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N-Ster

The backlash against Friendster, Orkut, and other “social networking” apps continues, and I have to say I’m in total agreement with the general “Where’s the beef?” day-after assessment. Despite initial enthusiasm about Orkut, I’ve since lost all interest, and never visit the site without provocation. ZeFrank has a hilarious and searing video indictment of social networking sites. Especially telling: Almost all of my real friends who received inviations from me to join Orkut simply ignored them.

But the problem isn’t with social networking per se’ — the problem is implementation. Friendster, Orkut, etc. make a big deal about who you know. Who cares? No wonder people get burned out on these services – they emphasize the wrong thing. What matters is (surprise!) content.

And guess which social networking experiment got that message from the beginning? LiveJournal. Sure LJ lets you hook up with rings of friends, but those friends are (generally) accumulated as a result of real conversations. Rather than starting with a databased list of favorite TV shows and cat names, people think and speak, others think and speak back, and relationships are forged as a result. Elemental. It’s possible to create relationships that way on Orkut too, but on Orkut, conversation is secondary to the process of artificially jacking up your tally of so-called friends to make yourself appear popular.

I doubt I’ll pull out of Orkut, but I don’t see myself contributing to it either. To me it’s become a non-starter.

Music: Gary Numan :: We Are Glass
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Wikipedia

Wikis are not new, but I feel my fascination with them being kindled. The usual model of web publishing is that the webmaster locks everything down tight; a few people can publish while the rest of the universe gets read-only access. Wikis turn this assumption on its head, asking the absurd question, “What if we let the entire world add or edit pages in real time, without editorial intermediary? Instead of assuming people will vandalize everything not locked down, what if we assumed that people actually want to do cool things together?”

There are a lot of cool Wikis out there, but the most sterling example is WikiPedia — a collaborative encyclopedia being constructed second-by-second by volunteers from around the world — thousands of people adding to and correcting the analysis of others on every facet of human knowledge. More than a quarter million entries since 2001, and growing. What’s really inspiring is that the information it contains seems to be of such high quality. This makes sense – if someone writes on a topic that you understand better than the original or previous author, you can modify the entry right there on the spot.

Of course the WikiPedia is up-to-date in a way no printed encyclopedia could ever be — yesterday’s successful test flight of Boeing’s Mach 7 aircraft X-43 is already a part of the X-43 entry. Seeing collaborative potential manifest is always inspiring.

Installed PHPWiki last night on a side domain, starting to play with it. We’ll see what comes…

Music: John Fahey :: Theme And Variations
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Ukulele Freakshow

Good piece summarizing the details of the new CAN-SPAM legislation … Jeff Bridges’ web site is all analog … Amazing (scary!) Dutch dolls … Stupid computer error messages … Ukulele freakshow … The truth about Stonehenge … Mindblowing Flash game – set aside half an hour when ready to slow down, sink in… What is moving, what is not? … Philosophers hate vagueness … The cardinal sins of blogging … The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist … Why the FBI loves Macs … Tatooed baby dolls … Pepsi bottlecap liner leak vulnerability …

Music: Herbie Hancock :: The Prisoner
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Greendale

Have been listening to Neil Young’s sonic novella “Greendale” for months – a somewhat disjointed portrait of three generations living in a small town, ultimately focused on granddaughter Sun Green, who awakens to her enviro self, takes over the lobby of Powerco, welds herself to the beak of a bronze eagle and becomes a media spectacle through the oracle of her megaphone (“Hey Mr. Clean, you’re dirty now too”).

Later realized that Young had made a movie out of Greendale — the whole thing shot on a Super 8 underwater camera (“That Super 8 grain looks like my music sounds“); the footage is grainy, never quite in focus, and seems to oscillate between 12 and 20 frames per second. The music is huge, deeply rocking. The stories are completely honest and uncomplicated — no symbolism at all. If a song mentions a rooster, Neil shows you a rooster. The characters speak every word of the songs. In anyone else’s hands, this kind of literalism would be corny, but Greendale is totally truthful, like almost everything Neil Young has ever made.

Music: Cosmic Jokers :: Interplay of Forces
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China’s Chopstick Crisis

Usually when one hears about rates of global deforestation, you get stats such as “Amazonian rain forests are being decimated at a rate of 2.4 acres per second.” But recently I’m hearing more about the amount of forest being razed to create disposable / one-time-use chopsticks throughout Asia:

China now produces and discards more than 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, cutting down as many as 25 million trees in the process, according to government statistics. Another 15 billion pairs are exported to Japan, South Korea and other countries. At the current rate of timber use, environmentalists warn, China will consume its remaining forests in about a decade.

And despite China’s great land mass, they’re importing 60 million cubic meters of timber yearly to meet demand. To make matters worse, the Chinese government actively encouraged disposable chopstick use for years to inhibit communicable disease. There is a nascent environmental movement in China which encourages people to carry their own non-disposable chopsticks, but I’ve heard from Chinese environmentalists that environmentalism in China gets even more strange looks than it does in the U.S.

So… what happens in a decade, when all of China’s forests are gone?

Music: Minutemen :: Beacon Sighted Through Fog
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Un-Electric Fridge

Astoundingly simple, totally elegant: Place a clay pot inside a larger clay pot and line the space between with sand. Dampen sand with water, cover with cloth. As water evaporates, the sand is cooled; basic thermodynamics. Result: Eggplants inside now last three weeks rather than three days, and a region that had no refrigeration now does. Inventor Mohammed Bah Abba wins this year’s Rolex Award for his pot-in-pot system (and can now, ironically, afford an electric fridge).

Music: Steve Roach :: Rainfrog Dreaming
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TypeKey

No Movable Type 3.0 yet, but TypeKey has been announced – a centralized login service for all MT and TypePad weblogs (and others?). Free to all, anonymity possible if desired. Most of the advantages seem academic, but this will be a huge win in the fight against comment spam.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Ramona
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Gruppo Sportivo

buddyodorFinally got bored of the default Entourage mail sounds I’ve been hearing for two years and went looking for replacements — which turned up in spades at soundsetcentral.com. Paging through the downloads, jaw suddenly dropped when I came across a Gruppo Sportivo sound set.

25 years ago I worked at a surf shop in Morro Bay, when punk and new wave were peaking, and one of our customers brought in a tape of this obscure (to Americans) Dutch new wave band. The tape was on constant loop for an entire summer, permanently burned into my brain. But the funny thing was, I never saw an album cover of theirs, never owned any of their records, and promptly forgot about them when I left the shop.

Suddenly re-obsessed with Hans Vanderburg (Vandefruit) and Gruppo Sportivo, tracked them down on Amazon; turns out a bunch of re-issues have been produced recently, import only. Not a trace at Rasputin’s or Amoeba, so ordered “Buddy Odor Is a Gas,” “10 Mistakes,” “Back to 78” (full discography). They arrived a few days ago.

It’s strange to compare one’s hermetically-sealed-in-time memory of some forgotten musical branch with current impressions. How one group can be so stupid/silly and so brilliant at the same time is a confounding paradox. But I’m having fun trying to work it out. Amy and I have been singing the “Beep Beep Love” chorus for the past few days – amazing and welcome ear worm.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Tokyo