Twitter practices

phyzzics of nooz

Solid: A small community of speakers can probably agree, more or less, on what's the news.

Liquid: A larger community, with a broader spectrum of the real and of views thereof, has more difficulty, and probablistically will be happier with algorithms than with any single vendor's version of "the" news. Especially when the vendor's life support consists mostly of vending advertisements for entities that aim to control credit markets, environment, intellectual property, "entertainment," etc.

Gas: Scale up beyond that larger community and the very notion of "news" begins to sputter, undergo another phase change. What scalable technique, method, or epistemology do we have to sensibly represent "the news" to the gathering digital maelstrom of global voices? The news about the war in Iraq is that there is no news, no single report, however complex, that can adequately acquit itself to all speaking communities of all nations of all earths.

ancient twitter?

athurostomia

peeps got algorhythm

From an interesting talk by BBC's Richard Sambrook, via JOHO (with link added):

New research shows (he says) that news sites are now way-stations, not final destinations. He points to memeorandum, “and algorithm replacing a newsroom.” Google is the fourth most trusted news brand in the world, but doesn’t create any content.

and

Newsnight on BBC invites people to come to the daily meeting about what stories to cover

Reuters on Iraq

Reuters offers a site about Iraq and journalists in Iraq.

via Richard Sambrook.

The Introduction offers potent images of sufferers - it's not a war - TVified.

The site also has a rich timeline, maps, more.

crying in the twilderness

It occurs to me that fluss, long a favorite blog, anticipated Twitter. Mostly.

Greeks called it 'hamartia' (ἁμαρτία)

we'll settle for s-t-u-p-i-d:

97 percent of the deaths of US soldiers have occurred after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

gathering small crowds

Jerry Michalski displays some new tooling wizardness: SNS cascades are changing work.

New over there

Fwiw, a new post on the FASTforward blog: An adjacency of opposites.

Demo now annotated

Obama, Clinton, McCain Address War

On Thursday, candidates continued to focus on the five-year mark of the Iraq war. Clinton addressed supporters in Indiana.

Tedious schoolmarmery:

Sen. Hillary Clinton: “This is the week of the fifth year of the Iraq war. And we are about to go into the sixth year and I believe passionately that we should begin to bring our troops home and I outlined the policy that I would follow as
president to do that. We have to do it carefully and responsibly, it is very difficult to withdraw troops, you can’t just wake up in the morning and say let’s start bringing them home. It has to be planned for.”

Obama meanwhile was in South Carolina, where he linked the nation’s economic woes to the Iraq war.

Trapped in the inexorable machine of battle rhetoric:

Sen. Barack Obama: “We also have to understand that the more than 10 billion dollars we’re spending each month in Iraq is money we could be investing here at home. Just think, just think what battles we can be fighting instead of fighting this misguided war. Instead of fighting this war we can be fighting the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11 and who are plotting against us in Afghanistan, in Pakistan.”

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain was in London Thursday on his way back from a Middle East tour. McCain said the Iraq war would be a key issue in the upcoming presidential election.

Plain McInSane:

Sen. John McCain: “We are now succeeding in Iraq and Americans, at least, I believe are in significant numbers agreeing that the present strategy of the Surge is succeeding. And they want us to succeed and that will be, frankly, a very big issue in this campaign.”

buggerie

Greg Palast: the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. - courtesy of Gifthub

Smart in Oman

Cheney, who grew up in Casper, Wyoming, was accompanied by his wife and 1 of his daughters on the fishing trip, but the sultan didn't take part. (AP)

Nor, apparently, did he invite him to go hunting.

A preface is needed...

It could say:

Welcome. Hi. I'm the JSTOR Dwarf. Welcome if you are connected. If you are a member of a member. Of our subscriber base. Of our club, our magick rynge, our secret boke of mysterium, our lockdown, our profitably trafficked market in human knowledge. Our little pot of gold. Enjoy! -- The JSTOR dwarf.

In these videos, the JSTOR dwarf appears to be speaking from within the hall of the mountain king. Or maybe his head was a sausage length too far up his arse. It has a bit of reverb:

via

{update}: Archaeoporn suggests a more open model.

More cosmicomical every day

Gaspar has some discomfort after noting that seven of the last 10 entities to follow him on Twitter are not human . . .

War is the father of all conversational impasse

This week, NPR's morning edition is doing a 5-year-review of the war in Iraq - sober, thoughtful, involving interviews with guys who sound truly humane and heroic.

Then there is the enterprise as told by veterans of Iraq, which makes NPR seem parochial, and offers a war run like My Lai turned into systematic policy:

Something else we were actually encouraged to do, almost with a wink and a nudge, was to carry drop weapons or, by my third tour, drop shovels. What that basically is, is we would carry these weapons or shovels with us, because in case we accidentally did shoot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body and make them look like they were an insurgent.

he watched the commander, who had given us the order to shoot anyone on the street, shoot two old ladies that were walking and carrying vegetables.

Winter Solder

Winter Solder 2

Winter Soldier reprise

The movie

[update:] Jeff Cohen finds a validation of new media in Winter Soldier. via

polyvore sets

Reportedly some ex-googleians have made a flickring social fashionista meta trendentious mash - mash this, W. Polyvore has over a million "sets."

RFP: ADA to dance with unique CPM

On the FASTForward08 blog, and on his own blog Wirearchy, Jon Husband points to Charlene Li of Forrester's recent talk about The Future of Social Networks. Among many suggestive forecasts, Li speaks of a world in which each individual has his/her own unique CPM.

One hopes that the same good people who bring this to fruition will also provide each of us with our own ADA - Asshat Dodging Avatar. This holographic image, preferably with seven heads and 10 horns, will walk alongside, or better, in front of each of us, hoary head swinging to and fro in real time, both within the "single social graph," and without.

Its work will be to collect all the spam, all the personally targeted ads, all the referrals, all the requests to play this or that fessbook game, all the clicks for which we poor biological specimens have neither the time, nor the patience, nor indeed, the care, mother of attention. The ADA will cordially refer each solicitation to the solicitude of the ADAs of 1.5 billion of our closest friends. We'll just pocket the change.

"It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. "

The Booge administration can lose in excess of $8.8 billion of public funds, and no one has a clue.

Apparently Mr. Spitzer's personal funds can be tracked to the last hot cent.

Selling the devil to your soul

The NYT explains it all to itself:

Consumers get all kinds of free services and content on the Web because they are shown ads, and media companies are increasingly showing them ads based on data they have collected about them. So, in a sense, consumers “pay” for free content and features like e-mail by letting companies collect this data about them.

Fair and balanced exchange:

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”

Hor. Epist. I.16.66

qui metuens vivet, liber mihi non erit umquam. @

Silvertight LOC?

Second that uh-oh:

bleh via Thingology

White Matter

NPR:

If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus on gray matter. But nearly half the brain is composed of connective tissues that carry electrical signals from one group of neurons to another. This is white matter. Roughly, gray matter is where the processing happens, and white matter connects different parts of the brain, helping us to bring different ideas together.

The liars in Yang's study had on average 22 percent to 26 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than both the normal and antisocial controls.

More Connections

Yang speculates that the increase in white matter means that people who lie repeatedly and compulsively are better at making connections between thoughts that aren't connected in reality — like, say, "me" and "fighter pilot."

Question for marketing whizzes

It rarely happens, but occasionally for some reason I find I've overpaid my credit card. The card dutifully informs me of the fact of the credit, and that's it. It does not offer to send me a check. Or to pay me interest on the use of my money. I guess it assumes I'll use the card soon and kiss that dollarage goodbye. But in point of fact, the extra cash is sitting on a card I want to cancel.

So I wonder: Is there a credit card company out there that does do this -- especially, pay interest on your money? Would this not be a nice Bidnez 2.0 thing to do -- you know, like make the customer the driver of the enterprise? Or, you know, give the other end of the transaction some actual traction? Or like, evolve the credit card business into something more like banking, where one could park money and gain attractive rates of return?

You know, have an actual conversational relationship with the customer.

Just wondering.

Nah

Break JSTOR!

Nothing new here - an upgrade to same scarcity intelprop model.