digital detritus

This just in from the Office of Really Cool Ideas Come to Life:

It would seem that some very smart people with the right resources have put their heads together to create Ourmedia. I like this idea so much that I’m actually speechless. There are just way too many good things to say about it. Here’s what it combines:

• Huge online storage, courtesy of the Internet Archive
• Sane copyrighting thanks to the folks at Creative Commons
• Excellent content management by way of Drupal

So, here’s a place that you can post your creative work for folks to see, enjoy, share and build upon.

Welcome to Ourmedia.org

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

Get recognized for your creativity. Make your voice heard. Register now and join the personal media revolution.

Just in case you missed it, here’s the link.

[composed and posted with ecto]

This has got to be one of the best ideas for a theme night at a bar that I have seen in a long time. Nerd Nite “is a forum where nerds get together for nerdery of all sorts.” Or as my friend Rebecca describes it “Come on down, get tanked, heckle some nerds the way you’ve always wanted to.”

So, check out Nerd Nite at the Midway Cafe, if you happen to be in Jamaica Plain.

[composed and posted with ecto]

I haven’t been to SXSW (read South by Southwest) in a very long time. Too long really.

If you don’t know what it is here’s the short list:

• A Music Festival
• A Film Festival
• A Festival of Interactive Technology
• One hell, of a good time!

It all happens in Austin, TX, which is a very groovy place in and of itself.

What really caught my eye this year was the fact that they offered MP3s by the bands appearing this year for download as a BitTorrent. This is cool in a number of ways. One is that they are offering up this music to folks who didn’t even attend and, in the process, create and incredible amount of exposure for bands that might not have it otherwise. Another is that they used BitTorrent as the method for downloading the file(s). This means that they leverage the popularity of the music against a filesharing method that does a great job of distributing the downloads across many hosts. This should got to the top of the list of great examples of uses of BitTorrent.

The icing on the cake of all of this great work doesn’t even come from SXSW but from a guy named Dan. Seems that Dan had noticed, back in February, that on the SXSW artist list, they had included links to mp3s by all of the artists. So Dan wrote a script to crawl the SXSW site and collect the URIs of all of the mp3s. And from that he built an RSS feed with enclosures.

It’s moments like this that make me proud to be a geek.

[composed and posted with ecto]

I’m no stranger to attempts at weight loss. So far I’ve not found the key to really pulling it off. But I do keep trying.

I have trouble believing that I’m admitting this, but this is a very exciting idea for ways to promote weight loss. At least for some folks.

[composed and posted with ecto]

This is amazing piece of work. It’s so good I don’t even want to quote it just point folks at it and let them read it. So go right now and read A Fat Girl’s Rhapsody.

What I really like about it is that it doesn’t just speak to “fat girls.” It speaks to everyone who has ever been lonely.

Kudos to the folks at Eros Blog for pointing it out.

[composed and posted with ecto]

“…God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”

This is one of the things that wakes me up in the middle of the night, screaming and in a cold sweat. The image that I have in my head is of someone clear cutting their way through the bill of rights, one at a time.

Seems that the Neo-Cons have decided that not only is the freedom of religion a bad idea but that people should have it rammed down their throat. So a year ago some of our representatives offered up H.R.3799 (pdf), euphemistically called the “Constitution Restoration Act of 2004.” It was introduced in the 108th congress (2003-2004). It’s sibling bills in the Senate were S.2082 and S.2323. All of this seemed to die in committee. But wait, it’s come back from the grave to haunt us. Now it’s H.R.1070 and S.520.

Here’s my version of what the bill says, if anyone who is part of the government (local, state or federal) decides that they want to highlight, support, push or establish a particular religion above others we, the people, have no grounds for redress. Am I crazy? Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that folks fled from Europe to get away from? I don’t want to have to walk into any government building and pray to or pretend to worship someone else’s idea of a deity. That’s just not right. This should violate at least two different parts of the first amendment (emphasis mine):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So, find your representative and senator(s) and let them know that this is one of the most dangerous ideas that they have been asked to discuss in a very long time.

Here’s the summary from the Library of Congress:

SUMMARY AS OF:
3/3/2005–Introduced.

Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Prohibits a court of the United States from relying upon any law, policy, or other action of a foreign state or international organization in interpreting and applying the Constitution, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

Provides that any Federal court decision relating to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction by this Act is not binding precedent on State courts.

Provides that any Supreme Court justice or Federal court judge who exceeds the jurisdictional limitations of this Act shall be deemed to have committed an offense for which the justice or judge may be removed, and to have violated the standard of good behavior required of Article III judges by the Constitution.

Much thanks to my friend Pat and his site Synaptic Junction that reminded me about this.

The re-introduction of this bill on March 3rd seemed to have been hardly noticed. It was first brought up last year by Senator Richard Shelby, Rep. Robert Aderholt, and Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore. I wonder if section 201 of the CRA will affect Article VI, Sect. 2. (born of, the 2004 thread (s)) [from MetaFilter.com]

Some useful links:

• Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and their blog
• ACLU
• Constitution Restoration Act re-introduced (from Scoop News)
• Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State

[composed and posted with ecto]

Since folksonomy is one of my favorite topics I was very interested in this post on slashdot. I’m also a big fan of open source so the combination of the two seems quite cool.

The growth of general search engines like Google and the growing number of specialized search engines like isohunt is a clear sign that it’s not just about what’s available on the internet but also about finding the data that is available. Ten years ago a common aphorism was “You can tell the internet was designed by geeks and not librarians, because it’s so hard to find anything.” This isn’t really the case any longer. It can still be hard to find things but it is getting a lot easier. I think folksonomic tagging is going to play a very interesting role in this.

This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to delicio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I’m sure it won’t take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that’s the gist of it. More details here and here.

Timothy K. Armstrong gives us an excellent breakdown of what went on today at the Supreme Court.

MGM’s rebuttal opened with a real howler, and I am a little surprised that none of the Justices interrupted their lawyer to challenge it, but he was speaking pretty quickly and forcefully, so I guess they were inclined to let him sum up. Addressing the relief MGM was seeking, their lawyer said: Grokster is a machine built upon inducing infringement and we are entitled to an injunction shutting it down. The obvious rejoinder, based on the lower courts’ express findings in the case, is that an injunction can’t shut down Grokster, the network, because it exists completely apart from Grokster, the company. If this was an attempt at some sleight of hand with the technologically unsophisticated judges, I don’t see it going anywhere, because the questioning of both sides seemed to reflect that the Justices have a hearteningly clear grasp of what the software does and doesn’t do. MGM also argued that the Ninth Circuit’s decision was itself chilling technological innovation, although they defined ‘innovation’ as innovation authorized by copyright holders. MGM closed with its pity-the-starving-artists line, complaining about the lost revenues from hypothesized sales it says would have occurred absent file-sharing.

Here’s the link.

[composed and posted with ecto]