Musings on education, techology, and life..
sez Danah Boyd:
Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based.
ChangeThis is on a mission to “spread important ideas and change minds.” How? As they say:
Over the next few months, we’ll publish powerful, rational arguments from leaders in politics and business. These arguments may upset you. They may make you curse. Ultimately, we’re confident that they will convince you.
Their plan is to publish 5-20 page ‘manifestos’ dedicated to clear thinking and respect for the issues and the readers rather than attempting to persuade through ideology and charaisma. They’ve enlisted authors and thinkers such as Donna Brazile, Halley Suitt, Guy Kawasaki, and Jessica Stern that they hope will then be passed around (in real life and on the web).
They’ve also got a blog: Read and Pass. I plan to keep my eye on it.
I just realized that the popular article My Brilliant Failure: Wikis In Classrooms (which is the kind of failure I’d like to see more of) has a companion piece with more thoughts: Aiming for communal constructivism in a wiki environment
Mathamagenic’s Trip Reports links to various notes, reports, abstracts, and transcripts for a variety of recent conference presentations and panels on blogging, social software, and knowledge management. A lot of good stuff to read, with something for anyone interested in these areas.
Leapfrogging the Classics from Speak Up has some interesting comments on type choices that could be modern classics…
I really need to get my import automated again. Until then, here is the linklog from the last few weeks. As always, all LinkLog entries are available on del.icio.us
William Saletan’s blog at Slate is one of the few Democractic Convention blogs that are consistently well-written and interesting. I might have to take back some of what I said about the poor showing by bloggers generally. I agree with Greg who commented earlier that one of the problems is that the blog entries don’t feel real-time and they try too hard to cover the whole convention instead of a more localized view.
Most of the DNC blogs appear to be in some strange gray area– not insightful or in-depth because they are written too quickly, but not quick enough to feel like you are following along with a good observer. What’s the point of that?
The great thing about blogs is their refusal to conform to the Royal “We” and that they are admirably “focused” on the things the blogger is most interested in rather than an institutional perspective. Those strengths appears to have been confiscated by convention security.
My current MP3 player is a Rio Nitrus , a small, 1.5g, USB 2, mini-hdd player. It’s certainly a step up from my beloved Nomad II, with its relatively paltry 192mb of flash memory, but it is far from ideal.
Before I bought the Nitrus I did a fair bit of research into the current crop of hard-drive based players. My intent was to buy a 15gig or higher unit– possibly an iPod, but I couldn’t find a single make or model that didn’t have some fairly significant drawback. The iPod is expensive, not particularly suited to Windows, and I am leery of the battery problems. The Dell Jukebox only has USB… and I couldn’t imagine transferring gigabytes of files over USB. The Zen Touch is basically a Dell Jukebox. The Rio Karma has fairly widespread reports of reliability problems. The Nomad Jukebox is too big. The iRiver HP-120 looks pretty good, but again no firewire and not the best drive. I figure if I am going to invest a significant amount of money, I want to at least meet most of my wish-list, which is as follows:
I’m given to understand (lots of discussion on the Head-Fi Forums) that most vendors will be coming out with new models over the next few months… maybe then something will finally meet these– reasonable, in my opinion– requirements.
In a related note, my headphones are Koss Plug earbuds… that I modded myself for a total cost of about $20 and 30 minutes of effort. And they sound just as good as the $100 Shure E2c’s I tried out!
Is Mark Pilgrim chronically crotchety? Is there anything he won’t complain about? Is the ol’ glass permanently half-empty?
Smart guy, smart site, good book… but the constant snarkiness sure gets tiresome.
(see ConventionBloggers.com)
Dave Winer might be right that the blogger reports from the convention will get better, but I’m not so sure most of them will ever actually become any good. Good political commentary on websites, like newspapers and other forms of media, is hard to come by. A whole lot of the convention bloggers are probably more enamored of the idea of being at (and allowed to blog) the convention than they are capable of coming up with anything compelling to say.
Blogging real-time events is a bit confusing, anyway. What makes many good weblogs fun to read is that they are more responsive than conventional media, but still composed with enough time for rumination that they can be more substantive and interesting than a real-time conversation or chat. The novelty value and information potential of real-time posts from a largely scripted event like the Democratic Convention is pretty small. How many bloggers does it take to make us all aware that Kerry’s face really is long or that Edwards’ turned to zip up his fly?
I’m sure being at the event will revitalize some of the bloggers, and I’m certainly not complaining that they are there! I just wonder how important they really are… or will be.