babes in blogland

Looking over my visitors list of the blog, I've seen several referals from "babes in blogland." Look how many other expectant parents are blogging! Very cool.

good questions

Much like a popular car surveillance system, the Internet is "Always there, always ready". But these individual services, the ones we define as being at the core of a supposed "Web 2.0" are not. They are commercial ventures, as unpredictable as any other profit-seeking endeavor, as subject to bankruptcy or lunatic management practices.

Here is a game: let's say you have one day to download your pictures out of Flickr and your mail out of GMail. Can you? Do you even have access to the data? Do you still really own it?

Have we sold our most precious possession, our data, to companies? Worse, have we given it to them, along with our blessing to blend it with context-sensitive ads? Loaning it, using a specific service for a certain time is definitely OK, even if that service is proprietary, closed-source or whatever, but what about selling it, giving it away?

Is Web 2.0 about the success of a few technologies or the success of a few companies?

from "A fake freedom" by François Joseph de Kermadec

Web inventor: Online life will produce more creative children

Web inventor: Online life will produce more creative children

BERNERS-LEE: Connecting everyone (on the Net) to everyone (on the Net) has made the world a smaller place by breaking down geographical barriers. It has not, however, enabled everyone to work with everyone else!

For instance, the Net does not change the number of hours in the day or the number of things you can keep in your head. So an individual person has the same amount of time and energy -- but more interesting choices about how to spend it. I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.

CNN: What will surprise us about the future evolution of the Internet?

BERNERS-LEE: The creativity of our children. In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted. The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future. I look forward to seeing what the next generation does with these tools that we could not have foreseen. ...

More creative, more connected children. Does access to information have an effect on the creativity of children? Does having more information increase the chances that someone can do more with that information? What is the effect of connection on creativity?

Perhaps it is not more creativity we need but the ability for more people to connect and communicate to realize joint creative visions. Perhaps the focus on individual creativity will evolve into group/connected creativity made possible by the "smaller" world created by the Net.

What is it that causes people to create? From my own experience, feedback from community sites like flickr is what inspires me to be more creative - to make the time and effort to write a blog entry or publish a photograph. I am more likely to take photos similar to those with the most comments and views. Tracking how many people read my blog makes me want to keep it fresh so that they'll return. What effect will that have on our children? Will it teach them to produce more or to produce better quality? What is the feedback they will get? How will they internalize it?

rebuilding or passing the buck?

The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.

Will there be real investment, or just more buck-passing between federal agencies and states?

The country has to choose whether it wants to rebuild the levees and destroyed communities, with no expense spared for the future - or once again brush off that responsibility, and blame the other guy.

from New Orleans crisis shames Americans BBC News

I don't think the question is "whether we will rebuild or not" but how we will rebuild and what kinds of changes to expect. Will there be funding to construct more robust levees? Will someone create an evacuation and emergency plan that can be enacted without question or blame in future disasters? Will the public be educated about the plan? Will NO finally find a way to decrease the rates of murder and drug use? In other words, NO has been sinking (literally) for quite a while. Will the extent of the help be limited to infrastructure - levees, buildings, electricity - or will all the layers of fabric finally be mended?

civil rights?

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."

From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy

Mayor Nagin's interview

trying to connect to offer relief

People are using the NOLA web site to offer room and board. Wonder how effective it is. Are the people who need a place to stay able to get online to get this information? There is not power and I assume no phone. Are rescue workers getting this information and distributing it appropriately?

murderball

I saw "Murderball" last night with the Geeze and his youngest. Happily, the theater wasn't empty, although it wasn't packed either.

It was great to see the athletes portrayed as people first - with personality quirks, goals and desires - and secondarily as quads. One of my favorite quotes is from one of Zupan's classmates at their 10 year reunion, "He was an asshole before the accident, so you can't attribute it to being in a wheelchair." For a great review check out Mark E. Smith's at wheelchairjunkie.

Today, talking with other women at a film seminar, I was happy to hear that the movie had successfully created a connection to the lives of the characters - a connection that they can now extend to other people in wheelchairs. One woman said that she will never look at a person in a wheelchair in the same way again; that she thought she had always had an open mind, but without realizing it had been carrying around a variety of misperceptions. If it weren't for the explicit language, I wonder about the effect of showing it in high schools and in "diversity training" seminars.

A few beefs:

• As we discussed at dinner afterwards, for a sports movie, it didn't say much about strategy, technique, or rules.
  
• I was surprised that one of the Team USA members said, "This isn't the Special Olympics" then made a derogatory remark about "retards." Which highlights the separation between the various disability communities and reinforces the notion that if there was some cause that all the communities could rally around, they would be quite a force for change.

As the Geeze said last night, "We're all disabled." Yes, we each have our own challenges, issues, roadblocks that we face daily. I tried to reinforce this idea with the two other filmmakers at today's seminar: one will be telling the story of a paraplegic skiier the other an autistic researcher. Hopefully, they'll tell the stories as people first.