mtl3p

My first board meeting with Coco was last night. It was really impressive. There’s been a huge amount of transition in the last two years so there have had a lot of challenges. The staff is incredibly on the ball and there’s at least two people on the board that I’m really impressed by - Jane, the executive director of the amazing Santropol Roulant who had the really tough job of replacing Vanessa and Marlo - the ED from Head and Hands, a nonprofit in NDG with 22 staff (!). Both of these women are young (my age) but uber professional and efficient and I expect to learn a lot from working alongside them.

On the way back from a meeting today, on McGill Ave I saw guy walking around with a red 5 foot mat. He was laying it down in front of him, walking over it, and then picking it up behind him and placing it out in front again. It was pretty funny, but no one was watching. I like public art, and although he was scruffy and dirty, he looked more like young artist than homeless and crazy, so I went up to him. Turned out that he was rolling out the red carpet for himself between home and school as an art piece for his fine art class at concordia. I helped him across de maisonneuve, watched him talk to a few people and get sworn by a driver. He didn’t know what psychogeography was, though. Too bad MK’s not around to mentor him (for the price of a few beers).

….
oh - and these two posts. I’m really jealous of tracey for checking out this exhibit. And Ethan did a good job of summing up an Adam Greenfield talk.

(As I’m editing this I’m appreciating the amount of work that Ethan does blogging - not just documenting the information, but making an effort to introduce it and make it comprehensible to an uninitiated audience. It’s always hard to tell the effect of these things, but I think he’s making a difference in getting these ideas and discussions out there.)

A lot of people are talking about Bukeni Waruzi.

“He’s from Sud-Kivu - and he has to cross the national border to go to Burundi for internet access. There’s no internet access where he lives, and it costs him about $2 U.S. to get the paperwork to cross the border, plus transportation… and $1 U.S. in that part of the world is a lot. . . . Where he lives, there are no land lines. Everyone uses cell phones. And one of the projects he works with includes routing messages to the authorities when there are problems in villages - very similar to ARC, but without using SMS for the most part. This is a people-network, and is a very core way to do a network - a core which is lost on most geeks.
link

mobileactive

I just met a guy responsable for this rabble project. It’s a closed application that works on cellphones. It allows for blogging, reading blogs, creating calendar events, and associating profiles with locations. The location-based stuff is all manual (user-submitted type stuff), but that will change as the mobile companies allow it.

It also publishes to livejournal, blogger, etc, but it’s really conceived as a closed system to be used with other subscribers on the system. They even have some neat searches for stuff in your area (setting a radius) that weighs keywords in other peoples profiles and stuff.

It’s weird to see something that I’ve thought so much about, being done in exactly in the way I don’t want it done. Still, it will probably make them a lot of money.

mobileactive

“PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller, is a small php script which find all the enclosures in an RSS 2.0 feed URL, and utilizing Prodigem’s new bittorrent API will have a torrent created and seeded for each. As an example of just what this exactly means, Prodigem is now using PEP to automatically torrent the top items found in the del.icio.us popular video feed. In general this now means distribution via bittorrent can be had with almost zero work or duplication of effort.”

i can’t be bothered to make all the hyperlinks. check out the slashdot.artcle

Talking to a friend yesterday, and I realized that one of the main reasons that I blog is that I’m self-employed and I don’t have a watercooler and people to talk with around it. But the way I use blogging is in exactly that way. I take a break from working every couple of hours, poke around people’s blogs, post something myself, and put my nose back in my work.

okay, back to work.

I’m feeling love for this class that I just found at ConU. I will definitely be sitting in on as many as possible.

CART 453 • The Digital Nomad

Look at the links on the references/resources page. This guy must rock (i’ve just included some of the links):

we-make-money-not-art
smartmobs
popgadget
worldchanging
reblog
rhizome
del.icio.us/popular
joi ito
see art make art
glowlab
anne galloway
creative commons blog
many2many

readings available online

Anne Galloway, “Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City”

Slavoj Zizek, “The Matrix: The Truth of the Exaggerations”

Christopher Allen, “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software”

John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters”

Lawrence Lessig, “Free Culture”

Lawrence Lessig, “What Things Regulate Speech”

David Weinberger, “Why Open Spectrum Matters”

Bruce Sterling, “When Blobjects Rule The Earth”

Broken Metaphors: Blogging as Liminal Practice

Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog”

Clay Shirkey, “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”

C. Edwin Baker, “MEDIA CONCENTRATION: GIVING UP ON DEMOCRACY ”

Clay Shirkey, “File-sharing Goes Social”

Guy Debord, “The Scoiety of the Spectacle”

Howard Rheingold, “Mobile and Open: A Manifesto”

Annotate Space: Interpretation and Storytelling On Location. Moed, Andrea, 2002.

Location Disclosure to Social Relations: Why, When, &
What People Want to Share

Mobile Games: Understanding the Real Appeal of the Unreal, Stringer, et. al.

A Design Approach To the Geospatial Web, Bleecker

Critical Art Ensemble, “Electronic Civil Disobedience,” Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (pp. 7-34)

Google Earth KML documentation

FME suite for Google Earth

GISuser.com

Île Sans Fil - free wifi in Montréal

google map hacks + Wired article on Map hacks + Mapping Hacks

netzwissenschaft - mobile research

wifi archives on wmmna

vodcasting
Laipac (gps stuff)

be your own hotspot

joi ito’s blog: smartmobs discussion

Bodies in Play: Shaping and Mapping Mobile Applications (Banff conference)

how-to podcast

had some (more) technical difficulties. this time boris’s server was hit by a tsunami. or something.

i’ve got a few good tidbits to share ;-)

Spam? What spam?

@#$!!@# (&%$ *&^%$-^%$@#!!

My spam filter got turned off for a couple days when the box I’m on was being upgraded. I only noticed after a few thousand got through.

Now I’m in a holding pattern for a few days.

My great friend Amy has gotten started blogging with a little help from Boris. I got her flickr-ing. As you can see, she’s kinda weird.

Amy was my first friend in Mtl. We went to violin camp together when we were both 7. Pretty harsh that she didn’t include me on her blogroll, though.

:-(

Update: That’s more like it!

I got a hand-me-down camera from Boris. It’s actually pretty sweet. (thanks!)

So I’ll be getting busy. I’ll kind of miss my old way of using flickr (which was 1)other people’s pictures and 2)screenshots).

I’ve heard that flickr is where all the cool kids hang out - as opposed to anything so mundane as commenting on each others blogs. Guess I’ll see.