Month: October 2002

Blogging beyond text

some people are experimenting with audio or video blogs. while totally a venue to explore for expression, i’m not sure about longer term viability. both audio and video are just too opaque, and until we have decent search algorithms that can penetrate into these files they are pretty much a 1-way street. a cool way to expand on this would be to SMIL-enable weblogs. (interesting fact: MMS, the next-generation SMS, is based on a subset of SMIL. convergence?) this could also be a very interesting topic for OSCOM IV in Tokyo.

Asset stripping @ home

i love getting rid of physical property. i’m constantly going through my belongings, pondering what i could do away with. most of the things i care about these days are virtual (the fruits of my labor are all virtual), and having to maintain to much stuff gets on my nerves. besides taking away living space and attention, many physical items do have little or no purpose. i’m thus very happy to report that i parted company with ~10 kilograms of stuff yesterday. in my opinion, our apartment is still full of useless crap, but most of it isn’t mine so i (unfortunately) cannot just go ahead and reclaim that space. maybe some education will help 🙂

Ending the reign of stupidity?

tara complains about old media and its taste for stories instead of facts:

I would like to watch the news and see accountable reporting that tells the facts, not the story. Books are for stories. I paid for home delivery of the newspaper and everyday I get a paperback in a plastic bag. What you read in the paper you see on the nightly news. It is the same story over and over again. They rarely bring attention to people who advocate significant change. If they do happen to release a story on advanced, progressive individuals and ideas, it might only be to expose a tattered past or anything remotely scandalous and of course violence.
There are a lot of fine journalists, but there is no good reporting here. Who, what, when, where, why have all been replaced by yellow journalism. The media is just another fast food industry. It has reduced the thinking public to attention spans and shock effect.

i completely agree with tara, and have long ago stopped reading papers or watching television. how people can waste time watching local tv is beyond me. a good newsreader provides much higher quality information, and a blog allows to write back. hopefully i will be able to contribute to this sea change with the blog business plan.

comments working 20%

i beat the comments code into submission. it now allows to post comments, although there are still tons of bugs: replying doesn’t work, it only shows the first comment of an article etc. i don’t feel like fixing all of carls bugs, so i will stop here 🙂

The Jamaica Digital Divide

i couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and now i’m the driving force behind a project to build a web-based music / articles management system for the government of jamaica. through the network of charlie, OSCOM was asked to do an amalgamation of our various systems with harvard tools, get a nice unified interface, and finally jet over there to instruct the locals how to use it. as is often the case with my ventures, this one is quite iffy too. for starters, it’s not clear whether the government officials in charge will still be in power after the next elections, we haven’t heard their precise requirements yet, it’s not clear who will be involved and in what role etc. although to be honest, i think clear-cut projects are boring.

writing a business plan

i’m currently writing a business plan for my new venture, which will be based around weblogs. its a great way to focus my always-wandering thoughts into a coherent concept. i already invested $300 of my own money, and will invest a considerable amount of time on this venture. of course, it ties in with my other plans at my employer 🙂 more as i flesh it out more.