technology that they know and also what we know.

LR: What would you tell somebody that was interested in participating somehow? You're always looking for people to work on projects, right?

BK: We're always looking for help. People are helping in many, many different ways. By curating collections. By keeping good web sites. By making sure that web sites can be archived -- is how thousands of people are helping. But people are also helping curate some of the collections that are here. We have volunteers that are helping with, oh, things like SFLan and some of the technical work that we do. But also, we are growing slowly and we are hiring a few more people -- mostly very technical.

LR: Talk about SFLan a bit.

BK: SFLan is a wireless project that is based around San Francisco. The idea is to experiment using the wireless network to do a rooftop network, to use to use commodity wireless 802.11 WiFi stuff to hop from roof to roof to roof to provide an alternative to DSL and cable for the last mile.

If we can make that both be open and have distributed ownership, then people would own the roadways and they would basically control their network, which is what the Internet really is.

LR: What do you mean by "the last mile," exactly?

BK: Trying to get the last piece from getting from a central location where there might be a fiber that comes to a city, and try to get that distributed so that people in their homes can not only get materials at video speeds, 3-5 megabits per second -- DVD-like speeds -- but also act as servers to make things available to others over the Internet at high speeds.

These are some of the things that are very difficult to do, if not impossible, with the current commercial DSL and cable providers. And we're looking to see how we can not only establish that baseline of video-ready Internet and make it so people can serve video over the Internet, but then, every year, make it better by a factor of two. So the technology follows Moore's Law just like the computer guys do, as opposed to how the telecoms tend to work, which is "here's the same thing, and you'll buy the same thing, and maybe we'll raise the price slightly ..."

LR: And keep paying more for it.

BK: Right.

LR: So you're looking for people with rooftops?

BK: We're looking for people with rooftops. And especially people that can buy a node. A node costs $1,000, and that's a little Linux box with a directional antenna.

LR: Is that a node right there?

BK: This is a node right here (gestures). So this is an SFLan box. This is a directional antenna that points upstream back to a node that's closer to the Net. This is an omni antenna. So anyone who can see this can be on the Internet for free.

And this is a Linux machine that's got a CompactFlash card as its hard drive, and two radios. And you get a wire that comes down into your house, which is the way that power is brought up to this machine. And also, you get bandwidth within your house or office.

There are about 23 of these around San Francisco on rooftops now, and we're actively deploying new software. Cliff Cox up in Oregon is doing a lot of the software development and also hardware development. He's actually the guy that sells these things for $1,000. So Internet Archive's participation is to help fund the project to get it kick-started, and to try to get some active roofs up and running.

LR: How does the Internet Archive decide about implementing new technologies? What's your philosophy about implementing new technologies?

BK: The Internet Archive is extremely pragmatic about new technologies. What we tend to do is look at the least costly, both in the short term and long term. So we are frugal to the core.

We run currently about 700 computers. They're all running Linux. We don't have any dedicated routers. We just use Linux machines. We use the same Linux machine over and over and over and over and over again. Jim Gray's model -- he calls it the "brick model." So we just use Linux machines stacked up, and even though they might be storage machines, or CPU machines, or running as a router, or running as a load balancer, or a database machine -- they're all just the same machine. What we've found is that it allows us to only have one or maybe just two systems administrators being able to scale to many hundreds and, we hope, a few thousand, machines, by having such a simple underlying hardware architecture.

Because we operate on these machines stacked up, we tend to do everything based on clusters. Because our amounts of data are fairly large. We have, oh, several hundred terabytes at this point -- three, four hundred terabytes of materials, and it's growing a lot. So it's difficult to process these if you have to go through just one machine, and a lot of proprietary software is licensed to just be on one machine, or it costs per each.

Open source has the ability that you can go and run it on as many machines as you want. Because we run things and we do data processing and conversions on ten machines or a hundred machines at once, we find that open source is often the most pragmatic, least costly way to roll. We also find that it's easiest for other people to copy our model if we use open source software, so we tend towards using open source software, because we'd like anything that we develop to be actively used by others readily and easily.

LR: How much do you test before going live with new services and things? Do you do a lot of testing?

BK: Do we do a lot of testing? I'd say we do a lot of progressive rollouts. We do testing in-house, but you can only go so far, and then you bring on some number of your users and bring things out. I'd say we're less testing-oriented. We're less service-quality oriented than a lot of places, because we're researching. We're trying to push the edge. So we try to make sure our data is safe, but if there happens to be a hiccup, we are very public about that, and we're looking for help from others to help us resolve these and find them. So I'd say we're not like a commercial company doing lots of in-house testing and rounds and rounds of beta testing, because we only have 12 people to run all of this.

LR: Can you remember a specific situation where the technology could have gone one way or the other, and you decided on a certain way over another way, and why? When there's a fork in the road, what process do you go through to decide which way to go?

BK: Boy, when there're different choices of which way to go, you find that one of the lead motivators in terms of how we decide which way to go is which way people believe it should go. People are always open to testing and pushing back and saying, "Why do you think that's true?" Especially if we've tried going down that road before.

Let's take RAID -- Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. The idea is to run, say, four disks or eight disks as a cluster of disks so that if one fails, it has the information on the other ones, so that it doesn't fail, so you can replace the disk and be able to keep going. Every few years we think that this is the right thing to do, and every few years, we find, unfortunately, that it is the wrong thing to do.

But it doesn't seem to keep us from trying again. Every so often we think, "Okay, they must have fixed the bugs," and that the software must be more reliable, or the controllers must be more reliable, and we'll go and put some number of machines into this new structure and then watch them for six months to a year to sort of see, "Does it work better or worse than what we were using before?" With RAID, we've found with two major tests of RAID that it's been a loser.

LR: Why? What goes wrong?

BK: We're not exactly sure, but it looks like the RAID controllers are just not debugged very well. The software isn't debugged. The hardware isn't debugged. There are failure modes that fall outside of there. "Oh," (supposedly) "if one disk just goes completely corrupt, then you can replace it and everything's fine." Well, we've found out in the latest Linux release that if two disks just hiccup slightly, then it gives it up for lost and it says, "You lose all your data," and so we've had to spend months then going back and decrypting all of the Linux RAID controller file system to be able to recover all of the data that you can actually recover. So I think it's just bad implementations based on not being able to get the reliability up, based on not having enough test cases.

We go along with Hillis' Law. Danny Hillis was one of the great computer designers of all time, and his approach was to have large numbers of commodity components; that basically, price follows volume. So if things are made in more volume, the price is lower. You can say, "Duh. Obviously." But it's amazing that most people don't follow this. Particularly that the price goes down when there's more of it made. You want to use things that cost less, because you might get more gigabytes per hard drive if you're using commodity components, as opposed to specialty components.

But another corollary of this is that "reliability follows volume." That things that are made in large volume have to be more reliable, at least in the long haul, otherwise the company that's making them would go out of business because they'd have too many failures. Another way of saying that is that Toyotas are more reliable than Ferraris. Even though a Toyota might cost one-tenth as much as a Ferrari, they are probably on the road more often. The coupling of this is that if you want a reliable system, and you want one that doesn't cost that much, go for high volume, if you want it available, reliable, etc. And so we find that technologies that are commodity and made in high volumes work better.

Tomas Krag
Wireless Networks as a Low-Cost, Decentralized Alternative for the Developing World

Informal and wire.less.dk are working to promote the use of wireless technologies (mainly 802.11) in the developing world. We are planning a Wireless Roadshow to teach local technology NGOs how wireless technologies can be used to bring Internet and intranet connectivity to those parts of the world not included in the plans of the commercial telecommunications companies.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
February 9-12, 2004
San Diego, CA

LR: When you say "commodity," you mean "off the shelf," or COTS products, right?

BK: Yes.

LR: Let's talk a little bit about your philosophy now. Could you discuss what you mean when you talk about "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge?"

BK: "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

LR: Do you have an overall philosophy about technology and the direction in which you'd like to see it go?

BK: I don't really have a philosophy about technology. I have a philosophy of what future I want to live in, which is probably more of a social and cultural issue than it really is a technological issue. And socially and culturally, what I want to grow up in -- and have my kids grow up in -- is a wonderful flowering of all sorts of really wild ideas coming from all sorts of people doing diverse and interesting things.

What I'd really like to see is a world where there's no limitations on getting your creative ideas out there. That people have a platform to find their natural audience. Whether their natural audience is one person, themselves, or a hundred people, or a thousand people. Try to make it so the technologies that we develop, and the institutions we develop, make it so that people have an opportunity to flower. To live a satisfying life by providing things to others that they appreciate.

And I think our technologies right now are well-suited to doing this in the information domain. In the information domain, we can go and offer people an ability to publish without the traditional restrictions that came before, and to help, with these search engine technologies, to help them find their natural audiences. And so people out there aren't surrounded by stuff they don't want. That they find that the music recordings they want and the video recordings they want, even though they're made a half a continent away, and there are only a hundred other people that also really like that genre.

LR: What kind of projects are you working on with the Library of Congress?

BK: We've been working with the Library of Congress over the last three or four years to help archive web sites. They've got a mission to record the cultural heritage of the United States -- actually also, Thomas Jefferson gave them, more broadly, "the world." And now that publishing is moving, or a large section of publishing, is moving on to the Internet, we've been working with them as a technology partner. They do the curation, and we do some special crawls.

Our first project with them was the election in the year 2000. The presidential election. And they selected a set of web sites, and we crawled them every day to try to get a historical record, and then the Internet Archive made them available to the world to see and use, to see if it was useful to people.

The Library of Congress is trying to move into the digital realm, and they just got a hundred million dollars from Congress to help do digital preservation, and we hope to be participants as that unfolds. We'll see. But the Library of Congress has got a lot of money -- a 450-to-500-million-dollars-a-year budget. We hope that a growing percentage of that goes towards digital materials, whether working with us or others, than currently, which is I think probably less than one percent.

LR: Earlier you said that one way that people could help was to make their web sites "more archivable," basically. What does that really mean? How would you make your web site easily archivable?

BK: Boy. By being straightforward. I think by keeping things fairly simple. If web sites have sort of straightforward links, then that makes things a lot easier.

LR: What do you mean "straightforward?"

BK: Straightforward URLs. JavaScript that's fairly clear-cut or reused from other places. What we have been really stumped on is sites that need a lot of JavaScript or a lot of programs that are needed to even render the site at all.

Probably one way of finding out is going to archive.org and seeing, "Did we get it right?" the last time. We're continuously updating our tools and trying to make things better. But for instance, we've been having trouble with .swf files, Shockwave and Flash files, from Macromedia. If those files have links to other pages inside of them, we're just not able to find those links, so we can't follow them. We also have trouble rewriting those .swf files so that they point to the Archive's version of the links and not the live Web's. So we're having trouble with certain complicated web sites. What we'd like to see is more straightforward use of pointers, because the hyperlink is one of the great ideas of the Internet.

Lisa Rein is a co-founder of Creative Commons, a video blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar, and a singer-songwriter-musican at lisarein.com.

John Perry Barlow has started a blog.

'Bout time! Thanks John Perry!

I've been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do - and, personally, I'd rather pump septic tanks - consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you'd get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.

But then - duh - it dawned on me that I'm under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.

As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You're a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I've never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual....)

Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn't start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn't be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I'd tell myself, "This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow."

This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco's snotty W Hotel - where there is at least free WiFi coverage - and within a few minutes I had a blog.

SPAM CALLED ON ACCOUNT OF DARKNESS

A funny thing happened to this spam on its way to you. I wrote it Friday afternoon, shortly after setting up my first blog. As usual, I dispatched it to my list-server at EFF, from which it was to be flung around the planet in swarms of magnetic jitter. But very near the time it arrived there, a fire broke out in the P.P.& L. substation in San Francisco's Mission District, near the Network Operations Center, wherein resides the server that normally flings my spam.

My mail host is also there and I didn't get any for a few hours - it's amazing how brief the delay was considering the mess in San Francisco - when it resumed I could see that the following message hadn't gone out.

I tried a test spam to see if the list-serve was up. No joy. The mail host was still working, albeit through a soda-straw connection, but the list-serve had crashed. And, so doing, it had apparently blasted this message into electronic nothingness.

Or maybe not. I kept thinking the server might come up coughing and spitting, and burp up for the old BarlowSpam just as I was re-sending it in this form. This kept me from resend it until now.

Timing was important though because I was announcing with it the arrival of my new blog, which, as you will read, is intended to be a place for you as much as for me. I posted the following Barlowspam on the blog at the same time I e-mailed it to you. But its subjects, the new BarlowFriendz blog, and my invitations to join me at Tribe.Net and LinkedIn.Com, are already a reality. So, it's lumpy, but it's happening...

------------------------------------>>>>-------------------------------------------!!!--------------------->>>>>>

HTTP://BLOG.BARLOWFRIENDZ.NET

After skidding through much of last two years on bald tires of unconditional hope, I am starting to feel traction again. The polarity may be about to reverse. New light is perceptible.

Still, things might get worse before they get better, and if I haven't learned anything else during this dreary passage, I've learned that we need each other. I've learned that community, in which I've always placed great rhetorical value, really does count.

Ironically, I've learned this even as I thinned my own belonging in the communities that once sustained me. I have not set foot in the little Wyoming town I still call "home" during calender year. I've bounced around the planet, solitary as an ion, as though in Brownian Motion. Though too alone in other ways, I suspect I'm not alone in this.

So I'd like to do more to increase the density of connection with this little community, the BarlowFriendz. Aside from being bound by the one thing you know you have in common, knowing me, you've been provided with little opportunity to learn about the many other things you have in common.

Of course, many of you knew each other to begin with, and many, many more have come to know each other through BarlowFrenzies over the years, but you've so far had no means of getting generally connected in Cyberspace. My method of communication with you has been generally about as interactive as Rush Limbaugh's. I broadcast and then take a few calls (or e-mails, as the case may be) which I have not shared.

I've often thought about passing them on, because they are usually as wonderful, thoughtful, witty, and intelligent as you are. But I didn't want to burden you with even more e-mail than you're already gagging on. It felt selfish not to share such an embarrassment of riches, but I know that if you start getting too much mail from me, you filter it into another mailbox which you never get around to opening. (Maybe this message is sitting just such a black hole now.)

The solution has been obvious for some time: put up a blog. Then, instead of sending your responses to me alone, you can send them to everyone who reads the blog. Of course, personal responses can still be directed to me. (Though please be careful not to include barlowfriendz@eff.org among the recipients. A couple of months ago, I responded to such a message without checking the To: line and dispatched my reply to the entire list. Just in case you were wondering what that was...)

I've been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do - and, personally, I'd rather pump septic tanks - consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you'd get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.

But then - duh - it dawned on me that I'm under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.

As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You're a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I've never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual....)

Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn't start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn't be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I'd tell myself, "This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow."

This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco's snotty W Hotel - where there is at least free WiFi coverage - and within a few minutes I had a blog.

Of course, it's still a larval thing. I don't have a great designer's eye, nor am I fully on top of the tools yet. Worse, I don't have an instinct for the natural protocols of the medium. Good blog posts are, in my observation, brief and telegraphic. I am orotund and discursive. I do go on. Perhaps I'll adapt. Perhaps you will.

The main thing is that now we have a place where we can get together between BarlowFrenzies, as well as a place where those of you too far-flung to bring your bodies to a party in Meatspace can get to know each other. We have a place where we can start building a community of ourselves, which, though virtual now, might eventually lead to the real thing. (And, believe me, I do know the difference. Virtual community remains one of my favorite oxymorons.) Still, this feels like it might be a kind of home for us. A home in nowhere, but a home.

Finally, I would like to be better connected with those of you who are already in the Blogosphere. If you'll send me your own blog URL's, I'll link them on my blog. And I hope you will link me on yours. By cross-linking one another, we can generate a more audible collective voice. We can make of ourselves a rich and growing ecosystem of opinion.

----------------------------...----------------------->>>>>>>---------------------------@-------------------------->>

NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION

An ecosystem is an information sorting engine. Whether photons entering a rain forest or heat gradients entering the deep ocean, biological systems pass these differences back and forth among themselves, creating increasingly complex matrices of structure. Hence, Life.

And yet, the most complex information sorting system yet devised by humans, the Internet, remains relatively simple and flat, rather as life was before the Cambrian explosion. Every IP address is like a single celled animal, with larger critters yet to emerge.

I've been expecting to see more new forms of order in Cyberspace than I have so far and am always watchful for the substrates of connection that might support it as it emerges. Lately, I've been watching sites that seek to narrow and map the famous 6 degrees of separation, like Friendster, Tribes.Net, and LinkedIn.Com.

I'm not entirely sure these things are going anywhere truly interesting, but they are certainly diverting to observe from a sociological standpoint. The former two are like gigantic singles bars for Burning Man refugees, while the latter seems to function largely as a means to reduce professional surface tension between aspiring business types.

It occurs to me, however, that since I am eager to increase the personal connectivity among you BarlowFriendz and give you better opportunities to know one another without passing through me, these sites might be useful to us. (There is already a so-far fairly quiescent BarlowFriendz "tribe" on Tribes.Net.) At least, it feels worthy of an experiment.

So I hope you won't mind that I'm dumping your addresses into the hopper at all three of these sites just to see what emerges. I don't think you have worry about your privacy. All of them seem to be scrupulous about not revealing e-mail addresses, personal information, or, in the case, of the first two, actual identities.

You will not be bombarded with e-mail, as you were during the infamous PeopleLink experiment back in 1997. In fairness, that attempt turned out to be headed in an interesting direction, at least. Though flawed in execution, PeopleLink was a forerunner of various instant messaging systems like AIM and Messenger.

(By the way, if you feel like trying real-time chat again, my AIM/iChat handle is barlow1. I don't have a video camera set up, but I am using iChat AV on a fast line, so we can use voices if you're similarly enabled. This may prove too distracting, but I will log in for a while and see.)

As I say, this is an experiment. We may find that none of these "social environments" are particularly helpful in bringing us closer together, though, at minimum, we are likely to find ourselves back in touch with people we thought we'd lost (as I already have). Also, since most of you are highly social people, I think if we join together, we can, as a group, find ourselves only a couple of degrees removed from a very large and interesting subset of humanity.

Meanwhile, may your generic holidays be as free of familial dysfunction as possible. May your days be merry and bright, and may Uncle Fred not get too hammered over dinner.

Peace and Light,

Barlow
--
**************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net

AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1

Current Cell Phone: 917/863-2037

Current Land Line: 801/582-5035

**************************************************************

Barlow in Meatspace Now: Salt Lake City (Until 12/20) 801/582-5035

(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Pinedale, Wyoming (12/20-29) -> San Francisco (12/30-1/8) -> Las Vegas (1/8-9) -> New York, New York...

**************************************************************

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
--
**************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net

AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1

This is footage of Craig Newmark playing with Lawrence Lessig's son, Willem, while in the arms of Justin Hall. (As filmed by me.)

Hey these aren't prepared to stream over the Internet - you'll have to download them to your hard drive!

The "complete" version also has some shots of the party.

This footage was pretty dark so I had to lighten it in Premiere to make it watchable.

Highlights include Craig flapping his arms like a chicken (part 1)!!

Craig and Willem 1 of 2 (Small - 9 MB)

Craig and Willem 2 of 2 (Small - 9 MB)

Craig and Willem and Party - Complete Clip (Small - 32 MB)

Slightly higher res version of same clip (Small - 44 MB)

My buddy Kevin Burton is having a hard time finding just the right programmer for his NewsMonster company.

I know you're out there, just waiting to hear about such a position, so I thought I would take a minute out from my blogging moratorium to let you know that your new job awaits!

Email Kevin at burton@newsmonster.org if you're interested.

Here's the conversation I just had with Kevin:

Kevin: We're still hiring. We're still trying to hire people.

Lisa: Who are you trying to hire?

Kevin: Well, we're trying to hire people with Linux and Java experience. Hopefully people that have *really* strong skills -- like PhD quality stuff. Knowledge of search experience, and knowledge of reputation systems. But they're just impossible to find. Even in this job market. If you're a smart person, you still get sucked up. So it's just impossible to find anyone. It's not impossible, but you just have to spend a lot of time looking.

I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.

Here's an excerpt (complete transcription below):

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I've done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I've adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90's, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing -- the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country's in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70's when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.

And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It's changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It's changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we're now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing... another way to look at it is, in the early 90's we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That's not bad.

Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?

A: That wasn't my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what's going on. To hear about what's going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don't save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We're not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we're growing.

Here's the complete interview:

Q: How did Craigslist first get started? It was an event list, right?

Craig: 1994. I was at Charles Schwab. Evangelizing the Net and saying that the brokerage business would work that way someday. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, particularly on the Well and Usenet news groups, and figured "well, I should do some of that." So, early '95, I decided that I would start sending people notices about cool events, usually ones that involved arts and technology. And from there, via word of mouth, the news of the list spread. People wanted to be added. People wanted more stuff like jobs or stuff to sell posted there. And then I said "how 'bout apartments?" and it just grew like that. People wanted more, had suggestions. We did it. And that's the pattern to this day.

Q: What technology did you originally use for Craigslist?

A: Originally, it was borrowed kind of stuff. Simple cc: lists for email. That broke in the middle of '95. Started using majordomo by virtue of a friend's donation. Then I realized I could write code to turn the email logs into web pages. Used Perl for that. Ran on friend's machines. Linux servers usually. At one point we actually got a cheap Sun/Solaris machine, but that lasted less than a year. And from there just went on to Linux systems. Now using all sorts of open source. Apache, MySql, Squidcache, Qmail, and lots of Perl.

Q: That was what you used then? Or what you use now? Don't you have more sophisticated filtering and things?

A: Nowadays, we use all open source stuff. Everything we do is custom made beyond that. But we only switched over to a real database in late '99. Prior to that, I actually used a simple old email tool called "Pine" to manage the contents of those log files. They were effectively our database then, which is crude but effective in a very deep sense. Pine as a mail tool is really good. It's a text kind of tool, but it operates for me better than anything point and click.

Q: What made you decide to go to a real database from the Pine system you were using?

A: We figured that using Pine to manage email logs was going to break down fairly quickly as volume grew. It's just not a very efficient tool for anything but a very tiny database. And it was still kind of tiny in '99. Now we have going on about 1.5 million postings every month.

Q: And how many did you have in '99 before you made the switch? Like at what number did you decide "we can't do this anymore?"

A: I'm honestly not sure, but it would be I think in the thousands -- something like that. That was just one city back then, and now we have 23 cities with an expansion scheduled very soon, and that may add, depending on, well our guess of what we can take, we might add anywhere from 4 to 20 new cities.

Q: In the United States?

A: United States and maybe a few beyond. Maybe Canada. Maybe a little Europe. We're in London now, which has stabilized at about 800,000 page views a month.

Q: And what database do you use?

A: MySql.

Q: How do you feel in general about implementing new technologies?

A: Some of the new software technologies, particularly Java-based, are exciting. Some of the possibilities intrinsic in social software, reputation management, are pretty exciting, but first we got to do basics, and we got to do basics right. We have to do what people need from us, and we have to keep it really fast. That's more important.

Q: Than implementing a new technology just cause it's neat?

A: Right. We're not interested in technology just because it's cool.

Q: Can you think of a situation in the past where you implemented a new technology and thought it was going to help, and then it ended up creating more obstacles, and you ended up going back to whatever you were originally using?

A: Well, since we have introduced new function, new technology, carefully and gingerly, we've only had one setback. In the middle of 2000, we anonymized all postings. That is that we implemented an email relay system and applied it to everything where it said "anon-number@craigslist.org," like "anon-6073@craigslist.org." Again, that helped preserve people's anonymity in personals, plus, if a spammer gets a hold of that, well, it will expire soon.

So as a mechanism for minimizing spamming, that worked pretty well. But, a lot of people liked seeing other email addresses there, so we backed out of implementing that for everything. And now, that's an option. I think that's the closest we've ever come to backing out of something....Oh, also, at one point, I did use some Java servlets for some things, like subscription management, but the big problem back then was that the Linux libraries for Java, specifically involving networking, were flaky. But this was in 1997, when servlets were just in alpha mode.

Q: So you ended up...?

A: Everything's in Perl now. In fact, most of it's migrating to be ModPerl.

Q: So when you did that Java servlet thing, you just went back to Perl, because of the Linux libraries?

A: Yes.

Q: Can you think of a specific situation, again, where things kind of forked? I'm looking for a situation where there were a number of different options, and you ended up choosing one of the others and why?

A: Very little of that actually happened. The only such choice that comes to me is when I decided on a directory structure where postings would go after I generated them, even for different parts of the bay area, now doing parts of New York City. And I made a decision then, which, well, looks wrong now, though we're still not sure, but we're sticking with it just because it's not worth changing.

Q: Could you elaborate?

A: It just has to do with using separate directories for each sub area, rather than just relying on posting identifiers to differentiate postings in much bigger directories. And this gets into the arcana of Unix and Linux systems, and it's just a detail which no one else, you know, no one sees, but I've agonized over in the past.

Q: What have you been agonizing over?

A: Well, it's just the use of an extra level of subdirectory in path names for postings in the Bay Area or New York now, and it just goes down a level deeper than I might have chosen otherwise.

Q: So what are the pros and the cons of doing the subdirectory thing?

A: In the subdirectory case, I thought it might be faster since Linux systems, Unix systems are to be better at more directories with smaller numbers of files, as I recall. I could be wrong about that, and the tech people talk about it, but I haven't thought about the issue for a long time.

Q: So that's the pro. What would be the con of doing that?

A: Don't know offhand. I've forgotten most of the issues.

Q: How involved are other people in your decisions at Craigslist? And again, we've been talking about the technology, but include the social aspects too in your answer.

A: For the most part, day-to-day decisions are made by the people who have to implement them, which is to say the tech people, the billing people, and the customer service people. So we've driven decision-making power down to the line workers. Jim and I will still make overall directional decisions, but often only after soliciting feedback from the team and from the community.

Q: How many people do you have working for you now?

A: There are a total of 13 of us right now, and I'm pretty much positive that we'll have one more tech person rejoining us in a couple weeks.

Q: Now is that less than you used to have?

A: Yes. I think we've had 18, maybe 19 at most.

Q: So you had to scale down from before?

A: We did scale down, especially as we entered the recession after the bubble burst.

Q: Do you have any kind of overall philosophy? We touched on it a little bit before when we talked about new technologies and how it's better to keep things going and maintained well than to implement new stuff kind of for the sake of itself...

A: Do you mean the philosophy of Craig's list? What would you like?

Q: I guess social philosophy...

A: I just realized that I have a number of books that pertain...Like, there's a number of books on networking theory, like there's 6 degrees there, "Linked" by Barobasi..there's Smart Mobs...a book called Sync...

Q: I'm more interested in your philosophy...

A: Those have influenced me though.

Q: Oh okay.

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I've done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I've adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90's, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing -- the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country's in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70's when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.

And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It's changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It's changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we're now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing. Possibly Clark and Kerry. In addition, it's started to influence the passage of law. For example, the Financial Privacy Law passed in California was influenced this way. Same is true of in California of the anti-spam law. And I may end up working more with Consumer's Union on this because they're starting to put a lot of energy into this. Maybe I'll have to give AARP a call too, since I'm a card-carrying member. AARP being the American Association of Retired People.

Q: You're not going to retire anytime soon, are you?

A: You can join as early as 50. And I wanted to be a card-carrying senior citizen.

Philosophy -- another way to look at it is, in the early 90's we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That's not bad.

Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?

A: That wasn't my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what's going on. To hear about what's going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don't save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We're not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we're growing.

Foo Camp Movies: Celebrity Death Aikido Match

Here's a celebrity death aikido match between Paul "Schmoo" Holman and Jeremy Borenstein.

This was shot on October 12, 2003.

Jeremy was nice enough to provide me with a little explanation:

"Pablos and I originally met because we were both training in the same
aikido dojo. This movie shows us, out of shape and out of practice
but still having fun trying to maul each other. There's a variety of
aikido techniques more-or-less demonstrated there. Pablos takes some
nice high falls (when he leaves the ground completely for a time) and
doesn't get hurt, which is a testament to his skill."

Man does John Perry have a way with words.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build...

Hey, maybe he'll turn out to be a terrific Governor. Weirder things have happened, and lately in abundance. Maybe he will demonstrate such administrative genius that he will surgically remove 9 billion dollars of fatty deposits from California's budget without devastating public services. Maybe he will get the state back on track without either raising taxes or holding Enron accountable for the billions they swindled from his state.

But I kind of doubt it. This is a man who wanted to be adored just like Hitler, as he himself put it. This is a man whose record of boorish sexual impositions would bar him from employment in any Fortune 500 company. Not only is he macho, he *is* macho. He is arrogant, distorted, and possibly the most narcissistic person in Hollywood. (Which would make him, I guess, just about the most narcissistic person in the Milky Way galaxy.) His primary assets are good bones, great teeth, killer name recognition, and a wife whose loyalty exceeds even Hillary Clinton's. Yet the people of California turned out in record numbers a couple of Tuesdays ago and gave him everything but a blowjob.

Here is the full text of the email:

---------> B a R L o W F R i e N D Z ----->

I do try to keep this list to actual friends - by that I mean folks who might bail me out of jail. Some of what I report here is too personal to be of general interest. Nevertheless, please feel free to post or forward anything you think merits wider distribution.

I'm sure his blog will be as great as he is!

This is right before Ben Hammersley's Talk At Etech 2003.
Movie of this.

Welcome Joi!

Creative Commons Welcomes Joi Ito to Board of Directors
(Creative Commons Press Release)

Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to expanding the world of reusable content online, announced today that Joichi Ito has joined its Board of Directors. Ito is a venture capitalist, technologist, and internationally popular weblogger and commentator based in California and Japan.

"We are thrilled to have Joi Ito join the team," said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University. "His unique breadth of experience in technology, business, and policy — and his well-earned reputation as an innovator on an international level — make him a perfect new colleague for our growing organization."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3721

Creative Commons Welcomes Joi Ito to Board of Directors

Monday, June 16, 2003

San Francisco- and Tokyo-based venture capitalist, technologist, and policy expert joins leadership of the Silicon Valley nonprofit

Palo Alto, USA — Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to expanding the world of reusable content online, announced today that Joichi Ito has joined its Board of Directors. Ito is a venture capitalist, technologist, and internationally popular weblogger and commentator based in California and Japan.

"We are thrilled to have Joi Ito join the team," said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University. "His unique breadth of experience in technology, business, and policy — and his well-earned reputation as an innovator on an international level — make him a perfect new colleague for our growing organization."

"Protecting the commons is essential for enabling emerging technologies and businesses in networked consumer electronics and the Internet," said Ito. "It is critical for Japan and the rest of the world to understand and embrace Creative Commons‚ principles and tools. I am honored to join this world-class organization to help make it happen."

Ito joins a Board of Directors that includes Lessig; fellow cyberlaw experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, and Molly Shaffer Van Houweling; public domain web publisher Eric Eldred; filmmaker Davis Guggenheim; MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson; and lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlawyer Eric Saltzman.

More about Joichi Ito

Joichi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, http://www.neoteny.com, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002.

More information at http://joi.ito.com.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works — whether owned or public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school's Center for Internet and Society.

More information at http://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
1.650.723.7572 (tel)
1.415.336.1433 (cell)
glenn -AT- creativecommons.org

Joichi Ito
jito -AT- neoteny.com

Neeru Paharia
Assistant Director
Creative Commons
1.650.724.3717 (tel)
1.510.823.1073 (cell)
neeru -AT- creativecommons.org

Okay so I won't hold up the rest of these clips waiting for the tour pages.

I've still got the rest of ETech to do, then I'm going back to my Spectrum Conference and SXSW 2003 footage.

Here's the Howard Rheingold Etech 2003 presentation. The tour page will go up in a day or so.

I've broken down some of these files for easier download over slower connections.

Howard Rheingold at Etech - Video in two parts:

Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 2 (Small - 30 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 2 (Small - 50 MB)

Video in three parts:

Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 3 (Small - 40 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 3 (Small - 40 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 3 of 3 (Small - 30 MB)

Audio in two parts:

Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 2 (MP3 - 35 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 2 (MP3 - 37 MB)

Audio in four parts:

Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 4 (MP3 - 20 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 4 (MP3 - 20 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 3 of 4 (MP3 - 16 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 4 of 4 (MP3 - 17 MB)

Photos: