misc

This is when I got sold on Obama, his June 2006 podcast about net neutrality. Have a listen. Speak my language? Yeah:

The topic today is net neutrality. The internet today is an open platform where the demand for websites and services dictates success. You’ve got barriers to entry that are low and equal for all comers. And it’s because the internet is a neutral platform that I can put on this podcast and transmit it over the internet without having to go through some corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship. I don’t have to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can’t pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes. [more...] [mp3]

I don’t know how Obama’s presidency is going to go, and I don’t hold my breath for any miracles. Any president of the USA has one hell of a challenge on his (or her) hands, and the O-man has inherited a bigger mess than anyone can clean up.

But, man if he wanted to make me happy, he could not have started in a place nearer to my heart than his Tech/Science platform, released today. First para:

The Problem: We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.

A datalibrists dream.

Whether Obama can do what he plans or not, I don’t know. He may be great or he may be terrible: we’ll find out. But I am happy that on day 2, I feel, frankly, more excited by the concrete vision described here than in all the talk of hope and renewal that had me cheering with the rest over the past few months.

See the rest of the platform here.

Let’s hope whoever wins the looming Quebec election has such vision.

I have a new article up at Huffpo, On Books & Ebooks:

Among book lovers, there continues to be an prevalent negative feeling about electronic books, or ebooks. The reaction, one I myself have experienced, goes something like this: I enjoy reading books, I enjoy the feel and the tactile feedback, touch, smell, look, books can be marked up and carried around, they never run out of batteries, I can keep them on my bookshelf, they look great, and they are permanent; they are easier on the eyes than screens, and dammit, I just love them. I do not want to read a book in an electronic format. And so I don’t think ebooks will succeed, no matter what Oprah says about the Amazon Kindle.

While I’m sympathetic with that reaction (indeed I feel the same way about paper & ink books), it entirely misses the point of ebooks. Ebooks are not in opposition to print & paper books; they are a parallel tool to get the content contained in a book [more...]

Testing John Miedema’s Open Book plugin, which helps blogs publish data from the great OpenLibrary site (sorta an open IMDB for books, a project of the Internet Archive).

Here is the test: One of my favourite books is:

Independent People: An Epic, Halldór Laxness; Vintage International

Find in a library

It works. Nice.

Brett’s movie Rip: Remix Manifesto will be showing as an ‘avant -premiere’ (?) at Festival Du Nouveau Cinema, this Friday Oct. 17th at 7:30 PM at the Cinema Imperial.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Paulson Bailout Plan, in the Guardian:

Britain showed at least that it still believed in some sort of system of accountability: heads of banks resigned. Nothing like this in the US. Britain understood that it made no sense to pour money into banks and have them pour out money to shareholders. The US only restricted the banks from increasing their dividends. The Treasury has sought to create a picture for the public of toughness, yet behind the scenes it is busy reassuring the banks not to worry, that it’s all part of a show to keep voters and Congress placated. What is clear is that we will not have voting shares. Wall Street will have our money, but we will not have a full say in what should be done with it. A glance at the banks’ recent track record of managing risk gives taxpayers every reason to be concerned [more...]

Some of you know that Stephanie, Marie-Eve and I, and a few others including Dan & Chris from LibriVox & Collectik, have been working on a new project.

The project itself is still top-secretish, but we’ve sorta launched a weblog, called the Book Oven Blog. It’s about: “books, making books and our relationship with text.”

I just wrote a post today about typewriters and writing software…

I’ve recently come into possession of the old Underwood typewriter that was in the office of the house I grew up in. After my mother threatened to throw it out, I inherited the thing, and now it’s serving as a decorative piece collecting dust in our front entrance way. I used to love that typewriter as a kid – I remember writing stories and school assignments and once a contract between my father and me for the purchase of a Rawlings baseball glove (he would pay half and I would pay half out of my allowance, collected over several months)….[more...]

If you have any interest in writing something for us about books or writing or publishing (?), ping me…and, of course feel free to comment read or subscribe etc.

I have a new start-up project underway, and I’m really excited about it. I have been lucky enough to get some fabulous people on board to work with me on it – some old salt collaborators of mine on LibriVox and other projects, as well as some new talented and smart people. And the project, I think, will be great.

As we progress in this very early phase, I though it was worth taking a peek at this old presentation I did for DemoCamp last year, about my experiences with Collectik.net, my first commercial web project. I still think Collectik was a great idea (so great that google reader’s shared items implemented the base principles a year after us, but they have a slightly bigger budget). We built good technology too, and really, when you got into it, the UI was solid and understandable. But it was hard for people to “get in,” and because of various mistakes and lack of resources Collectik never really got off the ground.

This presentation looks at some of the mistakes we made, and suggests some ideas about how to make a successful, rather than unsuccessful web project.

Nice to jog the memory a little bit.

Here are the abouts from my twitter friends:

i podcast and create junk for a living
Indie Music and Fun
UX & Web developer from Poutine land.
Dopplr CTO. If you follow me, consider starting off with an @mattb message and introduce yourself.
I do web stuff for people, design, xhtml/css, blogs, etc.
Still having fun with the web.
sweeping generalizations and jalepeño peppers
Web smith
develop coffee, drink code, free software and wonder
CTO and Co-founder @ Praized Media
dacodac
i do/create/study stuff. i sometimes get angry. But i’m mostly happy
President of Twist Image. Podcaster of Six Pixels of Separation. Professional Speaker.
Canadian Entrepreneur & Community Instigator
Screenwriter and freelance reporter
San Francisco, Montreal, Wikitravel, kei.ki, certifi.ca, Vinismo.com, identi.ca
Author, journalist and editor of Regret the Error.

http://jonudell.net/bio.html

Sysadmin, Rush addict
Game designer, raging extrovert.
I make audiobooks and knit
A cynic in the making
Insatiably curious
Illustrator, comic book artist, and blogger. Author of Ojingogo.com
New Media + Politics
free public domain audiobooks
great audio suggestions from around the world, via earideas.com
music, macs, mets.
Coworking space in Montréal
gardening, beekeeping, knitting, spinning, puzzles
Mosaicing a virtual self, one tweet at a time
Keeping track of what you think about anything, in 140 characters
“…the hottest thing from the North to come out of the South…”

Evan just launched an open source twitterish thing called identi.ca. He’s got tons of traction in a few short days (that surely have been long for Evan and the rest of the crack team at Controlez-Vous), including lots of interest from luminaries such as Dave Winer, Tm O’Reilly and others. So: first, a big kudos to Evan.

Identi.ca also has its pooh poohers, including the knife sharpeners at TechCrunch, who wrote a lukewarm piece called The Problem with Identi.ca Is That It’s Not Twitter. And that’s been pretty much the line of those less than impressed: It’s got fewer features, why bother, everyone is on Twitter, why would they leave, and: who cares if it’s open source, it still needs to be good. etc.

Which speaks of breathtaking short-sightedness, not to mention, a total erasure of the last, oh, half-decade plus of the most recent Internet history.

So here is my take: Identi.ca is not an alternative service to Twitter; it’s an open microblogging platform. That’s a huge difference.

(OK, identi.ca is an alternative service, and laconi.ca is the open microblogging platform behind it, but for the sake of this article lets say they are the same thing).

It’s not difficult to find salient parallels, either. Biz Stone and Ev Williams’ pre-Twitter project (before Odeo) was Blogger. A great platform for making blogs. But it turned out that an open source version, Wordpress, was far more powerful, versatile, and compelling. Bloogger is still popular and still a good solution for many people. Wordpress though turned into something different, and arguably much more important.

Will identi.ca be as successful as Wordpress? Who knows, but if you think that microblogging is important, then *something* like identi.ca will be successful, and it’s the best candidate so far, that I know of. Again, it’s not a service; it’s a platform (and an open one at that).

Let me give two small examples:

Mobile Microblogging in the Developing World

I met Joel Selanikio, a doctor, epidemiologist, and software developer, at the Stockholm Challenge, where Joel’s project, EpiSurveyor won in the Health category. Here is a short description of EpiSurveyor: an open source mobile phone platform for collecting health & epidemiological data, which is being implemented by the World Health Org among others (which gives great cost and efficiency improvements over both paper/pencil- the usual method – and expensive commercial software & consulting).

Joel and I had some great discussions about mobile as a platform in the developing world: ie, why spend money on OLPC in the developing world, when every teacher already has a computer in their pocket … a mobile phone. The smart thing to do is to develop applications for the “network-connected minicomputers” people already have, namely: phones. Let’s develop for the tools that exist rather than the ones we’d like to imagine.

We also talked about Twitter as a web platform for mobile communications; interestingly, Joel thought Twitter was puzzling (I’m putting that mildly, I think he said it was a waste of time!), whereas for me – other than the time-wasting/communication aspect, Twitter is compelling as a platform for developing web-based/mobile enabled communications, the specifics of which I can’t put my finger upon. One example that I provided was the Tower Bridge Twitter stream in London. This is a trivial little project that scrapes the web for info on when the bridge is opening/closing and what ships are sailing through. The example itself is irrelevant; the point is that one can imagine useful bits of information being transmitted to your mobile device in such a way.

Here are some interesting facts:

• many/most people in developing countries have mobile phones
• many/most people in developing countries DON”T have: computers & high bandwidth net access
• mobile phone-enabled microblogging tools might be the perfect platform for information distribution/communication in such a place
• a microblogging tool could be used for any number of useful things, beyond “just” the run-of-mill social communication, eg:
  • price discovery, for say exchange rates, market prices
  • boil water alerts
  • traffic reports
  • education (say, informing parents of homework? still wondering about this one…)
  • health alerts
  • news headline distribution
  • who knows what else?

Identi.ca can become a development platform to do all this, and much more that you and I can’t think of. Luckily there are 5 billion people on the planet who will be able to take identi.ca/laconi.ca and build/improve upon them. While Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and all the rest are constrained because they are just closed services, that do only what their owners wish them to do.

Archiving Links, and Search Rank

Here is another area of significant interest. I wrote a while ago lamenting that Twitter has replaced del.icio.us for me as a place to archive interesting links. While Twitter does a good job of letting me share interesting links with friends immediately, it doesn’t serve as a useful archive in the way del.icio.us does. So that means:

1. unless I post twice, I lose a structured archive of links I found useful
2. because of ubiquitous use of URL-shortening services in Twitter, the web is also losing the significant work of URL-sorting/ranking that we used to do by blogging about interesting links, and putting them into del.icio.us (etc).

The other night, I had dinner with Larry Sanger (thanks for the invite, Mike), and Larry was batting around some compelling ideas about opening up the search space.

And that had me stewing about things, thinking about Identi.ca and my problems with Twitter and (no longer) archiving my links. It would be “easy” to do this in identi.ca, by specifiying:

• that this identi.ca post contains a link (this can be inferred by the existence of a url)
• that i want to structure it somehow – eg using #hashtags
• that i wish to archive this – ie an RSS stream of my categorized links, that could easily be fungible with a more centralized or decentralized bookmark depository (del.icio.us or other) …

You’d also want the system to keep track of the true link, rather than the shortened on.

This is not just more useful to me, but Important in how the web/google/searches assign value to different URLs.

Now, theoretically all this could happen at Twitter. But Twitter is a company, with a few guys and (apparently, gasp) ONE mysql database (with two slaves). They have enough problems just keeping the fail whale at sea.

Identi.ca, on the other hand, belongs to us all … and if I had the chops and the interest (I have the latter but not the former, and not the time) I could code something up that would do the trick, and pitch it to Evan, or install my own identi.ca instance on my server doing what I want it to do.

Summary: Identi.ca is important because it is a microbloggin development platform; not because it is an alternative to Twitter. Whether or not identi.ca and the open source codebase laconi.ca succeed I can’t predict. But something like this *will* succeed because mobile-enabled microblogging might just be the most compelling new communications space, especially in the developing world where access to mobile phones is almost ubiquitous, while access to computers and bandwidth is limited.

[Incidentally, and as an aside, all this has much to do with why I thought Steve's comments on my iphone post were off-base ... there may be many people who lament that their shiny gadgets are too expensive, but given all this above, it's clear that there is much exciting work to be done in mobile web, much of it important, and with crappy data plans Canadians are excluded from this area of innovation, which is what pisses me off - luckily, tools like identi.ca mean we webbers have a new development tool to do interesting things in the space].

NYTimes reports:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

As I recently read, expressed with great eloquence, elsewhere, Dubya-tee-EFF?

[via talkingpointmemo]

I occasionally ask, has Miette read you a bedtime story yet? You should let her; The New Yorker has, and they liked it, even if they mixed up one Irish lass for another (who, I wonder?).

Speaking of which, whenever I come across Eveline [txt], I always think about Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful essay about writing, in which he writes:

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of our language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favourite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader more than those words do.

http://www.miettecast.com/podpress_trac/web/208/0/Miette_Joyce_Eveline.mp3

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

From The Library in the New Age, by Robert Darnton, in the NY Review of Books [tipped by mitch]

I should have mentioned this eariler: LibriVox is a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge, an award & conference put on by the City of Stockholm, which:

…features a six category Award for ICT for Development projects. ICT stands for Information and Communication Technologies and the best projects will win the prestigious Stockholm Challenge trophies and receive a 5.000 Euro stipend… An extended program of workshops, conference, study visits and social gatherings will bring together the most inspiring ICT entrepreneurs, researchers and students from all over the world to share experiences and knowledge.

Thanks to some financial support from Project Gutenberg (maybe you’d like to donate?) I’m off to Sweden on Friday (with a stopover in London), for a week.

From GRAIN:

Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world’s cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it’s true,[4] but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to all of those who need it. Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system. We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.

[more...]

Happy May Day. Sylvain has organized a meeting tonight to discuss putting together a podcamp montreal:

Jeudi 1er mai / Thursday May 1st
19h (?)
Sergent-Recruteur
4801 Saint-Laurent

I can’t make it, but here are my thoughts:

For a podcasting conference in Montreal, I would like to see this question be the central theme:
-what new and exciting things can we do with podcasting content?

and:
-how can we make it happen?
-who can help?

that is, why are there no podcasts about, oh, i don’t know:
-interviews with old farmers in the gaspe about what life used to be like
-discussions with 6 year olds about the world’s problems
-weekly interviews with montreal university profs (mcgill, u de m, concordia, uqam) who are doing interesting research, whatever the field
-in-depth exploration of the health care system, with interviews with doctors, nurses, orderlies, administrators, patients, academics … ideally with interviews with the same in other countries so we can really find out how to have a better healthcare system
-weekly podcast with interviews of montreal fiction writers
-quebec history
-the immigrant experience in quebec
-a podcast dedicated to bringing quebec’s french cultural heritage to anglos; a podcast dedicated to bringing quebec anglo culture to francophones
-more audio documentaries
-podcast from the musee des beaux arts
-podcasts of various lecture series, with visiting speakers from around the world (eg who speak at mcgill etc)
-podcasts from le devoir, la presse, the quebec musician’s association
-lives of aboriginals in northern quebec

generally: how can podcasting change the world? how can it make things better? how can it build a stronger quebec? how can it create more understanding in the provice? how can it be a tool for innovation? how can we use podcasting as an instrument to become the most innovative, socially and economically vbrant population in the world?

also, generally (this is a different conference, maybe):
how is quebec going to deal with the changes that the web is bringing? if freely available information (in a broad sense) is the foundation of innovation, what does quebec need to do to remain innovative with information freely flowing on the web? what impacts will this have on language? on language policy? on culture? can we close it off? do we need to open it more? what does this mean for education, for business, for culture? how do we come to terms, as a society, with an overwhelming amount of the innovation happening on the web in english? that is, how do we come to terms with the fact that, in order to be at the leading edge of web development, and web innovation, we need to be participating in a global network/community (eg twitter) where english is (right now) the primary language? what are we doing to prepare for the change, in 20 years, when the language of innovation might be chinese? what tools should educators be building, what tools should podcasters and quebec web entrepreneurs be building?

where does podcasting fit in?

etc.

A symposium on computation + journalism
Feb 22-23, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Hosted by GVU Center at Georgia Tech.

Panels

* Advances in News Gathering
* Improving Journalism Workflow: Automation & Productivity
* Social Computing and Journalism
* Ubiquitous Journalism
* Participant Journalism & Journalism Participation: Authoring and Interacting in New Media
* Sensemaking & Visualization
* Information Mashups: Aggregation, Syndication, and Web Services
* 21st Century Editor in Chief

[via infosthetics]

I wrote a little bit about the subprime mortgage troubles a few months ago, and mostly we’ve all forgotten about it. Generally Canada has been well-insulated from the troubles, and probably most people have yet to be touched by the crisis directly.

But anyone who thinks we’ve heard the last of it is wrong, I’ll bet, and anyone who thinks Canada will be fine if the US economy takes a real hit is even wronger.

Chris Penn writes about his concerns for the overall financial health of the the US of A in an aptly titled post: We really are in trouble in this country. This is just the beginning of it.

The United States doesn’t -make- anything any more. For the last 5 years, our economy has been driven by increases in asset prices, namely housing. People cashed out equity and spent like crazy, driving the economy forward.

All good things must come to an end, and we’re seeing just the first inning of the housing bubble unwind in a game that’s going extra innings. As prices drop, equity vanishes, and mortgage owners owe more than the property is worth.

…

Anyone who promises a fix for this situation that isn’t “we have to ride this out” either has something to sell you or is running for office. Don’t believe them. This financial crisis took years to make and it will take years to unmake.

The US Military has a site called the “Pentagon Channel” with tons of podcasts… including:

Rucksacks and Rations
A weekly audio program from the Pentagon Channel featuring stories and interviews about our service members stationed around the globe. From Afghanistan and Iraq to hometowns throughout the United States, Rucksacks and Rations brings you closer to troops downrange and families at home.

Bloggers’ Roundtable
Bloggers’ Roundtable is a weekly feature that sits senior military and civilian leaders down with bloggers, to provide updates, and frank and first hand perspective about ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Freedom Journal Iraq
A daily news program produced by American Forces Network Iraq. The program focuses on military missions, operations and U.S. military forces in Iraq.

The American Veteran
The American Veteran is a half-hour video news magazine designed to inform veterans, their families and their communities about the services and benefits they have earned through their service to America and to recognize and honor that service.

Freedom Watch Afghanistan
Freedom Watch Afghanistan presents the latest from Operation Enduring Freedom in a daily newscast showing the activities of American troops in country. Produced by AFN-Afghanistan.

In the past couple of weeks, I went to see some public lectures at McGill and elsewhere: the first was Amy Goodman, of DemocracyNow, giving the keynote at the ReDefining Media conference. Then I went to see cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker talking about language and the human mind. Finally, I saw management guru David Maister (choice quote: “just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s easy”) at PodcampBoston.

All three were good, interesting, intellectually stimulating.

But, the question is, given that I can (and do) see Amy Goodman on the net, whenever I like; and given that I can see Stephen Pinker present in video in, say, TEDTalks; and given that I could just read Maister’s book & blog posts; why do I want to go to physically see them? What is the value that I get by actually being there?

I had dinner during PodCampBoston2 with a good group: Sylvain Grand’Maison, Neil Gorman, Julien Smith and Anita from LibriVox. And we were batting around ideas about why that physical presence brings more to you than just reading text, listening to audio, or watching a video.

Some theories:

1. 2-way experience
Being there means that you are somehow engaged (or think you are engaged) in a two way communication with someone. I wonder though, in a big lecture hall (both Goodman & Pinker were speaking to hundreds, and I certainly had no sense that they were communicating with me, much less that I was communicating with them) whether this applies. Maybe our subconscious minds trick us into thinking we’d be able to really communicate, even if our conscious minds know that’s unlikely.

2.sharing the experience
Maybe somehow you “get” “more” (more what? how?) from seeing a person live with a group of other people. Is it that you will later be able to discuss it? How does this work?: if you go alone, and don’t know anyone there who you will discuss with later, this one doesn’t make much sense. Maybe it’s something though about being a part of a greater community that shares knowlege? collective unconscious? Hmm, I don’t know about this – though certainly if people you know are going, you’d like to be there too.

3. more information
In person, “more” information is transmitted. This one gets my bet as the most likely, though I don’t quite know what it means. but beyond the explicit information (ie, “here are 7 ways be be effective: make a list, make deadlines…” etc), seeing someone live transmits a richer breadth of information. voice, body, brainwaves… i don’t know. somehow information is transmitted more easily (for me) and with a sort of 3 dimensional context that you can never get from text alone, but more information as well, not contained in the explicit info; for me personally audio is a better way to understand concepts (probably that’s not true for everyone; and for detailed knowledge, text is always better); and video is “better” I think, though I prefer the flexibility of audio – you can listen while you do other things. But live, has something more than all that.

Probably it’s a mix of all three, but i think #3 is the most interesting. But the question is what exactly do you get that is *more* … ? any ideas?

Other ideas:
* seeing someone famous or smart in person gives you some perceived smartness and famousness in the eyes of others … when you tell others about the smart/famous person you saw.
* smartness and famousness actually rub off on you – and you get smarter and famouser by seeing someone smart/famous
* seeing someone live *forces* you to pay attention … you don;t have the same distractions as you would when reading, or listening at home (computers, other people etc).

Any more ideas?

As everyone knows, the next big wave of application innovation will happen on mobile devices, cell phones and cell phones plus (eg iPhone, and the competition that’s sure to follow it).

Because of a combination of our regulatory environment, and our oligarchical mobile phone carriers, Canada is exempt from participation in this market. This means Canadian consumers are excluded (because mobile data fees are 10 to 100 times more expensive than those fees elsewhere), and Canadian companies – big ones and little ones have no platform to develop and test on; and no Canadian beta testers who can afford to test.

It makes you shake your head, as does this page at Pandora:

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Canada (your IP address appears to be 70.81.35.224). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com

If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.

We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.

We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,
Tim Westergren
Founder

Anyone want to teach a photoshop course at atwater library?

Tuesday nights, 2-hr classes, 6 sessions, starting Nov 6. Let me know if you are interested (original instructor has backed out).

1. obstructionist.
main characteristics: many departments who don’t communicate; inability to record details of previous (fruitless) customer service discussions; require you to repeat your story over and over; assumption is always that the problem is your fault or that the problem is “impossible”; different stories from different departments; telling you problem is fixed is just a way to get rid of you
examples: bell

2. sugar-coated bullshit
main characteristics: complaint reference number means everyone you talk to knows the story, friendly and helpful staff, assurances that problem will be fixed, but it is not
examples: ikea

3. angelic service of mercy
main characteristics: polite staff, complaint reference number & details of previous exchanges known by staff, problem solved quickly, assumption that complainant is reasonable
examples: ?

The New Yorker has a fascinating story, about the “discovery” of a 75 year old virtuoso, genius pianist, Joyce Hatto, that turns out to be a hoax. What’s so interesting – to me anyway – is how the internet – and brilliant grassroots marketing, fraudulent tho it was – created the myth bought by many mainstream music journalists.

The whole thing, rather than being tawdry, is somehow touching, romantic, sad, and beautiful in a perverse sort of way.

Here a podcast interview with the writer of the story.

Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across.

It is empty of both normal matter – such as galaxies and stars – and the mysterious “dark matter” that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

[more from BBC ...]

From the Pessimism file:

I’ve always been skeptical of hedge funds and sophisticated derivative products. In theory these financial instruments protect against risk, by playing potential movement of the market in one direction, off of movement in another. It’s high-powered math stuff, and it’s made many many people truckloads, billions of dollars. But I don’t really understand it – though I was tangentially involved in the derivative business for a while. And it’s always seemed to me that hedge funds, at their base, are about getting money for nothing. That is, getting money without accomplishing anything. Still the house that Enron helped build has gotten bigger and bigger, and has become to some extent the underpinning of the entire global economy. Basically, it’s flooded the world with lots of cheap money. That sort of thing, eventually causes problems, because the laws of physics will always beat out the laws of the market.

And, according to Steven Pearlstein in the WaPo, the whole thing might come tumbling down.

As it all unfolds, we are learning several painful truths about the new global financial system, which until recently was widely lauded for its ability to price and spread financial risk to investors willing to accept it.

One lesson is that the sophisticated strategies employed by bank and investment funds to “hedge” risk may not be as reliable as had been thought.

In recent years, for example, banks and hedge funds created elaborate investment strategies built around the presumption that Bond A would always go up when the price of Bond B went down, effectively limiting potential losses. But in recent weeks, many such strategies began to go awry as markets for mortgage securities dried up and fund managers began selling whatever they could to raise cash to pay lenders. As a result, Bond A and Bond B began moving in the same direction, creating losses on both.

Another popular way for sophisticated investors to hedge their bets is to buy insurance against the possibility that a particular company or set of mortgage holders will default on their loans. But in some cases, this insurance policy, known as a credit swap, has been issued by hedge funds that themselves had taken on similar risks. If things go bad, a hedge fund may not have the money to uphold its side of the insurance bargain.

and:

Australian analyst Satyajit Das makes the point that the main achievement of the new financial architecture has not been to spread risk so much as it has been to expand risk by vastly increasing the amount of borrowed money. Making loans to buy bonds secured by packages of other loans makes for big fees and exciting work for bankers. But as Das predicted last year in his book, “Traders, Guns & Money” — and as we all discovered yesterday — if the supply of credit suddenly dries up anywhere in the system, the elaborate new structure they’ve created can come crashing down on itself.

And chances are you and I will get caught under that crashing system, one way or antother.

Scary stuff.

infer ≠ imply

infer
–verb (used with object)

1. to derive by reasoning; conclude or judge from premises or evidence: They inferred his displeasure from his cool tone of voice.
2. (of facts, circumstances, statements, etc.) to indicate or involve as a conclusion; lead to.
3. to guess; speculate; surmise.
4. to hint; imply; suggest.

–verb (used without object)

5. to draw a conclusion, as by reasoning.

imply
–verb (used with object)

1. to indicate or suggest without being explicitly stated: His words implied a lack of faith.
2. (of words) to signify or mean.
3. to involve as a necessary circumstance: Speech implies a speaker.
4. Obsolete. to enfold.

If you start to notice me being hyper-productive, it might be because I have started using a neat little productivity/management software, iGTD:

The software uses the Get Things Done productivity methodology, which apparently will solve all my constant procrastination problems and turn me into a man of unlimited energy and robot-like (almost frightening) efficiency, while allowing me to maintain space for creativity, to cuddle my wife, improve my cooking, my on-field rugby performance, take up opera singing.

The nice thing about the approach, and software, is that it separates tasks into both projects (eg, LibriVox, Writing, Collectik), and contexts (email, phone, outside, inside, online, urgent).

Sometimes, not all that often, OK, but still, sometimes, email spam makes me smile:

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)