Writing
725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.
The DefectiveByDesign.org campaign has really taken off! In about 3 days we had 1000 signups, in a week we had 1700! Thanks to the help of Diggers and SlashDoters! Well, we’ve decided that the target of the next action will be Apple because the iPod and iTunes music store make Apple the largest seller of DRM infected technology. On June 10, we’ll warn citizens in 6 cities of the dangers of DRM in Apple products. Sign Up
Today The Free Software Foundation and CivicActions launched the Campaign in Seattle at the Microsoft WinHEC conference. We had a great time with about 20 local Free Software and privacy advocates. We all dressed up in hazmat suits and handed out leaflets warning of the dangers of DRM to attendees of the WinHEC2006 conference.
Flickr recently added search functionality that allows users to search for Creative Commons licensed photographs on their system. This is great news for anyone looking to source photos from Flickr. Now you can just look for photos that bear acceptable licensing.
I have bitched about Craig’s List before, but i needed to blog this for once. The Seattle Craigslist covers way more than Seattle. It might as well be called Western Washington CL. I am trying to find a dresser. I only want something close by, but i get stuff in Tacoma, Renton, Edmonds. If CL simply had a zip code function, the utility of the site (and productivity of millions of Americans) would rise instantly. Basically, every posting on the classifieds would have a zip code field and the when searching you would be able to limit your search by zip code proximity.
I found this podcast, Distributing the Future via dorkbot, I think. Anyway, I listened to the Attention episode yesterday, and it is relevant to us and the way we work, and the work that we do. I think that everyone should listen to this particular episode, and I am hopeful about this podcast as a keeper in my itunes line up!
This is by way of World Changing , Jamais Cascio quotes from an article in New Scientist Technology: The concept… is based on a central server that registers details sent by the phone when the photo is taken. These include the nearest cellphone mast, the strength of the call signal and the time the photo was taken. […] …in tests Davis and his team found that by combining [facial recognition software] with context information the system could correctly identify people 60 per cent of the time. The context information can also be combined with image-recognition software to identify places within photos.
As of 5pm Friday, I received my certification as a Scrum Master. What’s that? Well Scrum is a form of project management that focuses on self managing groups and agile/iterative development. Read more about Scrum .
While at the Web Of Change conference in September of 2005 I spent a fair amount of time talking to Mike Gifford of Open Concept Consulting about CivicActions and our business model and how it can be a model for new open source web development consultancies. Upon our returns to the real world, Mike wrote me with some questions, at that point I brought Henri Poole, one of the founders of CivicActions into the discussion.
A friend just pointed out the The MySpace Terms 6. Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com. 6.1 By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.
If you have been following my blog, you have seen that I am feeling guilty about air travel and the environmental impact. I wrote about this earlier and got some good feedback in the comments from Rolf which lead me to Trees for the Future where I just bought $100 worth of trees to offset my carbon footprint from air travel. TFTF will plant trees to the tune of one per dime. So I just bought 1000 trees which will each absorb 50 pounds of carbon a year for 40 years.