infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

• Sharing of research links on mailing lists versus social bookmarking in Del.icio.us
  “Descriptions of bookmarks in Del.icio.us become for some practitioners outlets to address the readers in a network– they are clearly written with the reader in mind.” Trebor Scholz says.
  (tags: del.icio.us Web2.0 privacy)
• Web 2.0 how-to design style guide
  This is kind of interesting, but the center column flows over in my browser.
  (tags: webdesign Web2.0 reference)
• Nick Carr: Sharecropping the long tail
  I was going to blog a longer response to this, but this will have to do for now.
  (tags: Web2.0 economics attention labor)
• virtualpolitik: No President Left Behind
  Liz Losh critiques the Bush administration’s information design.
  (tags: design politics chartjunk)
• Street Tech: How-To Refill Varsity Disposable Fountain Pens
  I got my dad – and myself – some of these pens, which were apparently the geek stocking stuffer 2K6. They’re pretty nice pens.
  (tags: useful howto pen gadget)

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I’m currently in Norman, and driving up to Tulsa tomorrow to spend Christmas with my parents and sister. I imagine posting will be light over the next week or so, as my parents lack access to teh Internets or even extended-basic cable. It’s a hostile place for a guy whose life revolves around TV and the Web. Instead, I imagine I’ll be reading those heavy things made of dead trees.

In the meantime, I’ll point you to this Ocean Drive Magazine profile of indie rock heartthrob Cat Power. Here’s an overly long snippet:

…the Chanel freebies have already started arriving. “I come from a long line of nothing,” Marshall says of her peripatetic Southern upbringing. “My great-grandmother was a cotton picker. I never could’ve imagined my feet inside a pair of fine Chanel boots.” It’s a shift she’s still adjusting to. As she prepares to head out for a late-night karaoke session, she begins running down her chic wardrobe—belt by Louis Vuitton, Hermès swimsuit doubling as a tank top—yet I’m confused by the identity of the design team responsible for her olive-green military-styled shirt.

“It’s from the Boy Scouts of America,” she repeats.

Is that a new hipster line, like Imitation of Christ?

Marshall looks puzzled: “No, it’s a Boy Scouts shirt! From the Salvation Army!” Her sneakers are, natch, from Kmart’s fall Anchor Bay collection.

Of course, it’s her voice that matters most…

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• Colour Lovers
  I guess this is like Flickr for color palettes. It’s apparently in a visual language that only designers can understand.
  (tags: design Web2.0 folksonomy weird yasns)
• “Rebunking” the Lebanese ambulance story
  Right-wing bloggers have suggested that the Israeli attack on a Lebanese ambulance was a hoax. While the bloggers stayed home and performed textual analysis on photographs, Human Rights Watch went to Lebanon and concluded there was an Israeli attack.
  (tags: epistemology blog israel thereal war)
• Eyeteeth: Pac-Man: Graffiti or social engineering?
  This cool street, um, highway art reminds drivers to keep a safe follow distance.
  (tags: transportation streetart awesome gaming)
• Most popular time-shifted TV shows
  This post contains many of Nielsen’s top-10 ratings for the past year, including top-10 product placements. NBC dominates the top-10 time-shifted shows, which probably means it has a prestige audience desirable to but unreached by advertisers.
  (tags: TV advertising ratings audience)

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I don’t usually review products on this site, but I thought I might offer a last-minute gift idea, at least for my Austin reader. The ChicoBag is a nylon grocery bag with an integrated stuff sack; it folds up like a backpacking rain parka into a compact little package. This thing is great. I have a pretty large gadget bag, but after loading my computer, school papers, a water bottle, and a book, I don’t have a lot of room to spare. Grabbing a few books at the library can present some logistical issues, but not with ChicoBag. With ChicoBag, I can pull it out of my pocket, unstuff the bag at the circ desk, and head to the bus stop in style. Or if I don’t want to shower at the gym, (and who does?) I can put my street clothes in ChicoBag, and walk home in my gym clothes. I bought my ChicoBag for three dollars at Wheatville Co-op, and I’m glad I did.

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• CNET: IBM to give birth to ‘Second Life’ business group
  This story from last week doesn’t provide many details about the unit which will deal with 3D interfaces in and outside Second Life.
  (tags: gaming SecondLife business virtual_world)
• AlterNet: Wikipedia vs. Women
  “WikiChix was recently formed by women contributors sick of how male-dominated Wikipedia has become,” Annalee Newitz says.
  (tags: wikipedia feminism gender power)
• Are Sites Like Digg, YouTube And MySpace Still Exploitation If People Get What They Want?
  This is a good question, but I do think that users are often ignorant of the tradeoffs they make by uploading UGC or sharing personal information.
  (tags: Web2.0 yasns myspace YouTube)

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• TV Networks YouTube Clone Has Bigger Problems Than Antitrust Concerns
  Fox, Viacom, and others are thinking about creating a YouTube clone for hosting clips from their properties. Similar experiments with cable led to anti-trust rulings, but TechDirt believes that market forces would encumber this even more.
  (tags: TVontheWeb anti-trust business TV cable)
• ‘Person of Year’ sponsor gets punk’d by YOU
  Chrysler’s interactive ads that accompany Time’s “Person of the Year” puff piece start with the text “You might not be Time person of the year.” oops.
  (tags: schadenfreude advertising magazine irony)
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Public Beta
  This is interesting, but it’s more of a band-aid than an act of goodwill. Adobe is allowing users to download a beta of the next-generation version while they bring the Intel-native OS X version to market.
  (tags: photoshop design OSX business)
• Atomiq: Taxonomy of tagging systems
  (tags: folksonomy Web2.0 design)

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Yesterday, Ars Technica posted a long and interesting article that offers a case study of AT&T rollout of fiber in affluent Chicago suburbs. AT&T, Verizon, and whatever other ILECs might remain want to enter the landline television business, but are hampered by local franchise agreements which were developed for cable systems. In particular, cable franchise agreements generally require system operators to build out to an entire community within a given timeframe, to prevent differents service being offered to wealthy areas and poorer areas. Because of telco network topology, it is difficult to completely cover an area with digital access, so the telcos have been pressuring the FCC to re-classify their digital TV systems to avoid these restrictions and Congress to establish national TV franchises.

In the case Ars describes, AT&T just began rolling out services without the consent of the communities or the FCC. Instead, they simply started installing equipment on public rights-of-way, irking property owners and raising the ire of community activists.

While I encourage you to read the story, I thought it glossed over two issues I think are importanto to this debate. First, national cable franchises or unilateral efforts like AT&T’s will provide no allowance for public access systems. While franchises at the local level often include provisions that require operators to fund local public-access systems. It’s unlikely that media-access activists could pressure telcos and MSOs at the national level, eliminating the sometimes enlightening and sometimes frightening world of public-access TV. Secondly, I do worry about issues of the digital divide and institutional racism. When I lived in West Philly, my largely black neighborhood was one of the last in the area to get DSL access, and if there is not build-out requirement, I could see the telcos never investing in a fiber build-out to the inner-city. The ILECs enjoyed a century-long monopoly, which saw Jim Crow laws and redlinling. Since they were able to profit during this era, telco policy should address the racism of the past.

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• End of an Era: FCC to Drop Morse Testing for All Amateur License Classes
  .– …. — .-
  (tags: FCC radio oldmedia end-of-life)
• NY Times bans Microsoft analysts from Microsoft stories
  This Register story is fairly interesting – I don’t think it should be a surprise that many analyst firms are shills for the companies they discuss, but the NYTimes probably should have a different set of standards than the trades.
  (tags: journalism ethics business)
• InformationWeek Weblog: Ban The Analysts! Or Not?
  A reporter from the venerable trade magazine explains her position on the analyst issue. I tend to agree that some analysts are beholden to a particular platform, while others will entertainingly talk trash about a company or product.
  (tags: journalism ethics business)

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I watched a special on CNN earlier tonight that purported to give a behind-the-scenes look at the “Man of the Year” selection process at Time magazine. As a former magazine editor, I found the representations of story meetings fairly interesting, but what caught my attention was the use of one of my least favorite phrases “user-generated content.” The editors were mulling over naming content-generating users “persons of the year,” and the end of the show revealed Time’s Person of the Year is You.

I’ll probably pick up a dead-tree copy of the magazine, but I read the lead story online, and it somehow manages to elevate Web 2.0 to a even greater level of hype. One graf states “Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.” A later graf hedges its bets a bit and reminds the reader “Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary,” but the article maintains that Web 2.0 sites like YouTube are leading to new social formations.

I guess the timing of my Web 2.0 paper was perfect; hopefully more than a handful of people at the Cultural Studies Association conference will have heard of the Web 2.0 concept, thanks to the Time story. I learned this week that my panel is at 9am on the last day of the conference, so I imagine attendance will be light. Maybe the hype will roust people out of bed to hear me talk about Web 2.0.

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• Kids With High IQs Grow Up to Be Vegetarians
  Nothing we didn’t know already.
  (tags: vegetarian health food)
• Gear Factor: Hack Gawker With Your Own Message!
  A web-based form that allows you to exploit a hole in the Gawker CMS and create your own posts.
  (tags: hack blog cruel)

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