Give me liberty or give me…less?
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This is simply amazing.
Sure, the information printed may make a dent in tracking down terrorists. But the fault is in whoever leaked the fucking information, not the New York Times. Go fix your own problems.
The NYT is a news organization. Does free press mean nothing anymore? If the government can dictate what the press can or cannot print, even if it does so by threat of legal action, then we not longer have freedom of information, speech, or thought.
It’s disgraceful to suggest that these liberties are expendable. Next I expect the White House to line up and spit on Ben Franklin’s grave.
GEORGE BUSH and Dick Cheney are calling The New York Times a disgrace, Republican congressmen say it is guilty of treason and demand the prosecution of the Editor, while a right-wing radio presenter suggests most of its readers must be “jihadists”.
They never need much encouragement to attack America’s most venerable title which is, at least in critics’ eyes, a beacon for antiwar sentiment.
But this time the anger is palpably stronger. The newspaper’s offence was to publish an article revealing that the US Administration had kept tabs on suspected terrorists by tapping into bank records which track global transactions.
“What we did was fully authorised under the law,” said President Bush. “And the disclosure of this is disgraceful. We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that programme, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm.” read more…
Hooray for December 2004
I was going through my old file drawer and trying to make everything look like it’s in some semblance of order (this is the first time in my life I’ve bothered to do this - it occurred to me that sooner or later I would need some sort of file storage system), when I found something vexing.
An envelope very carefully (and clearly, and multiple times) dated December 4, 2004. It’s addressed to me, sealed and stamped, and from myself.
The only thing on it that suggests something out of the ordinary is the little “TMA” after my name in the part that addresses the envelope to me.
I remember doing this. I remember coming up with a really really good idea, and, not wanting to bother with patent lawyers, etc, I decided to describe the idea fully, and then mail it to myself so that should I ever need to prove in court that the idea was mine (first), I could brandish the sealed and dated envelope, striking fear into the hearts of those that dared copy me.
The problem is that I can’t remember what my great idea was. So now I’m faced with a difficult decision - do I open the envelope, thus ruining my brilliant plan, but possibly revealing to me my own former brilliance (which I would then, of course, use to get ridiculously rich)? or do I leave well enough alone, just in case someone does think of it, at which point I will have my proof?
I do not know.
Reverse blogging
One of the cool things about delicious is that it allows you to keep a reverse blog.
For example, I occasionally tag articles I’ve written or cool links I find around the internet for people who I think will be interested.
Basically, with a link, short description, and a personalized list, everyone else is making posts specifically for you. I feel like this is reverse blogging.
Nobody text me!
Until midnight, anyway. T-mobile is retarted enough to charge me for incoming text messages.
Amazing
Five depresing thoughts for a sunny day
1. For the first time that I can remember, I really saw smog in Seattle today. That pretty much goes against everything Seattle stands for in my mind.
2. We’ve set at least three heat records in the past few days, and the temperature is only supposed to go up. I talked to someone today who doesn’t believe in global warming.
3. Long-festering conflict in the Middle East still shows no signs of stopping.
4. Taxpayers have lost nearly $2 billion dollars on scams and corrupt Katrina aid programs.
5. It’s not “cool” to be environmentally conscious, which means there’s very little social pressure for change. That sucks, because I want to have a livable planet in 40 years, but it’s not going to happen unless more people start caring.
Why is Flicker Gaming awesome? (part 2 of 2)
People launch their browsers for basically two reasons: either to look something up, or to engage themselves. I think that the more people that get involved in something, the more value people get from participation, and if something is based around a group of active participants, then everyone wins.
I think that creating community is still one of the things that Livejournal has done far better than any other portion of the blogosphere, and that’s the main reason why it will continue to thrive in the face of a very difficult image (immature teenagers writing about cats and stories about the barber shop).
One of the things that we’ve tried to emphasize with Flicker Gaming from the very beginning is how it bridges the world of classic publishing (you read a newspaper without much input) and the world of user-only content (many forums have moderators, but nobody who’s really responsible for regular content).
One of the coolest user-oriented services that has sprung up on the internet recently is Digg, a social bookmarking/folksonomy that uses voting as a mechanism to sift through internet content, finding the most popular links available.
What we decided to do was build that functionality into our Blog’s sidebar. That’s what the Flicker Linkbox is - it’s a place for anyone and everyone to participate on the front page of our site. If you’ve written something cool or found some amazing news on the ‘net, drop it in the Linkbox and it gets thrown up just to the right of our “official” content.
What if the New York Times put letters to the editor on their front page?
Yeah. I think it’s that cool. Because nobody has really tried to integrate good professional writing with active participation of readership in this way.
Although building a community is probably what I’m most excited about doing with Flicker, I should also point out that authenticity makes a difference. Blogs are in the unique position of being very personal and very authentic at the moment.
The informal style of writing, the community engagement, and the flat nature of the internet in general help to make Flicker be a group of people more than just some company. Each post has the name of the blogger attached. We’re all available by e-mail.
I’d much rather be out there as individual gamers writing about cool gaming stuff and linking to neat shit we find all over the place than some Hearst-style monolith of six gazillion people and things.
In other words, I want to be accessible. If someone wants to shoot an e-mail to Flicker, I want them to be able to say “hey, I think I’ll e-mail Jason (or Ethan or Corvus or Ben) and tell them about this really cool thing I saw.”
When we’re part of the community instead of just catering to it, it gives us the extra weight of authenticity, and I think it makes us more likeable. Likeable is always a good thing.
Last but not least in my big list of why Flicker is so awesome is that Video Games are cool and brand new. Well, not brand new, but the video game space on the web is nascent at best.
I’ve watched year after year as PC Gamer, a magazine I’ve subscribed to since 1995, has continued to neglect their website. There are some other major publications who have done better.
But the most active space on the internet that has to do with video games is still Forums. If you look at the numbers on big forums, you’ll see that the IGN boards are the second largest forums being tracked online.
Forums are amazing (and I post at Evil Avatar myself), but they’re not the culmination of internet technology. There’s a big wide open space on the net right now (there are only two other major gaming blogs that I’m aware of - Joystiq and Kotaku), and neither of them really corners the space the Flicker is trying to take.
I think that with a lot of enthusiasm, a little bit of luck, and some dedicated fun, Flicker Gaming has a lot of places to go.
Biking through Medina
Do we live in a democracy?
Honestly, and I’ve posted before about how I’m getting scared of my government - but it’s probably a good thing that people in congress are starting to get upset with how much the current administration is bending the rules for their benefit:
WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) thought he had a deal when
President Bush, faced with a veto-proof margin in Congress, agreed to sign a bill banning the torture of detainees. Not quite. While Bush signed the new law, he also quietly approved another document: a signing statement reserving his right to ignore the law. McCain was furious, and so were other lawmakers.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Senate Judiciary Committee is opening hearings this week into what has become the White House’s favorite tool for overriding Congress in the name of wartime national security.
Why is Flicker Gaming awesome? (part 1 of 2)
I do a lot of thinking about what Flicker Gaming is, what we’re trying to do with it, and why it’s so damn cool.
But for all that, I don’t spend much time articulating it. It would probably be good for me to spell out exactly what makes Flicker Gaming worth everyone’s time. Let’s start with the premise.
The media business is changing. If there’s one thing that should be crystal clear to anyone paying attention to the internet, technology, and media, it’s that the old rules of publishing are changing.
The internet has empowered people in ways that no other publishing technology has ever done, and media is more than ever a business of aggregation, not distribution.
RSS is the single most important indicator of this change - news, opinions, update, and commentary all make their way into people’s inboxes and feed readers with relative ease. It used to be that there was a press wire, and certain people had access to the news, and the rest of us, for most practical purposes, couldn’t get at the big pulsing pipeline of everything.
Now, that has changed - big news portals like Google and Yahoo!, coupled with millions of blogs and untold thousands of specialized newsfeeds from sites like the New York Times have put practically everything at the fingertips of the average browser. The problem is that there’s so much stuff to go through on an everyday basis that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to slog through it just for the few choice gems. So the average user doesn’t.
And news becomes a business of aggregation. This is why sites like BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Engadget do so well. They collect the most interesting bits of news and content they can find, and they funnel it into a high quality channel.
And yes, channels make sense. I’ve heard several people talk about how, with our increasing tendency to purchase music and shows a-la-cart, channels are going the way of the dinosaur. In some sense, this is true - I certainly like to buy my music in single tracks and I don’t always appreciate how restrictive TV scheduling is.
But while I like to purchase my music by track, I really really enjoy radio. I’ve only recently realized how much I enjoy the convenience of not putting together a playlist myself. It’s convenient to have someone else pick out a song list for you, especially if they’re mostly the type of thing you’d listen to anyway - and that applies to things I read as well.
Blogs are perfect platforms for the future of “channels” because each site is basically a continuous collection of someone’s (or some people’s) favorite picks. Whenever I’m short on inspiration, I tend to go looking around the blogs on my blogroll or the feeds in my reader, because there’s almost always someone who’s talking about something that interests me.
What Flicker Gaming does is in many ways analogous to programming a gaming “channel.” Anyone can tune in to our RSS feed and keep up, on a daily basis, with the coolest gaming news, opinions, and commentary that we can lay our hands on. It can be seen as a convenience service.
I want to be careful, though, to emphasize that this is not Flicker’s main service. If the fast-growing social networking craze is anything to go by, it seems to be that community matters online. Personally, I think that a sense of community is one of the most important things in driving practically any internet venture.
Hey press, you forgot something
One of the funny side-effects of trying to do very cutting-edge things is that often several groups of people are working in the same direction at the same time. Sometimes you get there first, and sometimes you just get beat.
Other times, you get there first, and someone else gets all the attention.
I’m going to have to learn to live with the fact that the new Netscape Beta (it’s Digg, but they hired editors to write about the top dugg stories) is going to go down as the de-facto leader in combining user-generated “socal” content with editorial content.
Sure, we launched before they did, but they’ve got a PR team, and Calacanis pimping it out on his blog, and big bloggers cutting them some love.
I need to learn how to sell Flicker Gaming to journalists, because I’m tired of reading about how cool the idea behind Netscape Beta is (and it is cool) without any mention of other people who are doing the same thing (Flicker Gaming).
/rant
So much heat
I turns out that finding the Seattle Times’ big front-page story online is not always the easiest thing to do. Today they had a huge feature on how frikin’ hot it is up here, and how it’s not likely to get any cooler anytime soon.
I’ll settle for linking to the bland-looking AP story that tells roughly the same tale.
It’s hot. It’s getting hotter. Yay global warming.
New Courses
I’ve been playing a whole bunch of Disc Golf lately. Not with huge fancy discraft drivers and putters, of course, but just at the right level to make it really fun.
Over the past week or so my friends and I have made up and started to refine two new courses to replace the one that was demolished sometime last week (I think). The picture above is my friend David playing a shot off the roof from the course that is no longer.
I’ve discovered mailing lists
It seems odd that it tooks me so long to figure out what mailing lists are, and how potentially cool they can be.
But just recently I joined a mailing list called css-discuss because it’s a great resource for learning how little I know about css and getting berated for poor coding on my sites.
Fundamentally, though, the idea is pretty sweet. It’s like a forum that comes to your inbox.
Why iTunes works, despite the fact that I hate DRM
I just downloaded a song on iTunes. I clicked the purchase button about 15 seconds ago, and now I’m listening to it.
This, especially in contrast to my recent frustration with Fry’s Electronics, is what is called a “painless shopping experience.”
It’s amazing what a difference it makes to be able to actually get what you purchase, as opposed to…them not letting you have it. (Granted, that’s kind of what DRM is, but I don’t have to worry about that until I want to play my music anywhere besides my computer).
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