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Thursday, May 15, 2008
The old Victorian homes that dot Providence and other New England communities convey the beauty and worksmanship of a bygone age. (As James Howard Kunstler has observed, there's no small irony in how when this country was less prosperous before WWII, the homes and public buildings were far more durable and aesthetically pleasing than those made following the boom years.)
Anyway, the emerging subculture of Steampunk weds Victorian ingenuity with contemporary uses while rebelling against streamlined design and the Wal-Martification of American culture. Sharon Steel writes all about it in this week's Phoenix:
The All-in-One Victorian PC is the perfect little black dress of computer modifications. It’s classic and timeless, but has a modern edge that makes it impossible to escape wolf whistles and elevator eyes. Like any good designer, Jake von Slatt knew he had to start with strong raw material. He purchased a 24-inch flat-panel Soyo monitor from OfficeMax for $299, and fabricated a shell to hide the rest of the computer — including a Pentium IV motherboard, disk drives, and a 350-watt PSU — behind and inside of it. Most DIY-ers, even some hardcore tech-geeks, would have stopped there, but von Slatt had barely begun.
He poked around his town dump until he found a knick-knack rack that reminded him of a Victorian-era stage set. Framing the monitor with the rack lent it the air of an antique pixel picture frame. Then, he added aluminum and pop rivets, followed by two long pieces of angle iron as “curtains,” to give the monitor-stage a trump l’oeil effect. Gold-painted flower scrollwork arches across the top like a crown, and tiny brass feet — miniaturized versions of the ones you’d see on a vintage bathtub — prop the utilitarian objet d’art a few centimeters off the table. A tightly coiled wire leads to an elegant, fully functional keyboard, the keys of which have been taken from a 1955 Royal Portable typewriter. The completed PC is a sexy, ebony-lacquered beauty trimmed in high-polished brass accents. Von Slatt, who is wearing a bowling shirt and a formal top hat, watches me admire his work with an affable smile. He looks, for all the world, like a man caught between two centuries. For that matter, so does his computer.
Up close, the PC is a tactile wonder, far more extravagant than the pictures I and thousands of others — it had been featured on Boing Boing, Engadget, and digg.com — had gawked at online. I’m itching to press the typewriter keys and, when von Slatt unleashes the DVD drive with a ping and a flourish, I’m tormented that I don’t have the luxury of loading in a movie, say, The Wizard of Oz, so that I can steer this gothic tech-fantasy to a whole other place. But there’s so much else to stare at in von Slatt’s Littleton, Massachusetts, Steampunk Workshop — itself a big, pleasant jumble of anachronisms — that it becomes difficult to focus on any one thing.
Von Slatt (a pseudonym) recently blogged about his PC on the Web version of his Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), detailing the process of its construction and the unique modifications he’d included. Given all of this, it’s hardly surprising that he has been lauded as a kind of tinkerer visionary, a man with the mechanical prowess (he’s an IT professional by day) and artistic skills to solder technology with craftsmanship and form a new artisanal DIY movement.
Friday, May 02, 2008
My piece on the RI blogosphere has generated a lot of feedback, and as mentioned in a brief sidebar with the print piece, I want to highlight some of the other noteworthy blogs in the Ocean State.
Jack Templin of the Providence Geeks launched RI Nexus last year, and it seems like a great resource for the local tech community and people looking to learn more about it.
Here are some excerpts from a recent e-mail interview betweek Jack and myself:
What has the RI Nexus blog meant for the tech-geek sector/community?
Because info-tech and digital media professionals are early adopters of the blogosphere, we are reaping its benefits both sooner and to a greater extent than other groups. Dozens and dozens of individual RI geeks, as well as the companies they're associated with, have active blogs.
RINexus.com is a community and content management system complete with a calendar, a news tracking tool, interactive map of Rhode Island, discussion forums, and a job & internship board. A multi-author blog figures in prominently into the mix. With the RINexus.com blog, we highlight the voices, ideas, and achievements of Rhode Island's burgeoning info-tech and digital media sector. We try to pass the baton around to as many authors as possible. Postings trigger conversations, both online and off. We know that all sorts of business activity that has been catalyzed from RI Nexus blog postings including partnerships, events, sales, hirings, and investments.
How will this influence change going forward?
Keep an eye on the micro-blogging trend that's best represented by Twitter. A lot of Rhode Island Geeks are "twittering" and in doing so creating a whole additional layer of communication that complements both blogging and in-person interactions.
Also, note that RI's info-tech and digital media community has a very robust "in person" dimension with all sorts of events, small to large, super casual to slightly more formal. The blogosphere, and online activity in general, has been key to the community creating these rich "real world" happenings and relationships.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
To the surprise of no one, the release this week of Grand Theft Auto IV has inspired much media hand-wringing.
Yesterday, AG Patrick Lynch put out the obligatory "consumer advisory" about the pending sale of GTA IV:
“As video games become more realistic and in many cases, more violent, parents must become more vigilant before buying them or letting their children use them,” said Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch. “Also, retailers and salespeople have a responsibility to better inform parents how violent these games actually are. Grand Theft Auto IV is obviously rated M for a reason, and parents need to keep a game like this away from their kids.”
Lynch is advising adults purchasing video games to check the rating symbols on the front of virtually every game package sold at retail. Each package bears one of the following age recommendations, which have been developed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB): EC (Early Childhood 3+), E (Everyone 6+), E10+ (Everyone 10 and up), T (Teen 13+), and M (Mature 17+). The rating also is printed on the back of each package, along with content descriptors providing information about content that may have triggered the rating or that may be of interest or concern to parents.
Not unreasonable, eh? Yet this became the basis for a prominent story on Channel 10's 11 pm newscast last night, faintly suggesting that this video game is a serious menace to all that is well and good, the denials of the one young person interviewed notwithstanding.
Such coverage hardly hurts Lynch's gubernatorial aspirations, since it caters to the fears of the state's suburban demographic. Yet Lynch, in his mild approach, compares favorably with the most zealous self-styled video watchdogs, as Mitch Krpata wrote in last week's Phoenix:
Florida attorney Jack Thompson, one of the most strident anti-games voices around, described the newest GTA installment as “a murder simulator for violence against women, cops, and innocent bystanders” and promised to bring legal action against the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games, and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, if any copies of the game were sold to minors.
Similarly, in a move reminsicent of how she tried to stoke fears about school violence here in RI, there's this:
In 2005, Democratic New York Senator Hillary Clinton, along with co-sponsors Independent Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, Democratic Indiana senator Evan Bayh, and Democratic South Dakota senator Tim Johnson, introduced a bill to the United States Senate that would have made the sale of M-rated (Mature) games to minors a federal offense. Although the proposed Family Entertainment Protection Act died in committee, it’s telling that the legislation contained no similar provision for R-rated movies. There seemed to be no doubt in the senators’ minds that games didn’t fall under the aegis of the First Amendment — that it wasn’t up to retailers to decide what they wanted to sell.
Krpata knows about what he speaks in his thoughtful essay on video games, which treats the subject with the complexity that it deserves, as with this:
The government shouldn’t impose limits on what software parents can buy for their kids. But just because they’re wrong doesn’t mean that anything we do in response is right.
Violence is overblown in some games. Non-whites are underrepresented among video-game heroes. Ironically, Grand Theft Auto is on surer footing than most games in both these regards. It’s true that GTA empowers players to commit violent crimes, but doing so attracts the attention of the police, which in turn makes the game world more perilous for the player. It’s an elegant risk-versus-reward mechanic that makes it much more than a brainless crime simulator. And GTA protagonists since the Vice City installment have been, serially, an Italian-American, an African-American, and now an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern European country. Far from trying to gloss over the diversity issue, Rockstar has embraced it. More developers should be taking this approach.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Speaking of economic development, and I'm bit late in getting to this, but Jack Templin of the Providence Geeks sees a lot of promise in the ongoing I-195 relocation project:
For those interested in urban and economic development though, the much more exciting aspect of the I-195 relocation project is not what's going up, but rather what will be coming down - the old stretch of I-195. Once the new I-195 is complete (scheduled for 2012), the old elevated portion of I-195, that cracking, concrete, rusting, metal mess that obtrusively snakes through the middle of Providence, will be razed. With its demise, 19.2 acres of prime center city real estate will be freed for development. Let me write that again - 19.2 acres! ....
It is awesome to see our sector so prominent in the context of this historic undertaking. Many of us would love to see RI's info-tech and digital media have a geographic center, a physical hub. And the soon to be uncovered land seems like the perfect spot. Its strengths include:
• Easy access to both I-95 and the new I-195; within walking distance of the train station's Amtrak and MBTA lines
• Proximity to many of our institutions of higher learning including Brown, RISD, and Johnson & Wales
• A funky, walkable mixed-use neighborhood with plenty of amenities, and with plenty more to come, including a big new riverfront park
• Adjacency to the state's large and growing bio-tech and medical sectors. From computational biology to medical devices to bioinformatics, there are all sorts of opportunities for our sector and the bio-tech/medical/life science industries to collaborate and innovate
Already, there are a myriad of ITDM companies in the vicinity of the old I-195 including Dynamic Diagrams, Creative Circle, SprintOut, Andera, Providence Health Solutions, Diamond Star Media, Machine Hero and Public Display, just to name a few. (See the RI Nexus Map for more.) With the relocation project, and a strategy that has the our sector prominent in the mix, I have little doubt that we can reach the critical mass of people, companies, and activity needed to make the neighborhood the true center of our community.
Stay tuned - this could be great.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
From the Geeks:
Wednesday, March 23, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
Spring is in the air, and you know what that means – time to get your Geek on! (Alright, fine… according to us, it’s always that time.)
 Chances are you’ve never heard of Rhode Island’s fastest growing private company as they tend to fly (and we do mean fly) under the local radar. According to Inc. Magazine, it’s North Kingston-based The Corporate Marketplace (TCMPI) with a recent annual growth rate of 1,858.3%. And get this – TCMPI was also ranked as the 73rd fastest growing company in the country.
Inc. explains that TCMPI, “builds private online stores for large corporations running employee incentive and reward programs… TCMPI’s software acts as a procurement hub, linking… reward buyers to factories at high-end brands.” In addition to the thousands of private stores, TCMPI also powers parts of Amazon.com and American Express’s huge Membership Rewards Program.
At this month’s Providence Geek Dinner, TCMPI CEO Chris Crawford and CTO Peter Mackey, will explain their incredible business, and give a rare demo of the online engine that makes it all possible.
Update: Chris has just authored a post about TCMPI for the RI Nexus weblog – The Little Engine that said it could.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Yes, kids, it's time for another installment of are we the butt of technology's cruel joke?
What's worse: that there's a chain e-mail making the rounds, falsely claiming that Al Gore gave Oliver North a hard time when he tried to warn the world about (wrong again) Osama bin Laden?
'Threatened? By whom?' the senator questioned.
'By a terrorist, sir' Ollie answered.
'Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?'
'His name is Osama bin Laden, sir' Ollie replied.
Or that none of the people sending this along this nonsense spent the few seconds needed to find a bevy of sites debunking it?
What's better: that a viral video of an assault by young girls is the rage of the Internet, or that, thanks to the wonder of hypertext, we can see the changes made by the founders as they were working on the Constitution?
You be the judge, dear readers.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
While liberals and conservatives square off on the "Economic Growth & Fairness Act," a measure that merits broad support -- making manufacturers responsible for the safe recycling of electronic waste -- is due for consideration in House Finance.
Here's part of what Sheila Dormody of Clean Water Action, which supports the bill, says about the e-waste problem:
According to the state’s Comprehensive Solid Waste Master Plan, Rhode Islanders create 7,500 tons of electronic waste each year. The RI Resource Recovery Corporation’s e-waste recycling program has taken in an average of only 76 tons of computers per year since its inception. While the total tonnage has been steadily increasing each year, it means that RIRRC recycles on average less than 2% of Rhode Island’s e-waste.
“With the new federal rule requiring all TV signals to switch to digital in just over a year, we can expect even more televisions to be thrown in the trash,” said Dormody. “If the general assembly doesn’t require manufactures to cover the recycling costs this session, taxpayers will have to foot the bill for all of that toxic trash.”
On February 17, 2009, TV stations will stop broadcasting analog signals over the airways, and switch to only digital signals. This means that millions of older TVs across the country will no longer receive a signal. Consumers will need to either buy a digital set-top converter box or a brand new TV in order to get over-the-airways reception. Millions of new TVs will end up in the trash as consumers opt for new flat panel TVs.
Discarded electronic products are a growing part of the solid waste stream. Every year, we scrap 400 million units of electronics in the US, according to the recycling industry.
In 2006, Tim Lehnert, wrote, in the Phoenix, about the problem:
On the consumer end, disposing of electronic waste is an immense problem. Every year, 100 million computers, monitors, and TVs become obsolete in the US, and this number is growing. Although a lot of this gear winds up in landfills (the US Environmental Protection Agency calls e-waste the leading contributor of lead to municipal waste), most of it is sent to Asia and Africa, effectively transferring the problem to poorer countries.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
From the Geeks:
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
Between the excellent presentation by Location Inc., the great crowd, and the Boston Globe’s coverage, February’s Geek Dinner is going to be hard to match. That said, I think March’s dinner might do just that.
 See what stole the buzz at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in Feb – CNN & others rave about GyPSii.
A group of seasoned RI-based entreprenaurs get together again to grow GyPSii on a global footprint in the converging markets of mobile social networking and location based services – Mobile 3.0 – GyPSii the mobile lifestyle application. Meet Shane Lennon, SVP, Strategy & Marketing, Norm Olean, Director of Product Marketing & Vikas Singh, Director of Software Development and see a demo of GyPSii in action, share in the experience, see the latest features and network with the team.
Update: Shane has just authored a blog post at RI Nexus – Gypsii: Social networking meets location-based services on your mobile phone.
Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
On a day when the ProJo reports on a local merchant asking would-be customers for proof of citizenship because they were speaking Spanish, Bill Gates, a slightly more influential capitalist, has shared his thoughts about US immigration policy with Congress (h/t Drudge):
US high-tech companies are being forced to outsource more jobs overseas because of outdated restrictions on immigration, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told Congress Wednesday.
Gates, echoing a longstanding complaint from the technology sector, told a congressional panel that the US immigration system "makes attracting and retaining high-skilled immigrants exceptionally challenging for US firms."
"Congress's failure to pass high-skilled immigration reform has exacerbated an already grave situation," Gates said in remarks prepared for delivery to a hearing of the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee.
"As a result, many US firms, including Microsoft, have been forced to locate staff in countries that welcome skilled foreign workers to do work that could otherwise have been done in the United States, if it were not for our counterproductive immigration policies."
Gates said the limits on so-called H-1B visas aimed at highly skilled professionals are far too low for the rapidly growing tech sector.
He said the current cap of 65,000 H-1B visas "is arbitrarily set and bears no relation to the US economy's demand for skilled professionals."
The Microsoft founder noted that all the 65,000 visas for the current fiscal year were snapped up in one day last April and that employers are now waiting to apply for visas for fiscal 2009, starting in October.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
The Red Sox have opted out of an agreement struck last year in which Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which controls online ticket sales for all 30 MLB teams, agreed to have StubHub become the official ticket reseller for Major League Baseball. StubHub says it has already signed up the Yankees, the Mets, and the Cubs, and it expects most of the teams to participate.
I learned about the Sox' decision as I was reporting a story for this week's Phoenix, about the growing difficulty of landing face value tickets for Fenway Park. When many Sox fans got meager returns, if anything, during the team's January 26 online ticket sale, StubHub became a focal point of criticism in a thread on Sons of Sam Horn.
Sox spokeswoman Susan Goodenow would only say this in explaining the team's decision to me, via e-mail, last Saturday:
“We are exploring all options with the secondary-ticket market with an eye toward taking a walk-before-we-run approach. We expect to reach clarity on the issue within the next week or so.”
Asked whether the Sox are considering using Patriots-style tactics with fans who resell tickets on StubHub, Goodenow would only repeat that the team is "exploring all options."
It's entirely possible, as I write in my story, that concerns about frustrated fans may have influenced the Red Sox' decision.
As it stands, thousands of Sox tickets for the 2008 season can still be found on various Web sites, including StubHub, whose top-selling category is baseball tickets, and where the hyper-popular Sox are listed first among the MLB offerings.
We’re not likely to hear the Red Sox state it so plainly, but the organization’s decision to opt out of the MLB-StubHub relationship reflects a delicate calculus, a consequence of the team’s success under the ownership that bought the franchise in 2002.
Because the Henry-Werner-Lucchino troika has emphatically staked its claim as the guardians of Fenway Park — the heart of Red Sox Nation — it faces the challenge of maximizing the team’s profits while preserving the sense that Average Joes can still get into the place.
As Glenn Stout, the author of more than 50 baseball books, including co-author of Red Sox Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), notes, the question of whether StubHub is good for Sox supporters is kind of beside the point. The precious nature of Sox tickets, he says, “is a product of how a lot of things have changed down at Fenway Park, in Major League Baseball,” and in professional sports.
The Red Sox will keep drawing as long as the team is winning. But if the fan base feels it is being excluded and taken for granted, there could be fallout.
Stout notes that fans’ connection with the Sox “is an emotional one that often flies in the face of logic.” If these diehards step back and start thinking about the amount of time and money they’re devoting to the team, “That’s not a good thing for the Red Sox as an entity, and it’s not a good thing for the Red Sox as a business.”
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The latest from the Geeks:
Wednesday, February 20, 2007, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
Hey, it’s that time of the month again! Time to come out of our broadband-enabled ice caves. Let’s get our geek on!
A number of us have been looking forward to this presentation for awhile now – we hope you can make it.
 A neighborhood like Beverly Hills right here in Providence? You’ll never guess where it is… Beacon Hill in the shiny-new Sunbelt city of Dallas? There is a neighborhood just like it!
Andrew Schiller, founder of Woonsocket-based Location Inc./NeighborhoodScout.com, a nationwide neighborhood search engine for home buyers and movers with 1.8 million unique visitors last year, will be talking about their patented search technology that answers the first question most home buyers have: “where should I focus my house hunt?”. The audience will try the algorithm by ‘building their ideal neighborhood’ on the site, and finding the local neighborhood that best matches the ideal imaginary one. A sneak peek at NeighborhoodScout v2 will reveal flash-based maps, data mining that has produced new levels of granularity for neighborhood crime, appreciation rate, and school ratings, and ‘smart search’ taken to a new level. Andrew will be joined by Andy Couture, VP of Business Development for the company.
Update: Andrew has just authored a blog post at RI Nexus about their forthcoming new site – Building a 250,000 page website.
Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).
As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:
- It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great)
- Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
- Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar
- There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Just your routine Valentine's Day roundup:
-- Writing in this week's Phoenix, Amy Littlefield describes the making of a sexpert.
-- Daily Dose plays both ends against the middle, sponsoring an anti-Valentine's bash tonight while also reporting on the deleterious impact of the flower industry:
-- There's also "blood chocolate" to be concerned about.
-- Lastly, with apologies to Austin Powers, tech geeks have a story to tell about the approach of the sexbots.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Kudos and congrats to Phoenix contributor Tim Lehnert, whose November 2006 story, Your desktop could be a time bomb, about the consequences of computer waste, won a first-place prize in environmental reporting this weekened from the New England Press Association.
Since computers are obviously still with us, the story remains a good read:
On the consumer end, disposing of electronic waste is an immense problem. Every year, 100 million computers, monitors, and TVs become obsolete in the US, and this number is growing. Although a lot of this gear winds up in landfills (the US Environmental Protection Agency calls e-waste the leading contributor of lead to municipal waste), most of it is sent to Asia and Africa, effectively transferring the problem to poorer countries.
There’s just a small amount of harmful material — like lead — in each discarded computer, and because the e-waste problem is relatively new, there’s little evidence specifically linking computer waste, with, for example, kidney damage, mental retardation, or other conditions associated with lead poisoning. Yet environmentalists like Sheila Dormody, head of the Rhode Island office of Clean Water Action, still worry, both about the sheer volume of discarded electronics, as well as the long-term threat that they could pose.
Such concerns are on target. Lead and mercury don’t just go away, after all. They accumulate, and can enter the food stream through the ground and the water, creating a chain of toxicity, and a difficult and costly, if not impossible, cleanup.
And besides lead, other marchers in Rhode Island’s parade of electronic toxins include thousands of pounds of mercury (which can cause brain and kidney damage, particularly in babies and children); chromium (which can cause asthmatic bronchitis and damage the DNA); and cadmium (which can cause kidney damage and harm bones). Hundreds of thousands of pounds of brominated flame retardants, which are used in computers and in TVs — and which have been linked to fetal damage — have also wound up in Rhode Island’s trash.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
As voters go to the polls today in more than 20 states, The New York Times yesterday considered the question of whether Obama (or more specifically, his Web site) is the political equivalent of a Mac, with Hillary's resembling that of a PC.
That is, Mr. Obama’s site is more harmonious, with plenty of white space and a soft blue palette. Its task bar is reminiscent of the one used at Apple’s iTunes site. It signals in myriad ways that it was designed with a younger, more tech-savvy audience in mind — using branding techniques similar to the ones that have made the iPod so popular.
“With Obama’s site, all the features and elements are seamlessly integrated, just like the experience of using a program on a Macintosh computer,” said Alice Twemlow, chairwoman of the M.F.A. program in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts (who is a Mac user).
Meanwhile,
“Hillary’s is way more hectic, it’s got all these, what look like parody ads,” said Ms. Twemlow, who is not a citizen and cannot vote in the election.
Jason Santa Maria, creative director of Happy Cog Studios, which designs Web sites, detected a basic breach of netiquette. “Hillary’s text is all caps, like shouting,” he said. There are “many messages vying for attention,” he said, adding, “Candidates are building a brand and it should be consistent.”
But Emily Chang, the cofounder of Ideacodes, a Web designing and consulting firm, detected consistent messages, and summed them up: “His site is more youthful and hers more regal.”
So how does this translate into votes?
While Apple’s ad campaign maligns the PC by using an annoying man in a plain suit as its personification, it is not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics. The iPod may be a dominant music player, but the Mac is still a niche computer. PC, no doubt, would win the Electoral College by historic proportions (with Mac perhaps carrying Vermont).
On the other hand:
On the big Internet issues like copyright, Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who is supporting Mr. Obama, said there was “not a big difference on paper” between the two Democrats. Both tend to favor the users of the Internet over those who “own the pipes.” He is impressed by Mr. Obama’s proposal to “make all public government data available to everybody to use as they wish.”
In the long run, however, Mr. Lessig believes that it is the ability to motivate the electorate that matters, not simple matters of style. And he’s a Mac user from way back.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Word to the wordsmiths and Scrabble-lovers out there:
For Scrabble fans, there are few bigger dilemmas than how to play a Q without a U. But what about users of Scrabulous, the Scrabble-like Facebook application that has become one of the social networking site’s most popular activities since it was launched this past July? A cease-and-desist order could soon block their triple-word scores indefinitely.
On January 15, players learned that Hasbro — the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, company that owns the US and Canadian rights to Scrabble — had thrown down the legal gauntlet against the application’s creators, Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, claiming copyright infringement.
This has provoked fear among the more than half a million active users of Scrabulous. In Facebook groups with names such as “Please, God, I Have So Little, Don’t Take Scrabulous, Too,” thousands of users post petitions and lament the possibility of losing their favorite time waster. An anonymous artist even penned an R&B ode called “Scrabulous,” which begins with the rap: “Damn thing won’t reload/I can’t tell if I can go.” ....
Hasbro didn’t respond to a request for comment, but has stated publicly that they “hope to find an amicable solution.” The Agarwalla brothers — who also run a non-Facebook version of the game at scrabulous.com — thanked fans in a statement noting, “It is amazing to see that a small application has touched so many people across the world.”
In other news, N4N hears word of the Blackstone Chess Academy, a new chess club at the intriguing To Kalon Club in Pawtucket.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Don't get me wrong. I love the speed with which Google, the Internet, and other forms of new technology enable me to find information, and how blogging offers a faster way to break news than through being just in traditional print.
Yet all is not well and good, particularly in the political realm. A number of observers have been weighing in with the viewpoint that, well, things just aren't as good as they used to be.
For example, Steven Stark, writing in the Phoenix, used the mistaken forecasts of the New Hampshire primary to contend that Internet pundits are worsening the quality of political coverage.
With a deficit of real news, the result, as Daniel Boorstin astutely wrote in The Image almost a half-century ago, is that pundits and opiners start making it up, so they have something to write about. This year, we have been blessed, for example, with constant candidate debates that, in real terms, have been watched by virtually no one but those directly involved with the process. Of course, performance in a debate has absolutely no correlation with performance in office, anyway (an idea that has seemingly been lost). But the smaller point is that, this year, it has also had little to do with how candidates do at the ballot box, either.
That still hasn’t stopped the Internet and cable-TV pundits (myself included!) from compulsively grading each one. The process has gotten so out of hand that, after most debates, Fox News now features a focus group of potential voters — each of whom is “wired up” to a machine that looks suspiciously like something out of shock therapy so that he or she can watch the debate and grade it with others. It’s no surprise that these “scientifically chosen” groups have managed to do everything but identify the eventual primary or caucus winner down the road. Yet the pundits are still treating the results of these ludicrous exercises as something worthy of serious reflection.
Even before that, Matt Bai had noted the death of the old-style campaign books, by the likes of Teddy White, Timothy Crouse, and Richard Ben Crameer:
Cramer himself may have been partly to blame. Though “What It Takes” met with unimpressive sales and skeptical reviews (The Boston Globe called it “What It Weighs,” while the Book Review complained about the “grandiose” verbal effects “that would make the early Tom Wolfe blush”), Cramer’s style spawned legions of imitators, all of whom wanted to do their own fly-on-the-wall reporting and italicized riffs, but most of whom weren’t nearly as scrupulously accurate or as keenly attuned to the human psyche. Often, their pieces left their subjects feeling exploited, to the point where candidates and their handlers quickly became wary of being psychoanalyzed by amateurs or having their ugliest private moments played up for maximum effect.
This breakdown of trust between politicians and reporters, however, probably had less to do with Cramer’s influence than with the moment in American politics he just happened to capture. The cold war was ending, the age of the satellite truck and the 24-hour news cycle was just beginning, and politics, like everything else in the society at large, was becoming more trivialized and more celebrity-driven. A new generation of political journalists was taking over, one reared in the era after Watergate, when taking down a politician, any politician, was considered the pinnacle of a career.
And then there are those, like Andrew Keen, who contend, as argues the subtitle of his book, The Cult of the Amateur, that today's Internet is killing our culture:
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”
Let's face it: there's no turning back technology. Yet it's also worth considering the consequence of so-called "progress."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
BlogNetNews, an aspiring national blog aggregator, has launched a Rhode Island site. It has all your faves -- RI's Future, Anchor Rising, Daily Dose, Belo Blog, and, yes, N4N.
A fellow named David Mastio dropped me an e-mail with the following skinny:
The heart of the site is an aggregator that reposts the begining of the latest posts from blogs across the state and then links back to the originating blog for readers who want to check out the whole thing. There's also a search engine on the top right and and on the left a variety of statistics on what is going on in the Rhode Island blogosphere. In the "services" tab on the left sidebar, you'll find the code to put the Rhode Island search engine on your site, as well as a Rhode Island blogger headline widget.
You'll hear from me again in a few weeks when we have wrapped up building out all the states (seven more to go I think), we're building a national platform that will let readers quickly find the latest posts from blogs writing about every U.S. House, Senate and Governors race in the country written by local bloggers actually on the scene. (If you want to play with the programming we're using for this, you can see some of the innards at www.blognetnews.com/feedcentral.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Today's New York Times details the rise in Japan of the cell phone novel.
TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.
Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.
“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.
Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The latest from the Geeks:
Wednesday, January 16, 2007, 5:30 – 9pm
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
This coming Wednesday we’ll be kicking off the new year, by checking in with an “old” friend of Providence Geeks – Investment Instruments Corporation (IIC).
 Owen Johnson, co-founder of the local-global web company that creates happy tenants and happy landlords, will be sharing the low-down on the company’s impressive progress in 2007. He’ll also give a quick demo of IIC’s latest offering, Rentomatic, an update on the popular Rentometer, and an overview of the significant technical improvements made to both systems over the past year. Owen will be joined by Nick Kishfy, IIC’s manager of operations.
Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).
As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:
- It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great)
- Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
- Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar
- There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.
Monday, January 07, 2008
It turns out that all those cube-dwellers and desk jockeys watching ParkRidge47, Inappropriate Yoga Guy, and LonelyGirl15 have inspired a new media model. It's a wonder than any work gets done.
From Slashdot:
News.com has up a piece from the NYT about the concept of 'video snacking', a new focus for media companies as they gain a certain savvy about the internet. They're increasingly targeting the 'lunch market' for office workers, creating short to-the-point videos that can be consumed over a sandwich. "The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium. In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web."
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
As we greet the new year, it's worth taking the time for a read of a compilation, by Slate's William Saletan, of the top scientific and technological threats of 2007. Here are a few excerpts:
It's been another big year for scientific and technological encroachments on individual privacy. For good or ill, governments and businesses are finding new ways to enter what used to be considered personal space. Here are this year's top 10 highlights.
1. Surveillance cameras. They're everywhere. Britain has more than 4 million; France has more than 300,000 and is aiming for 1 million; China is building a network of 200,000. New York City wants a few hundred more to enforce traffic fees. Responding to civil libertarian complaints, New York's mayor points out that the city's cameras are nothing compared with the thousands of private security cameras already infesting Manhattan. Meanwhile, the technology is becoming more sophisticated. China's cameras "will soon be guided by software … to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity." France plans to do some of its surveillance through aerial drones. Britain is installing loudspeakers in its cameras so operators can scold you for littering, fighting, or vandalism. ....
5. Pedestrian cell-phone use. Many states and cities have restricted phone use while driving. This year, a New York legislator took the next step: proposing to ban use of cell phones, iPods, and BlackBerrys while crossing the street. The bill declared that: 1) it would be a crime to "enter and cross a crosswalk while engaging in the use of an electronic device" and 2) "a user of an electronic device who holds such device to, or in the immediate proximity of his or her ear, is presumed to be engaging in the use of said device." The proposed fine was $100. Proponents argue that such legislation will protect drivers as well as pedestrians, and that "it is impossible to be fully aware of one's own surroundings when occupied in using an electronic device." Critics, in turn, ask why, in that case, it should be legal to engage in other distractions, such as walking while reading a newspaper, or operating your car stereo (or, dare we say, your police radio) while driving. ....
7. Phone-surveillance ads. If you thought terrorist-hunters were the people most interested in your phone conversations, think again. A company has begun tailoring ads to monitored phone calls. The offer: Advertisers subsidize your (Internet-based) calls by paying for ads on your computer screen during the conversation. The catch: The ads you get are determined by voice-recognition software that monitors your conversation and shows you products related to it. The company argues that 1) the software ignores naughty words, 2) it doesn't keep records of what you said, and 3) it's no different from Google's practice of scanning your e-mail box and tailoring ads to the topics it finds there. Civil libertarians worry that tech-industry intrusions have become so common that we've lost our expectation of privacy. Businesses agree—and cite that as a reason to plow ahead.
8. Human chip implants. Radio-frequency identification chips were initially implanted in consumer goods and animals for commercial tracking. Now they're coming to humans. The FDA has approved a chip for people to encode your medical history so doctors can call it up if you can't speak. A company has required some of its workers to accept chip implants. Several Mexican officials were chip-implanted for access to restricted premises. In China, the government is requiring chip-implanted identity cards that show your religion and "reproductive history" (to facilitate enforcement of the country's one-child policy). All told, at least 2,000 people have been implanted. Implant proponents argue that if you let people wear the chips externally, on ID cards or badges, they can be transferred, thereby thwarting surveillance. The electronics industry is opposing further regulation of chip implants, on the grounds that "subcutaneous chips are highly useful" in peop | |