Culture

This is a fantastic article, that along with its companion piece, it covers how the influence of business on the web has been reduced from writing to "zombified copywriting." The author indicates that this is because so many people writing for the web are not writers, but rather engineers, secretaries and designers.

Just a quick post to mention that I’m a guest on today’s episode of the Creepy Sleepy Show Podcast. We discuss the recent HDDVD Digg Storm controversy, Digg’s incompetence at proper PR and the differences between traditional media and social news.

This weekend I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of Django (which you will read my raves about again and again), has posted a wonderful meditation on how online newspapers need to change. He centers his thoughts on one central point:

Via Boing Boing: Just a quick post, but if you are at all into comics you will get a kick out of blogger Kevin Church’s hilarious reimagining of Alan Moore’s Watchmen as if it was written by Stan Lee.

Via Digg: This is an interesting story that showed up a few days ago. The very popular sex education podcast “Sex Is Fun” has been removed from the iTunes directory. “Sex Is Fun” is a sex-positive podcast/videocast that focused on educating their audience on a whole host of sexual issues.

This is absolutely hilarious. Funny enough to make me break my personal rule about embedding video in blog posts. :) I’ll be back to regular blogging soon, I promise.

If you have not heard about Bruce Sterling’s keynote speech at the O’reilly Emerging Technology conference, you really need to take a listen. It’s was a mind-blowing presentation illustrating the future of Internet technology and how the language we use to talk about it will guides technological development.

Via Boing Boing: I’m a little late on this one, especially since I took my unplanned blog vacation. If you haven’t seen the footage of Jon Stewart intellectually pounding conservative pundit Bill Bennett, you are missing out.

Via /.: Wisconsin may soon become the first state to ban the practice of mandatory microchip implants in human beings. State Representative Marlin Schneider has authored a proposal that will make it illegal for governments and companies to require RFID chips, or implanting them in employees without their knowledge.

Phillips, the entertainment technology corporation, has recently applied for a patent on a new software for your digital receiver/recorder that will force you to watch commercials. The software looks for digital flags which would be embedded in the broadcast that will lock your channel in place when commercials begin, restricting you for flipping to another station during the ads.

The Bush administration has a new version of DMCA to offer you, and it’s so much worse. In this article, Declan McCullagh of CNET news describes the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 that the administration plans to propose via their lackey Representative Lamar Smith.

A recent article in Wired News discusses the difficulties podcasting is creating for NPR. With free podcasts finally becoming more common for NPR programming, more and more listeners are turning to them in order to listen to their shows whenever they want, and in some cases to avoid pledge drives.

Looking for more examples of corporations going too far in their misguided quest for DRM? Here’s Sony’s recent exploration into using rootkits to manage DRM on your computer without your knowledge.

I recently came across a blog entry describing a presentation an old friend from high school gave. Josh Casteel served in Iraq as an interrogator sent in to clean up things in Abu Ghraib after the scandal.

This morning, I found myself thinking of how technology can alter communication, particularly in the way it alters our way of storytelling. At its base, conversation is a means of exchanging information and can be used to make collaborative decisions.

I recently learned about the online service Second Life. This must be one of the most bizarre things I have encountered online. For those of you unfamiliar with this service, Second Life is essentially a complex 3D digital environment where you can create your own completely customizable avatar, and by avatar I don’t mean an icon, but a fully realized 3D digital body.

“Can’t you see? He has the mind of a child!” Or rather, the RIAA does. Seriously, this is just getting ridiculous. The RIAA has done it again, and yes, they made bunny cry.

To begin with, my friend in London is safe. Chris, who my friends and I always refer to as “British Chris” for some reason, was unharmed in the bombings that took place this morning.

Today at work I had to have a couple kids arrested. I was supervising a transfer point for my transit agency and two young girls began shouting at each other over something stupid.