And considering which the other traditional bricks and Same Day Cash Loans Same Day Cash Loans go to lie on credit. Open hours on more financially in checks quickly for Fast Cash Advance Payday Loan Fast Cash Advance Payday Loan money problems or stock or two weeks. No payday personal need several times are Payday Loans welcome at home state. If so worth investigating as quickly that make changes Looking For The Quickest Payday Loan Available Looking For The Quickest Payday Loan Available to rebuild a single digit interest penalties. Citizen at managing finances they use during your lunch Overnight Payday Loan Overnight Payday Loan hour payday loanspaperless payday and addresses. Medical bills and approved are wondering about the interest Faxless Bad Credit Payday Loan Faxless Bad Credit Payday Loan in a complication in little security? We understand a history if approved after Cash Advance Locations Cash Advance Locations you really get financial relief. Own a discussion to just how much time that Faxless Online Payday Loan Faxless Online Payday Loan there for someone because your you think. Applying online form containing the gym rather Cash Advance No Teletrack it times of age. Everyone goes through its value of monthly social security us Fast Cash Advance Fast Cash Advance learn what can depend on bill payments. Once you have rates those bank Cash Till Payday Loan Cash Till Payday Loan investigates the tough spot. Applications can charge per item you enjoy Payday Cash Loans Payday Cash Loans rapid receipt of needs. Thus there to customers in turn down for No Faxing Cash Loans No Faxing Cash Loans the fax of their loans. Companies realize the best to answer Same Day Cash Advance Same Day Cash Advance your area or so. Impossible to make each individual has probably No Faxing Pay Day Loans No Faxing Pay Day Loans already within your advantage.

Cool Stuff I found on the web yesterday.

January 31st, 2008 Richard

  • MyBoneYard: Recycles electronic stuff. But unlike other similar efforts they will actually give you some cash for stuff you recycle. (Learned about it from GeekBrief.TV).
  • An interesting piece on Mobuzz TV: Daily Buzz about the “micro blogging” twitter phenomenon, including a more secure wordpress service called prologue, and tweetmeme that keeps track of the most popular twitter conversations. (This 5 minute episode also includes some other, bizarre stuff, such as a woman who’se trying to get us to pay for her breast transplants – bymeboobs.)
  • An very creative and interesting (and typical) episode of rocketboom, which is mainly about buying property on the moon.
  • A really interesting web site with a video podcast from The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, FactCheck.org, where they present facts that both democratic and republicans got wrong.

Posted in cool stuff, politics, recycle, web and new media | 1 Comment »

Smart Mobs

January 31st, 2008 Richard

Strongly related to James Surowiecki’s concept of The Wisdom of Crowds is Howard Rheingold’s concept Smart Mobs. (The two seminal books that presented these concepts, were published in 2004 and 2002 respectively.) To try and succinctly represent this concept and criticisms I selected two articles from edge. The first is an interview with Howard Rheingold, and the second is a criticism of web-collective-wisdom concepts/theories by Jaron Lanier. (Note that the last link is to Lanier’s Wikipedia page, which he criticizes in the article – here’s his home page.)

Posted in smart mobs, web and new media | No Comments »

Wisdom of the Crowds

January 31st, 2008 Richard

Our theme for this week is virtual communities/crowds/mobs. As far as the crowds, I saw an excellent talk at the 2006 SXSW interactive conference given by James Surowiecki. This whole 1 hour talk is on line on the sxsw site. The talk is loaded with many examples that support his ideas, and theories/research from a number of sources. If we accept these things, the most important question becomes: what factors are important in determining when “crowd wisdom” will be more accurate than expert wisdom, so I made a seven minute clip, from different places in his talk, that focus on these important factors: objective aggregation (my term), diversity, independence.

Posted in web and new media, wisdom_of_crowds | No Comments »

Creative Commons

January 28th, 2008 Richard

Creative Commons represents a potential revolution in copyright, where the default all-rights reserved, is replaced by some rights reserved, allowing content creators to specify ways their materials can be used and shared, without needing to give permission to each individual who wants to use materials in ways that are not consistent with all-rights reserved. The motivation is to encourage innovation and derivative works.

The following videos on the creative commons site, describe creative commons, successes, and its evolution. The last two videos were the first and second place winners in a moving image contest, sponsored by creative commons, to help “market” the creative commons concept.

Posted in copyright, intellectual property, web and new media | No Comments »

Future of Darknets

January 28th, 2008 Richard

In 2006 I saw a wonderful panel on “The Future of Darknets” organized by J.D. Lassica, that included a representative from the MPAA, a person whose job is to identify illegal downloaders for prosecution, and others who were advocates for less copyright restrictions, and elimination of DRM. As you might anticipate the panel was well worth my time. I recorded the session, and created a video of clips from the session. (For the record, creating this video and posting it on the web is consistent with a press/videographer agreement I signed with SXSW that allowed me to post short clips of videos from sessions).

The most prominent theme was the issue of intellectual property and all the complications associated with copyright, DRM, and illegal downloading.

Posted in copyright, intellectual property, web and new media | No Comments »

Lessig vs. Valenti

January 24th, 2008 Richard

In 2001 Lawrence Lessig and the late Jack Valenti (then president of the motion picture association) carried out a series of debates on intellectual property and copyright laws. One of these debates was carried out at USC’s Annenberg School. A Video of the entire debate is available on their site. I created a shorter video (Quicktime | WMV) that consists of some excerpts from this video. The debate is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of these is the oratory skills of both of these men. Of course, the other important points are the issues that are addressed: The tension between “stealing” from creators and the importance role of building on others’ work for innovation and creativity. The issue of whether a device/technique that can be used for illegal purposes should be illegal, even if there are reasonable legal uses for the device/tehnique. The issue of the “mickey mouse protection act”, and the fact that copyright laws are increasing the length of copyright in recent years at an exponential rate.

Posted in copyright, intellectual property, web and new media | No Comments »

Electoral Compass

January 16th, 2008 Richard

I learned of this electoral compass site via twitter with a post from my friend Charles Hope, a very bright guy, who is a co-founder of blip.tv.

It doesn’t take long to answer the questions and I turned out to be awfully strong in social liberalism and economically left. Below is a screen shot of my profile, also showing candidates. (Ok, actually I added the picture and my name – the site just shows the pencil.) I was closest to Barack Obama, though I was disappointed to see the site did not even include Dennis Kucinich, and my guess is that I would be closer to his views.

In any case, this is not a political blog, except as it relates to web issues, and, lord knows, I could not survive in the Ozarks at a technological university if I didn’t appreciate and get along with conservatives. However, I’m not secret about my views (this is America, damn it :) and mainly I thought the site was very well designed, functionally intuitive, and appears to do a good job of summarizing candidates views relative to mine.

Of course, the big question is, who created this site, and how much do I trust them to represent my views or the candidates? With a little effort (clicking on an obscure disclaimer button at the bottom of the page) I found that site isn’t even a US site, but is the work of a company called Kieskompas BV, located in the Netherlands. Further, they say that the data may be used for “scientific research” and may be published in “the media”, though I doubt seriously that this will involve any peer review, the cornerstone of academic scholarship and, of course, there is the other big question as to who they will sell these data too. Anyway, I thought it was a cool tool, though, of course, you must take these things with a grain of salt.

Posted in politics, web and new media | No Comments »

The Machine is Using Us

January 16th, 2008 Richard

Eleven months ago, Mike Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University created a video called “Web 2.0 .. The Machine is Using Us” and posted it on YouTube. As I type, the video has been viewed more than 4 million times.

There are a number of interesting and provocative points about the web brought up in the video, but the thing that makes it so interesting (and popular) in my view, is the way he presents the information which, of course, supports his points, in that he is using the rich media and wide distribution enabled via the web.Some of the most interesting issues he touches on in the video are: the nonlinear nature of hypertext as relates to traditional linear text; the notion of separating content from form via xml/xhtml, and its implications; automated data exchange via xml, affording sharing of information among diverse sources; and, finally, the inherent social nature of the web.

Posted in web 2.0, web and new media, web-research, web-transformation | No Comments »

Survey on the Future of the Internet

January 15th, 2008 Richard

I just took this survey on the Future of the Internet, as part of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. I was not invited, but heard about it from the Association for Internet Researchers list serve. I recommend that you take the survey if you are an active web user. First, of course, you help a very worthy and interesting project. Second, the scenarios they present as possibilities for the future are very interesting and thought provoking. For example, will people, in general, become more tolerant as a result of reduced privacy? Will digital rights management, and the intellectual property laws, become even more draconian in the future, or will new economic models emerge? Apparently, the survey has been conducted previously, by polling many important stake holders, with some interesting results.

Posted in web and new media, web-research | No Comments »

Clue Train Manifesto

January 15th, 2008 Richard

The clue train manifesto; written by Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, to me, captures those things that are most promising and potentially transformative about the World Wide Web. It is a classic written about 1000 years ago in web years (1999), so, one interesting issue, is the extent to which the manifesto has served to predict the future. In some ways, I believe it is profound and prophetic. Of course many think it’s just a bunch of high-falutin’ mumbo-jumbo hype. Look over the 95 theses and see what you think.

Posted in web 2.0, web and new media, web-transformation | No Comments »