Writing
725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.
CivicActions has been working with the Free Software Foundation on the DefectiveByDesign campaign since last May. In that time we have seen a significant shift in the way DRM is talked about in the news media and an increasing awareness of DRM among music fans and the general public.
I’ve been down in California since Tuesday, met with Henri, did some work from Aaron’s and then went down to Yahoo in Sunnyvale for the Open Source CMS Summit (OSCMS 2007) and DrupalCON .
This morning as I ran my errands I listened to Your Attention Please , the full panel discussion from which some content in the Distributing the Future podcast I blogged about last week came from. The whole panel discussion is about an hour long and includes Steve Gillmor, Glenn Reid, Doreé Duncan Seligmann, David Sifry and Linda Stone. I highly recommend it. Linda Stone’s concept of “continuous partial attention” is very interesting and I plan on reading up more on the concept on Corante and Joi Ito’s blog and on O’Reilly .
I just placed an order for some books and cds on Amazon. And I bought some items used and others new. As I was preparing to check out I thought about the following: Buying used is good for the environment: it reduced waste, reuses stuff that people don’t want. Buying used stuff on Amazon is bad: more packages (packaging) coming from more places (polution from the shipping) So what do you think? Is ordering from Amazon just bad, period? SHould I forego the cost savings of buying used items because of the environmental impact that results from multiple shipments and more packaging?
The meeting is being convened to support communication amongst developers and the small businesses being built on the drupal platform. I am really open to your ideas about what to cover. Please contribute thoughts to the agenda. The event will be held at the CSL office
Washington state has moved to a state wide voter database replacing the current 39 county databases. In part this is to comply with HAVA, but this article points mostly to the anti-fraud benefits like eliminating duplicate registrations, voting by dead people and felons. Perhaps the biggest benefit is that anyone doing voter outreach work in Washington State will now be able to make one call to the state to get voter data on all 3 million voters (rather than call the 39 counties). I am going to start reaching out an collecting the voter data formats from states heading in this direction so that we can make our voter data standard better and more universal.
Today I am going to begin (again) to work on the Drupal Guild proposal. I’d love folks to take a little time to look at what is on the wiki and let me know if you have anything to add at this point (just edit the wiki if you have access) or send me comments if you don’t. Drupal Guild Introduction We are in a housing crisis and there are not enough skilled laborers to meet demand.
Just wondering what podcasts folks are listening to. Aaron? Rich? anyone?
Today’s NYT carries an article that sites further evidence that the major music labels are getting creamed by indie music and net distribution and promotion methods. In a world of broadband connections, 60-gigabyte MP3 players and custom playlists, consumers have perhaps more power than ever to indulge their curiosities beyond the music that is presented through the industry’s established outlets, primarily radio stations and MTV. “It’s not as easy to shove something down people’s throats anymore and make them buy it. It’s not even that they are smarter; they just have everything at their fingertips. They can go find something that’s cool and different. They go tell people about it and it just starts spreading.”
I resolve to use Skype more in the new year. This only works if you guys resolve to do it too. Why do I want us to use skype more often? Well if we are skype chatting about something and then need to talk to close the loop, we can easily move from IM to Voice with the click of a button. It is seamless. So put a plantronics DSP400 on your Christmas or Chanukka list. Or if you have Bluetooth on your computer you can use a Bluetooth headset