One-point Journalist Test (EFF 4/1 press release)

/ Media

There’ve been a lot of good 4/1 posts today, but I especially like EFF’s press release on the Ninth Circuit’s new “one-point journalist test” in the Apple “do bloggers count as journalists when it comes to shield laws” case:

“Historically, the relevant question is whether the author had the intent to use the material – sought, gathered or received – to disseminate information to the public and whether such intent existed at the inception of the newsgathering process,” wrote Judge Stephen S. Trott in the opinion. “But in an era when anyone with a computer and Internet connection can publish to the world, the key distinguishing factor is whether the author was wearing pants.”

The Court looked to the example of blogger/journalist Jeff Gannon, explaining, “When Mr. Gannon was lobbing softball questions to the President on behalf of Talon News, he was acting just like any other member of the White House press corps — and, critically, he was wearing pants. In Mr. Gannon’s other Internet publishing endeavors, however, he did not wear pants, and his activities therefore fall outside the boundaries of journalism.”

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ALA takes another step to personalizing information

/ Uncategorized

Seth Finkelstein points to the forced stepping down of Michael Gorman (president-elect of the American Library Association) as the latest blog take-down. He’s right of course, but blog take-downs are so yesterday’s news — the real news (at least from a world-wide perspective) is what he’s going to do next:

Gorman will take residency in the London Library and work on the next edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, “now more necessary than ever,” Gorman wrote, and contribute original cataloging. “I’m increasingly suspicious of the value of cooperative cataloging. What is really gained?”

It’s nice to see libraries are finally giving up on this whole one-size-fits-all approach to information sciences. Hopefully this will eventually lead to complete personalization, where there’s no need for librarians at all because everyone is his own librarian, each with his own personalized mental map of the universe and search engines and filters tuned to that model. You could have personalized literature, history, or even physics instantly translated to match your own language, education, IQ and cultural upbringing — just like we use the blogsphere to translate the daily news today.

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Dovetailing tools together

/ Media Technology

OK, this amused me enough I had to share. My fraternity brother Nivi just lost his voice, so he went and purchased a nice-sounding text-to-speech voice for his Mac at Cepstral and piped its output into Skype with Soundflower. Voilà — instant TTS phone.

I remember David Ross once told a story about how the Model T Ford (nicknamed the “Tin Lizzy”) was adapted to all sorts of things unexpected things, from winching wagons to pumping water. The key was the car’s simplicity: it was just a motor on wheels, and it didn’t take an expert to that motor for something besides driving. It’s a lesson that keeps repeating itself: tools made up of simple, powerful components with straightforward interfaces for linking the pieces together find their own new uses.

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Understanding people different from yourself…

/ Politics

Understanding people different from yourself. That’s supposed to be on the “Blue State” side of the big stereotype slate that’s written in somebody’s guidebook, isn’t it? (You know, the one that says if I’m in favor of gun control then I have to be anti-Israel, and vice versa?)

Heather Hurlburt at Democracy Arsenal has a nice short post on 10 steps Democrats can take to get back on the map WRT national security. Kevin Drum at Political Animal quotes one particular example:

Step 6. Every progressive takes a personal vow to learn something about our military, how it works, what its ethos is, and how it affects our society at all levels — as well as what it does well and less well in the wider world.

Sounds like good advice. Also reminds me of a great piece that NPR’s On The Media did last month about how journalists, in general, just don’t understand gun issues or gun owners, and how they really need to start.

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What are the front-runners for the future of mobile displays?

/ Wearable Computing

Siemens demonstrated a prototype cellphone with a built-in projector at CeBIT 2005 last week. (Thanks to Thad for the link.)

I’m curious whether this kind of technology will win out in the long run. It’s clear it fills a need — the PDA/cellphone small screen is fine up to a point, but in general we want big screen real estate in a small package, and you just can’t get that with today’s rigid screens. There are a few competing models though, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ordered from most personal & on-the-move to most public &apm; in situ:

  1. Head-mounted displays: good for private information and information on-the-move, bad for showing anything to someone else.
  2. Roll-up or fold-up displays: small when being carried but still gives however much screen real estate you need when you need it.
  3. Projector systems: good for turning any table or wall into a touch-sensitive display, but require a flat light-colored surface and can’t be used on-the-move or privately. Unclear if they could ever be as good resolution as the other options unless you carry your own high-quality screen as well (making it something of a hybrid projector / roll-up display).
  4. Ubiquitous displays: great resolution, requires that you’re somewhere that has accessible displays at your disposal. Can’t be used on-the-move at all and also requires that you trust the infrastructure you’re using.

Of course we might also wind up with several systems and use whatever works best in a given situation, just like we have both laptop and PDAs today. But if one niche winds up being vital (say, everyone needs information while on-the-move so everyone wears an HMD) and if it winds up being good enough for the other niches then that tech will eat the others, just like we’re seeing laptops more and more often being used as desktop-replacements today.

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End of the rainbow

/ Culture

Long as I’m posting holiday pictures I may as well catch up on St. Pattie’s day…

A couple months ago we had one of those amazing rainstorms where it’s raining pretty hard but the sun is shining at the same time. (I know, you Seattle folks won’t be impressed, but here in California the fact that it rained is already enough to make us sit up and take notice.)

Anyway, it made for a gorgeous rainbow stretched across the sky. It also caused something I’d never seen before in a “real” rainbow: the end of the rainbow was in sight, just 100 feet or so away. You can see in the picture below, where the end of the rainbow clearly occludes the houses just across the street.

Having never seen such a thing before, I did what any good Irish-heritage boy would do — I ran over and looked for gold, or at least a midget in green telling me to keep my mits off his cereal. Looks like I was too late though — at the end of the rainbow is a water-main access cover. I figure somewhere in Menlo Park is a water works repair employee with a big smile on his face.

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Happy Easter

/ Culture

Happy Easter all (either a week late or right on time, depending on your persuasion). I’m happy to report this year’s experiment was an unqualified success: quail’s eggs make great naturally-speckled Easter eggs, with a nice marble look to them.

And the best part is bringing them to work and having people assume they’re chocolate since they’re the wrong size to be real eggs.

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OurMedia.org

/ Intellectual Property

I’ve often heard (and sometimes said) that there are three possible outcomes to the copyright wars:

  1. The Content Cartel manages to stuff the djinni back in the bottle and reinstate themselves as gatekeepers. The Internet dream gets twisted back into pay-per-view with email.
  2. A citizen revolt against congress’s constant erosion of fair use, free speech and free market to keep the Cartel’s lobbyists fat and happy. We regain the rights to our own culture, but only after much blood has been spilled on the field and in the courts.
  3. The Content Cartel keeps their pocket congress-critters and enact even more draconian copyright laws, only to discover that the more restricted a medium is the less it can compete with the new liberated content model.

OurMedia.org (just released in Alpha) is another step forward towards making the third scenario a reality. It’s a new web service that’s offering to host any sort of creative media (including audio & video). For free. Forever. You own your own copyright, you choose your own license.

This is similar to what The Internet Archive does, and in fact the IA is providing free storage and bandwidth for OurMedia’s media files. OurMedia is focusing much more on the general pro/am community though, and includes a free blog & Wiki (all based on Drupal), community-based rating and comment systems and plans for many more social-network support plans.

(Thanks to Seth Finkelstein at Infothought for the link.)

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LinkBack for OSX

/ Media Technology

LinkBack looks pretty sweet:

LinkBack is an open source framework for Mac OS X that helps developers integrate content from other applications into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-enabled application into another and reopen that content later for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically appear in the original document again when you save.

Looks like it goes about 90% of the way towards the convenience of editable embedded objects, without all the problems associated with that last 10% of trying to get everything to actually be edited in a window within the embedded document. It’s also interesting that this is an open-source project, spearheaded by 3rd-party software developers Nisus, OmniGroup and Blacksmith rather than by Apple itself.

LinkBack is currently being integrated into Nisus Writer Express, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, ChartSmith, Stone Create, Border and a plug-in has just been released to paste LinkBack data into Keynote 2.

(Thanks to Nivi for the link!)

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