ThousandStars writes "The Wall Street Journal says that 'High-tech start-ups are increasingly setting up shop in places previously not known for attracting high-tech firms. A number of cities, such as Kalamazoo, Mich., and Toledo, Ohio, are offering grant money and tax breaks to high-tech start-ups, just as the usual venture-capital hot spots, such as Silicon Valley and Boston, continue to see a pullback in venture lending.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we paid special homage to bridges. Come visit us for those posts and more:

* An interview with Donald MacDonald, chief architect of the new Bay Bridge
* The new suicide prevention barrier on the Golden Gate
* How to build a model bridge
* A 1000-year old bridge surrounded by houses
* A bridge-building centipede truck
* A tiny floating water bridge
* Why Kurzweil will probably die
* Why in-car bluetooth is still considered a luxury
* The ultra-Japanese NEC netbook
* A map of phone calls made on Obama's Inauguration Day

photo by Wasabi Bob

With President Obama nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Thomas O'Toole noted that she would likely be the first justice with experience in "cyberlaw" cases prior to joining the court. As such, it's at least worth looking at what she's had to say -- though, as O'Toole notes, there's really not all that much to be gleaned from her decisions. None of the rulings stands out as especially troublesome and most seem pretty straightforward. The most notable is likely her ruling in Sprecht v. Netscape, where she ruled that contract terms online may not be enforceable when hidden behind a link and then requiring the user to scroll down the page. She found that a "reasonably prudent" user would not likely have gone through the trouble, thus suggesting that the contract might not be enforceable. This seems like a good ruling, and at least a hint that perhaps Sotomayor understand some online-related issues. But, overall, there's not much else to go on at this point.

Most of the other rulings are on minor cases, though she did issue the original district court ruling on the Tasini v. NY Times case that explored whether or not the Times was violating the copyright of freelance authors by reselling the articles they had written for the Times in an electric form. She ruled in favor of the NY Times, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled the other way. On this again, I think she made the right decision (and the Supreme Court got it wrong), but there were a lot of little nuances in that case that make it not a black and white case at all.

Meanwhile, some others have looked into Sotomayor's record on intellectual property and free speech issues, noting that she was once an IP litigator when she was a practicing lawyer -- though there doesn't appear to be much detail there, and much of the work seemed to be focused on trademark issues (which are less of an issue that patent and copyright issues). There aren't that many cases, but, again, it's something of a mixed bag. Her ruling that a book of Seinfeld trivia was infringing seems questionable (facts aren't copyrightable...), but she also rejected a playwright who claimed copyright infringement over a movie (though, such cases rarely get very far).

So... from all this, we can conclude not very much at all when it comes to the issues we tend to talk about around here.

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(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Sooo...it's Friday night again.

How about a playlist of thirty or so videos by Frank Zappa!

We miss you, Frank.

An anonymous reader writes "The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has just released the new Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification. With the new 3.0 specification, the path has been paved to enable future devices to transfer up to 6Gb/sec as well as provide enhancements to support multimedia applications. Like other SATA specifications, the 3.0 specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA products and devices. This makes it easy for motherboard manufactures to go ahead and upgrade to the new specification without having to worry about its customers' legacy SATA devices. This should make adoption to the new specification fast, like previous adoptions to SATA 2.0 (or 3Gb/sec) technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has just released the new Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification. With the new 3.0 specification, the path has been paved to enable future devices to transfer up to 6Gb/sec as well has provide enhancements to support multimedia applications. Like other SATA specifications, the 3.0 specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA products and devices. This makes it easy for motherboard manufactures to go ahead and upgrade to the new specification without having to worry about its customers legacy SATA devices. This should make adoption to the new specification fast, like previous adoptions to SATA 2.0 (or 3Gb/sec) technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few months back, a reader named JT sent in the news that school districts in Texas were being forced to buy physical textbooks, even if they only wanted to use digital ones. Apparently, some publishers were claiming that they had to "bundle" the digital textbook with a physical one, and that meant that schools were receiving shipments of physical textbooks, which were then locked up in a warehouse never to be used. That may be changing, as the state is moving forward on a law that would put electronic textbooks on the "approved list" of books that schools could buy. That said, I'm still wondering why the schools that wanted the e-texts (such as the one listed that issues every student a laptop) didn't just team up with other schools to give them the physical books for "free." After all, if they were forced to "buy" them, couldn't they give them away to others as well?

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Ken Blackwell of The Family Research Council (Self-described as a "Christian organization promoting the traditional family unit and the Judeo-Christian value system upon which it is built") goes up against Christopher Hitchens on the topic of Christianity in America.

I love the stray lock of hair dangling across Hitchens' forehead as he blithley shoots his deadly barbs.

Edis Krad writes "Redmond based company Microvision is in the last stages of developing and releasing a portable, laser-based projector, code-named 'Show WV.' The projector has a resolution of 848 by 400 pixels (WVGA) and, since it uses laser-scanning rather than LCD to form the images, it does not require a lens to focus, allowing it to display images virtually in any surface. The device comes with its own user-replaceable battery, which means you could take it with you anywhere you want. Although there is no pricing information on their website, according to this local news video, it could cost at least $200."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We'd been looking at reports about the ongoing discussions about pan-European music licenses without too much interest, given that licensing bodies only ever seem to do things in their own interests. But one aspect of the talks is a little bit interesting. It's often claimed by these bodies and their supporters that they're these little non-profits working tirelessly on the behalf of musicians and songwriters, ensuring they get paid for their work. It's a convenient appearance behind which these groups hide, using it as an excuse to justify plenty of ridiculous behavior. After all, if you object to anything these groups do (supposedly) on behalf of musicians, you're trying to take away the musicians' "right to get paid", so your opinion can be marginalized and ignored.

But the reality is that many of these licensing groups are nowhere near as innocent as they'd have you believe. Their licensing schemes often do little to actually help musicians make money, and in fact, they can even make it harder for musicians to succeed. Then there are examples like that of SoundExchange, which is sitting on more than $100 million in royalties it's collected, but claims it can't pay out because it can't find the musicians to which it's owed. In addition, where do unclaimed funds end up? The RIAA.

Just for a second, let's ignore the above paragraph and assume the licensing bodies really are working in the artists' best interests. If that's the case, and the artists' best interest constitutes them getting paid, why is it so difficult to set up a pan-European license? Why does it matter who collects the money, as long as it ends up in the artists' pockets? Apple has talked before about how having to set up licensing deals in each EU country before allowing iTunes Music Store sales there means that it's simply not worth the effort in some places, and that having a pan-European license would let it open up iTMS in new places. That would be good for artists, right? More outlets for online sales means more money for them. So why hasn't the pan-European license been done? Infighting over which licensing body gets to collect the fee -- and take a cut? If these licensing bodies are all about the musicians, surely that can't be the reason, since they just want to funnel as much money as possible to the artists.

So maybe, just maybe, the licensing bodies aren't solely interested in artists' welfare and have other motives?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. Chu said at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years. Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 percent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 percent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed." (Continues, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Go-Go dancing to The Sonics' "Psycho" from 1965. (Via Finkbuilt)

Some psychiatrists are trying to get excessive bitterness identified as a mental illness named post-traumatic embitterment disorder. Of course this has some people who live perfect little lives, and always get what they want, questioning the new classification. The so called "disorder" is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. "They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, the psychiatrist who put a name to how the world works.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, we've been raising questions about the incredibly bogus stats the BSA puts out every year. There are so many problems with them it's incredible that the group continues to release them each year... and much worse that the press and politicians quote them as if they're factual. However, Michael Geist has discovered that they're even worse than originally thought. In digging deeper into the questionable claims of the report by The Conference Board of Canada that was basically a cut and paste from various industry groups, Geist noticed that the report relied on some BSA data. So he asked for more info on how the BSA determined the "piracy" rate of software in Canada. How many people were surveyed? What was the methodology?

In response, Geist found out that no one in Canada was surveyed, and BSA (and IDC who created the report) simply made an educated guess, assuming the piracy rates weren't all that different than they were in past years. Yet this hunch, based on no actual data, is being used as a definitive source of piracy numbers in Canada? Even more noteworthy, both the BSA and The Conference Board report use these numbers to support the silly claim that Canada is somehow one of the worst offenders when it comes to supporting "piracy." But what was the reason for not surveying companies in Canada?

"Countries that are included in the survey portion are chosen to represent the more volatile economies. IDC has found from past research that low piracy countries, generally mature markets, have stable software loads by segment, with yearly variations driven more by segment dynamics (e.g. consumer shipment versus business shipments of PCs) than by load-by-load segment."

So... just to get this straight. IDC doesn't bother to survey Canadians about software piracy, because it considers Canada to be a "low piracy" country. So it just makes up the number... and then the BSA, other lobbyists, research groups, the press and politicians (including the US Trade Representative) use these made up numbers to support the claims that Canada is a high piracy country. Doesn't that seem like fraud?

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vigmeister writes "I've decided to explore the possibility of using a netbook/MID as a phone while eschewing the services of a cellphone provider. Now that Atlanta (where I live) has WiMAX from Clear, I ought to be connected to the Internet everywhere within the city (once I sign up). Theoretically, this should mean that I will be able to use my netbook as a cell phone. Of course, there are some very real issues to overcome and I am simply putting this experiment together to see if it is something that is realistically possible. This could possibly extend to uncapped 3G connections (if they exist any more) as well. Are there any obvious problems you would foresee? Is there anything I have missed or any other questions I should attempt to answer in this 'experiment' of mine? A major issue is, of course, the fact that my pseudo-netbook has to be carried everywhere and always left on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rebecca from EFF sez,

You may have seen the new anti-copying educational program the Copyright Alliance is promoting to the nation's teachers. Today, EFF launched its own "Teaching Copyright" curriculum and website to help educators give students the real story about their digital rights and responsibilities on the Internet and beyond.

The Copyright Alliance -- backed by the recording, broadcast, and software industries -- has given its curriculum the ominous title "Think First, Copy Later." But EFF's curriculum (the result of more than a year of work) introduces critical questions of digital citizenship into the classroom without misinformation that scares kids from expressing themselves in the modern world.

There are a lot of good resources on TeachingCopyright.org -- everything from lesson plans for high school students to guides to copyright law, including fair use and the public domain. So it's worth checking out whether you are a teacher, a student, or a parent.

Teaching Copyright (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Forgetomori has a nice photo gallery of giant earthworms. I'm not sure if they are real or not.

The worms in the images all look they are up to a meter in length, compatible with the recorded dimensions for the many species of the families we discussed. They are probably real, though exactly from where and what species my ordinary investigation didn’t come up with. Specialists, do enlighten us with further confirmation and identification! The first image of a girl holding up one, for instance, may not be of an earthworm but of a caecilian.

Over on BBG, our Joel's got a video clip of a man using the internet with an antique modem from 1964:

K.C. (a.ka. "Phreakmonkey") has a Livermore Data Systems "Model A" acoustic coupler modem, a 300 baud modem from the '60s--"one of the oldest modems of still in existence. It was given to me by the widow of an IBM engineer."

So, so awesome. If I were a fiction writer, I'd do a short story about an alternate present where broadband never came to be, but the entire world was connected through analog, low-baud modems.

Video: Connecting to the internet with a modem from 1964

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Webphemera has a great gallery of many species of insects making the beast with two backs, 18 legs and 96 eyes.

Insects In Flagrante (Thanks, RJ!)

These two amazingly talented women run up and down the keys on the giant floor-piano at FAO Schwarz, belting out an astounding rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Bach never sounded so good.

Girls Rock A Giant Piano (via Kottke)

I'm working out my will, power of attorney, literary executor and related logistics (I'm not sick or anything, it's just crazy to have a family and be intestate) and one thing that came up today is what to do with my GPG keys and (especially) the 128-bit AES keys on my user partitions on my various machines. Right now, I carry the passphrases around in my head, which is fine, unless I drop dead, get hit by a bus, etc.

What do you-all do with your cryptokeys? Keep 'em with a lawyer and hope that attorney-client privilege will protect them? Safe-deposit box? Friends? Under the mattress? Do you worry that if your friends have your keys, they can be subpoenaed or suborned?

Gerv writes "When Google launched their Map Maker community mapping tool last year, they included loads of Caribbean islands. This led Ed Parsons (chief Google Maps guy) to say that he was sad there wasn't any fieldwork involved. Well, now OpenStreetMap have gone one better — following a successful Pledgebank pledge, they have got together the money to send one randomly-chosen guy to Antigua for a week to work on the OpenStreetMap map!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.

I've been interested in cellular automata (CA) for many years, and I helped program two different free, downloadable CA software packages for Windows: Cellab and Capow.

If you just want a peek at these scuttling graphics, try Mirek Wójtowicz's Java-based MJCell program, viewable in your browser.

In the 1980s, my fellow cellular-automatist John Walker and I used to believe that CAs were poised to take over the worlds of video, fabric, and game effects. But the revolution is a little slow in coming...

At least, as I discussed in a "Gnarly CAs" article in Make magazine last year, my former student Alan Borecky indeed managed to make a CA dress for his wife, Donna. And I keep noticing that a lot of the fabrics that I see people wearing these days could easily be designed by CAs.

Nosing around for further evidence for the advance of CAs, I found some mildly heartening signs. The blog Code-Spot has a tutorial on using CAs in games.

The book Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming has a little bit about using CAs to generate fire.

And cellular automata have played a role in both SimCity and Spore.

I've long thought that digital musicians should lean more heavily on chaotic effects so as to avoid roboticity. KVR Audio Damage has released a CA-based device called Automaton:

A glitch plug-in that uses a unique game of life style sequencer...capable of adding subtle, seemingly random fills and humanizing effects, but if you like, you can crank the sequencer up to eleven, and watch as your digital audio workstation becomes a petri dish while Automaton makes complete hay of the track you've inserted it to.

Most folks have heard about "patent trolls" (even if the name is in dispute) and generally associate it with companies that don't do anything other than threaten/sue over patents. Then, we had stories about music copyright trolls, who were gaining the rights to songs (though, in some cases there was evidence that these copyrights were gained through highly questionable means). So, it was really only a matter of time before we got "trademark trolls," as well. To be honest, we've had a few stories about a guy named Leo Stoller, who has been dubbed a trademark troll after registering trademarks on all sorts of common words and then insisting no one could use those words without paying.

However we hadn't seen much evidence of "professional" trademark trolls until alerted to this story by Eric Goldman. Basically, it's a story about an auction site for guns that went to court to ask for a declaratory judgment against gun maker Heckler & Koch (HK). But perhaps the more interesting party is a company called Continental Enterprises (CE). GunBroker apparently received a letter from CE claiming trademark (and copyright) infringement because certain HK guns were up for auction on the GunBroker's site.

Of course, it's difficult to see how GunBroker has any direct liability. First, accurately listing a product for sale isn't likely to be found as infringing (i.e., if I own a Apple iPod and list it for sale as "Apple iPod for sale" that's not a violation of Apple's trademark). Second, since all of the complaints were apparently for user listings, it's hard to see how GunBroker is liable. The copyright claims, one assumes, would get tossed out on a DMCA safe harbor review. Unfortunately trademarks appear to be something of a loophole, in that they're not really covered by the DMCA or CDA safe harbors. However, common sense should take care of the fact that it's not GunBroker doing the infringing.

But the post goes on to highlight some additional questions about CE, including a link to a web page that dissects how CE apparently operates, and it sounds quite similar to a typical "trolling" sort of operation. According to the various websites, CE contracts with companies/law firms to act as "representatives" for trademark holders, and then goes searching for "anything they can remotely claim is infringing." Then, it sends a threatening letter, demanding compensation, even if there's no actual infringement. Apparently CE gets a cut of any money it squeezes out of companies, so it has plenty of incentive to send out threatening letters even when there's no infringement whatsoever. Apparently, it's worked with companies including Heineken, Home Depot, Textron, Bosch, Black & Decker and others. It sounds like these companies are effectively renting out their brands to see if this company can scrape up any companies willing to pay out of fear.

This really isn't a huge surprise. When you let tools like patents, copyrights and trademarks be regularly abused in the market, it shouldn't be a surprise when companies are built up around abusing them for profit.

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When not working on Make: television, writing for Make: Online, and working as a character mechanic for Disney, our bud John Edgar Park, along with fellow MAKE contributors Brian Jepson and Tod Kurt, have been burning the midnight solder on some new peripherals for the Arduino world that they've dubbed WingShields. The first kit in the "wing-format" is the ScrewShield, a header pins-to-screw terminal blocks board. The kit includes 1 Analog-side PCB, 1 Digital-side PCB, 2 sets of 6-pin stacky female header pins, 2 sets of 8-pin stacky female header pins, enough terminal blocks to fill 34 holes on the board (these come in 2- and 3-terminal units, which slot together). The pins on the headers are extra-long to allow for stacking over or under other shields.

The ScrewShield is "premiering" at Maker Faire this weekend and will be available in the Maker Shed at the Faire. After that, it'll be available for Maker Shed mail order (as well as at other online kit retailers).

Congrats on the new venture, guys!

WingShield Industries

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CWmike writes "AT&T will upgrade to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 wireless networking technology later this year, offering faster (up to 7.2 Mbit/sec.) network speeds to new compatible laptop cards and smartphones due to be released at the same time, the company said today. Current HSPA download speeds can theoretically reach 3.6 MBit/sec, according to AT&T executives who commented on the planned upgrade in April. AT&T did not comment on which laptop cards and smartphones will be compatible with HSPA 7.2 other than to say it will introduce 'multiple' devices later this year. Could this be one of the big iPhone announcements to come from WWDC?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we still have various old media execs insisting that piracy is destroying content creators, every day we're seeing new examples of content creators who have learned to embrace sharing, recognizing that it's actually free promotion and free distribution. Via Ian Rogers, we find out about how the band Chester French isn't just encouraging people to share their music, they're actively promoting fans who are burning copies of their CD and handing them out to friends and strangers. In fact, they just put up a silly video of the guy showing others how to burn copies of the CD to hand out as well. The band gets it: these are "super fans." They're not "thieves" or "freeriders" or "leeches." They love the band and are helping to promote the band for free. Old school entertainment execs insist that bands won't have the incentive to produce if people are sharing this way, but this band seems energized in knowing they have such great fans.

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aceydacey writes "Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Beginning Python Visualization: Creating Visual Transformation Scripts, published in February 2009 by Apress, shows how Python and its related tools can be used to easily and effectively turn raw data into visual representations that communicate effectively. The author is Shai Vaingast, a professional engineer and engineering manager who needed to train scientists and engineers to do this kind of programming work. He was looking for a tutorial and reference work, and unable to find a suitable text, wound up writing his first book. He writes in the easy and clear style of someone comfortable and engaged with the subject matter." Keep reading for the rest of aceydacey's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download / YouTube)

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video, we experience the funky flaming glory that is DANCE DANCE IMMOLATION, a pyro-parody of the popular arcade game in which one jumps around on touch-sensitive pads underfoot in rhythm with music. With DDI, you do this inside a flame-retardant suit. Miss a step, you get torched with a giant flamethrower.

Dance Dance Immolation combines video games, music, and propane. You play DDR. A good performance wins you acclaim from flamethrowers. A missed step gets you a face full of fire! Yes, the fire is real. Put on a fireproof suit and give it a try!

The contraption was created by the clan of happy mutant makers known as Interpretive Arson. We shot this at "How to Destroy the Universe," a yearly Industrial culture event which this year honored Throbbing Gristle's reunion tour. Laughing Squid has a related blog post here.

We hear they're next performing at the "Smukfest" art confab in Denmark.

(Update): Nicole Aptekar of Interpretive Arson pops in with more on the upcoming .dk gig:

DDI next heads across the pond to burninate the Scandinavians, where we have been gleefully booked for the Smukfest music festival in Skanderborg, Denmark, August 5-9. It's a beautiful setting for our first European run, within a lush green forest. However, trees are flammable so DDI will run on a custom-constructed raft floating in the middle of a lake. We've had to skip our normal West Coast circuit to do it, but it might just be worth it if we get to shoot Kylie Minogue with fire.

CREW NOTE: About this episode's host, Aaron Muszalski (aka SFSlim): He's a Burning Man builder, visual effects artist and educator, and a wandering polyglamorous anarcho-Dada Buddhist biker punk. He's on Twitter. In this episode, you'll also see our delightful recurring guest host Charis Tobias, who is all of 18 years old if memory serves. And thanks to our SF-based shooter-producer Eddie Codel who did a fine job capturing the madness on this piece, yet again.

(Photo below by Kristen Ankiewicz, courtesty Interpretive Arson)

---

Sponsor shout-out: This Boing Boing Video episode is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

"Like music before it, and lately the book industry, major film studios are grappling with the transition from distribution of physical DVDs to electronic delivery. It is a change the studios need to make, to cut costs and curtail piracy." You'd be forgiven for thinking that line was from a story about the film business from several years ago, but it's from a piece over the weekend in the WSJ laying out that movie studios still haven't figured out this internet thing. Of course, with guys like Michael Lynton in charge, that doesn't seem too surprising. Anyway, the main point of the WSJ piece is that studios have been slow to move because they're afraid of killing off DVD sales, which still account for 43 percent of film revenues. Here's the rub, though: DVD sales are already slipping, and efforts to boost them by pushing new kinds of plastic discs on consumers aren't helping. The studios seem to believe that their content is valuable enough that they can dictate how people purchase and enjoy it, and that they'll keep on buying, regardless of how their preferences and desires change. This attitude has already shown up in the studios thinking of yanking their movies from Netflix and trying to hamper the Redbox rental service. Clearly, the idea that studios can protect DVD sales by hamstringing downloads and online services isn't working. Using the fear of cannibalizing DVD revenues with online services isn't particularly smart. Studios face the choice of perhaps cannibalizing their own sales, or losing the revenues to somebody else completely.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Several readers have written to mention that Microsoft has confirmed and unveiled the Zune HD. It has a "3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display, built-in HD Radio receiver, HD output," and it makes use of multi-touch input. More details will be forthcoming at E3, including how the device interacts with Xbox Live. Reader johnjaydk notes a PCWorld article that asks whether the Zune HD will be capable of competing with the iPod Touch. Quoting: "... the real competition between the Zune HD and the iPod Touch will come down to software. The new Zune will be based on a custom version of Windows CE, while the iPod Touch runs on the already popular iPhone platform, for which thousands of applications are available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

R. Stevens says,

"North Korea apparently tested another nuclear weapon and my mind immediately goes to bad jokes. For those who don’t get it: Fat Man & Little Boy. Xeni deserves part of the blame for asking if I knew any Kim Jong LOLs. You’d be surprised how hard these are to make without ripping off Team America or being racist!"

Guan Baihua of China made this nifty bike with a rounded triangular wheel and a rounded pentagonal wheel.

(Here's a video of a trike with square wheels.)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Besides having one of the most awesome Flickr handles ever, Thunderhammer3000 has an interesting strategy for prototype boards -

If you've ever used those cheapo one-side Radioshack (or knockoff) protoboards, you're familiar the the problems with them. But I noticed that I had no such problems with kits from Adafruit, Maker Shed, etc.

Why? Because their boards are through hole plated, the contacts are plated (unlike cheap protoboards which corrode so you can't get a good connection), and they have a nice solder mask.

After spending countless hours struggling to debug issues with protoboards - even the expensive ones - I decided to just design my own.

definitely seems a worthwhile endeavor if you find yourself using mostly the same parts on each project - at around $4 per board it could be an affordable timesaver. More info on the photo's page.

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snydeq writes "The InfoWorld Test Center has released vulnerability testing results for four so-called 'unified threat managers' — single units that combine firewall, VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, anti-spam, and Web content filtering in lieu of a relay rack stuffed top to bottom with appliances. The lab threw nearly 600 exploits of known vulnerabilities in a wide range of popular OSes, applications, and protocols, and despite being designed to thwart such threats, the UTMs as a class allowed hundreds to pass through. Why did the UTMs miss so many exploits? A lack of horsepower to perform the necessary deep packet inspection under load is suspected, as the lab pushed the limits of each unit's throughput with legitimate traffic. 'The upshot is, although the vendors have packed these devices with additional gateway security functions, clearly many UTMs are still strictly firewalls at heart.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David sez, "Mitch Kapor's [ed: Founder of Lotus, co-founder of EFF] become the chair of One Web Day, plus the organization got a major grant from the Ford Foundation. The group, which sponsors an annual 'Earth Day' for the Web every September 22, was founded by Susan Crawford, who now advises the Obama White House on tech policy."

As Board Chair, I will provide strategic direction and lead the Board in developing a plan for long-term growth. Nathan will manage day-to-day business of OneWebDay, build and support our network of volunteers, and develop our program plans for OneWebDay 2009. We would like the thank the Media and Democracy Coalition for Nathan's support leading up to the grant award, and we hope to build on our relationship.

Every year, OneWebDay focuses on a new theme. This year's theme is the promise of digital inclusion, and we will call attention to efforts that work to ensure that anyone who wants it has access to the Internet and the skills they need to engage in our new communications environment.

New Leadership for OneWebDay (Thanks, David!)

John Allsopp and Satoshi Kikuchi tackle recreating apple.com's nav bar using CSS3 and no images. It also acts as a great primer for the vendor-specific CSS3 properties that work in some browsers today, and the power and flexibility of embracing progressive enrichment. #

Lots of people know about the infamous "Great Firewall" of China, where internet censorship is quite common -- and citizens are, at times, encouraged to help alert authorities to any questionable content online. Government-directed censorship is quite common and expected, so it's a bit surprising to see a Beijing court side with the victim of censorship (via Michael Scott). The case didn't directly involve the government, but an ISP that took down the website of an economics professor, Hu Xingdou, who often discussed corruption and police brutality on his website. Of course, one of the ways in which the gov't gets the Great Firewall to work is by threatening to hold ISPs liable if they don't censor unwanted content -- so those ISPs have plenty of pressure to over-censor to avoid liability. However, in this case, the court actually found that the ISP failed to show proof of "illegal content" on the professor's website while also failing to show that it had first asked the professor to remove any illegal content, as required by its terms of service.

As the article notes, this may now put ISPs in something of a bind. The gov't may hold them liable if they fail to censor certain content, but the courts may push back and hold them liable for being too aggressive in their censorship.

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Last year, Cory wrote that Airborne, a cold remedy ("CREATED BY A SCHOOL TEACHER!") lost a class action lawsuit for deceptive advertising and had to award its customers $23 million in damages.

I just noticed that Airborne has also changed its packaging art, probably as a term of losing the lawsuit.

The old art shows a man in a blue suit sitting next to a woman coughing into her fist. Behind him, a man is sneezing into a handkerchief. The man in the blue suit is looking fearfully at a menagerie of ugly germs floating overhead, no doubt let loose by the coughers and sneezers around him.

In the new artwork, the coughing woman has been miraculously cured of her cold. She even sports some fashionable red lipstick. The sneezing gentlemen has traded in his snotty handkerchief for a petite napkin, which he uses to politely dab his lips while enjoying an airplane meal. The germs are gone. The blue-suited man, however, remains as frightened as before. This time, he's staring in shock at a gold emblem, which Airborne apparently awarded itself for "quality, purity, and safety" (See close up here). What is Airborne trying to tell us here?

Recently on Offworld, still stinging from the uncertainty of a Western release, we watched, with wonder, six full minutes of Muscle March, Namco's WiiWare game of oiled down beefcake bodybuilders trying to retrieve their stolen protein powder -- and it's everything we'd hoped it would be. We also saw the announcement of the seemingly Party-Monster-esque new chapter of Grand Theft Auto, called (yep) The Ballad of Gay Tony, watched the first extended video of the forthcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and pre-ordered fantastically designed fan-made Metal Gear Solid T-shirts, shoulderbags and buttons. Finally we explored life on Mars as Noby Noby GIRL finally meets the red planet, saw Crayon Physics dev Petri Purho return with a sneak peek at his first new prototype in too long, coveted a pair of custom Grim Fandango Converse, loved the comic book cover concept when LittleBigPlanet meets 2000AD, and saw the first concept art from a proposed swamp-opera platformer/adventure from Die Gute Fabrik called Mutatione (above).

thanosk sends in a story at Wired Magazine about how online culture is, in many ways, trending toward communal behavior. Sharing and collaboration have become staples of active participation on the Internet, while not necessarily incorporating a particular ideology or involving a government. "Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property. Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I like this photo from the Instructables article on Gummi Bear Surgery. (Via Weird Universe)

Vaughan of Mind Hacks came across a paper about a 23-year-old woman who was mountain climbing and got struck by lightning (a "bolt from the blue" in a sky that was "clear and sunny"). Upon waking from a three-day-long medically-induced coma, she experienced a series of hyperreal hallucinations that remind me of drawings from one of R. Crumb's sketchbooks.

These exclusively visual sensations consisted of unknown people, animals and objects acting in different scenes, like a movie. None of the persons or scenes was familiar to her and she was severely frightened by their occurrence. For example, an old lady was sitting on a ribbed radiator, then becoming thinner and thinner, and finally vanishing through the slots of the radiator.

Later, on her left side a cowboy riding on a horse came from the distance. As he approached her, he tried to shoot her, making her feel defenceless because she could not move or shout for help. In another scene, two male doctors, one fair and one dark haired, and a woman, all with strange metal glasses and unnatural brownish-red faces, were tanning in front of a sunbed, then having sexual intercourse and afterwards trying to draw blood from her. These formed hallucinations, partially with delusional character, were in the whole visual field and constantly present for approximately 20 h. At the time of appearance, the patient was not sure whether they were real or unreal, but did not report them for fear that she might be considered insane.

Bolt from the blue triggers bizzare hallucinations

One of the most exciting revelations in the book Homemade Hollywood was the news of the existence of Monster Kid Home Movies, a two-hour 2005DVD of kid-made monster movies from the 1950s to the 1980s, transferred from streaky old film-stock.

I sent away for a review copy of the disc and it's been my captivating evening viewing for two nights now. Monster Kid Home Movies is an utterly exuberant celebration of monster-obsessed amateur creativity, and the films are filled with raw enthusiasm for the genre. These are Forry Ackerman's spiritual progeny at their most ingenious, contriving incredible costumes, ill-advised stunts, clever camera work, and often hilarious hamming to recreate the famous monsters of filmland.

The DVD's extras are great as well -- bios and production stills from the films, which are organized by creator. Some of these kids went on to have real Hollywood careers, others didn't, but they all made glorious monster movies in their day.

Buy Monster Kid Home Movies

Monster Kid Home Movies homepage

wjousts writes "Technology Review is reporting on IBM's plans to take on Trebek at his own game. The 'Watson' computer system uses natural-language processing techniques to break down questions into their structural components and then search its database for relevant answers. A televised matchup with Trebek is planned for next year. 'David Ferrucci, the IBM computer scientist leading the effort, explains that the system breaks a question into pieces, searches its own databases for "related knowledge," and then finally makes connections to assemble a result. Watson is not designed to search the Web, and IBM's end goal is a system that it can sell to its corporate customers who need to make large quantities of information more accessible.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few folks have sent in variations on the news that Apple and AT&T have been sued for patent infringement over the fact that the music recognition service Shazam can be used on the iPhone. The patent in question covers a music recognition system that certainly does sound like Shazam's. While it's lame that the patent holder is going after third parties like Apple and AT&T, this lawsuit really highlights how silly the patent system is. Shazam has been around for ages. I remember meeting up with some folks from Shazam many, many years ago, soon after they had started. They had a music recognition system at the time, but it didn't work all that great, and there was no real market for it. So they spent many years continually tinkering with and improving the system, and adapting to the market as it changed -- and finally had a hit when the iPhone app store came out. That is the process of innovation. The idea was a useful starting point, but it was meaningless until the idea could be implemented in a way that the market wanted. And, yet, some guy who had the same idea, but didn't go through the trials and tribulations of actually making it work for the market, suddenly gets to demand tons of money for it? That's an economic and societal waste.

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This alarm clock carpet could be a fun remake with a gutted alarm clock circuit's switch replaced with conductive fabric stitches triggered by stepping on the rug. Via Inspire me, now!

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One of my fave found-object artists/kinetic sculptors, Nemo Gould, is going to be at Maker Faire again this year. He'll be there as part of the Applied Kinetic Arts group which will also include Benjamin Cowden, Jonathan Foote, Carl Pisaturo, Kal Spelletich, Greg Brotherton, Christopher T Palmer, Alan Rorie, Mark Galt, and Reuben Margolin. This is an astounding opportunity to see the current work of some of the most impressive people currently working in kinetic art. Nemo will also be on a panel I'm hosting on Saturday (4pm on the Make: television stage) which will include a number of the artists involved in Device Gallery in San Diego.

Above is a piece Nemo will be premiering at Maker Faire, a little magical box where you can peer into the world of Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Under the Sea 2009

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Kensai7 writes "The much-awaited Nokia Ovi Store opened for business yesterday. By following a business model similar to that of successful rival Apple for the iPhone, Nokia is trying to provide developers and customers a vast portfolio of Symbian OS applications, games, widgets, etc. TechCrunch took a look at some of the more interesting applications available at the start, but was disappointed by the launch itself. The Ovi Store team acknowledged some difficulties due to high levels of traffic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeremy Love's Bayou is a graphic novel ghost-story that is scary, beautiful and sad. Lee is a sharecropper's daughter in 1930s Mississippi who finds herself in trouble when her white friend, Lily, loses her necklace in the bayou and blames it on Lee, rather than facing a beating. Her problems only get worse when her father is framed for Lily's disappearance, and Lee has to go to the spirit world to rescue her father.

Creepy and sad, Bayou reminded me favorably of Robert McCammon's award winning Boy's Life, a thoughtful story about racial injustice, the spirit world, family, love, heritage and history, which never lets go of its fundamental ghostiness, even as it relentlessly pursues beauty through the gorgeous pastoral scenes in the art.

This is volume one, and having read it, I'm impatient to know how it ends, and frightened, too.

Bayou

Update:: Turns out you can read it online for free!(Thanks, Fancycwabs!)

Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that a team of steganographers at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland have figured out how to send hidden messages using the internet's transmission control protocol (TCP) using a method that might help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship. Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a 'got it' message. If no such acknowledgment arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again in a system known as TCP's retransmission mechanism. The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred,' says Wojciech Mazurczyk. 'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A guy in Florida has apparently sued Facebook because his account got hacked and started sending out links to a virus. He's claiming that the site failed to protect its users, and he's upset that, even though he got his account back, he lost his photos and had to re-add his friends. He's only asking for $70.50 ($0.30 for every friend he had to re-add), which got a bit of a joking response from Facebook:

"We're very interested to hear how he came up with the figure of $70.50," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt wrote in an e-mail to CNET News. "He's not going to get it but we promise to refund all the money he paid to use Facebook. Seriously, we're glad to know how important Facebook is to Mr. Karantsalis but his account was not disabled, is currently active, and he is using it, so I'm not sure what the problem is."

Facebook can afford to laugh since the case appears to have no legal merit. Section 230 clearly protects Facebook from liability in this situation (as it should), and the case law on similar cases backs that up. In fact, Eric Goldman notes that: "If anything, Karantsalis might be on the hook to Facebook for filing such a meritless lawsuit." The guy claims he filed the lawsuit to make a point, but the point he may end up making is that you shouldn't file frivolous lawsuits just because you don't like how things happened.

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Sigma has posted a firmware update for its DP2 large-sensor digital compact camera. Version 1.01 improves auto focus and reduces the intermittent freezing of the camera that can occur under certain conditions. The update is available for immediate download from Sigma's website.

After reading Mark's review of Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers, I knew I had to read this thing. And I just did. And I'm reeling with it.

Boody Rogers, a contemporary of Tex Avery, Harold "Little Orphan Annie" Gray and Chester "Dick Tracy" Gould out-weirded any cartoonist, living or dead, for the bizarre design of his characters and the out-of-control situations he plonks them in. In reading this book, I kept seeing visual echoes of the many who clearly cribbed from Boody, from the characters in Monsters, Inc. to Tex Avery at his oddest. But this tasted like the original brew, first brewed from fresh leaves.

Babe is an immensely strong hillbilly lass who is destined to be a pro ball-player, provided her Mammy can keep her in lightning juice. Sparky Watts is a strongman who needs to be refreshed with cosmic rays or he shrinks to bug-size (his pals include a talking hat with feet and a pinhead whose feet have been swollen to immense size by cosmic rays, and naturally they loathe each other), Dudley is a be-bopper whose kid brother wants to use his records for target practice (and whose dialog runs to "Jumpin' Jack from Skaggerac!" and "'Lo from Buffalo! Crowd in, gang -- mom an' dad have gone to a movie -- let's start SLICING CARPETS!"). They all climb new pinnacles of lovable absurdity, as the words and pictures vie to see who can be more madcap.

This kind of comic makes me wish I was a time-traveller and could visit the era of its birth and read it every week.

Boody

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has finally released the final build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 'There are a few significant additions that are included in SP2: Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista, Windows Connect Now (WCN) is now in the Wi-Fi Configuration, and exFAT file system supports UTC timestamps. The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes.' A list of other notable changes is available on TechNet. SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet, but it will be 'during the coming months.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using Mr. McGroovy's Box Rivets, these enterprising builders built a cardboard scale replica steam engine.

Cardboard Scale Replica Steam Engine

More:
Mr. McGroovy's cardboard box rivets

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The Dice-O-Matic is a giant rube-goldberg random number generator used on Games-By-Email in lieu of a cheaper, less-physical, less-cool software dice-roller.

The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom.

The dice start the cycle at the top of the ramp, toward the rear of the machine. The ramp is comprised of ten steps, each at about a 20 degree incline, with a right hand thread through two and a half spirals. Two layers of cloth covered foam (car headliner) keep the noise down. Felt covered foam quarter-obelisks are at each corner, sewn to the side padding. It took a few tries to get the pitch just right. Too shallow and the dice stopped tumbling, too steep and they would start banging against the Plexiglas. Now they roll very well, sometimes stopping and then getting knocked back into the stream. Perfect.

The hopper at the bottom of the ramp is pure seething violence. I am sure there is a better way to load the dice into the buckets (vibrating tables and all that) but not in the budget and footprint I have. Instead, buckets come up through the bottom of the hopper, smashing their way through the accumulated pile of dice and scooping some up. It is rather hard on the dice, much of the paint gets chipped from the edges of the pips. The buckets are close enough together that dice cannot slip through the bottom.

As Schneier notes, "As someone who has designed random number generators professionally, I find this to be an overly complex hardware solution to a relatively straightforward software problem. But the sheer beauty of the machine cannot be denied."

May thy dice chip and shatter

An anonymous reader tips the news that the UK's music collection society, PRS, has announced a new pricing plan it hopes may entice YouTube and Pandora back to the UK market. Pandora pulled out at the start of 2008, and YouTube began removing content from the view of UK users last March. "From 1 July 2009, firms will have to pay 0.085p for each track streamed, down from the previous rate of 0.22p. [The] head of the music streaming service We7 told BBC News he welcomed the new charges. 'It's brilliant. Not so much the rates but the realization by the PRS that things have to change in the digital world. Till now it's felt like they were not listening,' he said. ... 'They [the PRS] are getting in touch with the reality of the digital world.' [The PRS's managing director said] 'We've laid our stall out and listened to everyone who would engage with us. We've consulted with the 25 firms that represent 97% of our revenue over the past six months and have been given opinions from many others. We need to ensure the music artists are paid for their work, but we also wanted to make sure that the framework was in place to enable the digital market to grow.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just posted! Our lens review of the Hartblei Superrotator 120mm F4 TS Macro. In this latest review we deviate from the beaten track and delve into the slightly esoteric world of tilt and shift optics, taking a look at the longest lens of its type currently available. Like the rest of Hartblei's lenses, the 120mm F4 sports an 'Optics by Carl Zeiss' tag and is available in mounts for most DSLRs, but does it offer enough to justify the price tag?

We've covered the Al-Haramain case for a while, as it's the one case where there's actual evidence of a party being the subject of warrantless wiretaps by the administration. So far, the judge has continued to allow the case to go forward despite objections from both the previous administration and the current one. On Friday, the judge in the case got angry enough to scold the administration for failing to obey court orders related to the case and continuing to make arguments that had already been rejected. As such, the judge appears to be considering a sanction prohibiting the government from opposing liability for such warrantless wiretaps. This whole situation continues to baffle me. There's absolutely no reason why the federal government should need a warrantless wiretap, unless it knows that it has no probable cause and simply wants to spy on people for the sake of spying. If it had a real reason to wiretap, it could get a warrant. If it was urgent, wiretap laws have given the government a window to ask for a warrant immediately after setting up the wiretap. There's no reasonable explanation for denying the basic checks and balances to avoid abuse, and it's disappointing that both administrations have continued to try to avoid any discussion over the matter, and are improperly framing it as a matter of national security for which they don't need to answer.

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Via Boing Boing Gadgets comes this model of Berlin's Oberbaum Bridge, being cut with a laser out of gingerbread. The builder hasn't completed the whole thing, but has put up an Instructable slideshow showing his progress thus far.

Laser Cut Gingerbread Bridge

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[Image from Inventaholic]

Perry Kaye is a great inventor I met at Maker Faire Austin in 2007. Recently, we have had several conversations about the process for bringing a product to market. He has set up a site around the idea of inventing for regular people.

Invention is not always about money. For many of us inventing is primarily the quest for discovery and advancement. Fun seeking also plays a major roll. No, it's not always about profit. Because attempting to monetize every inventive product is silly. Superman does not require a Visa Card before he'll rescue you.

And right now, the World needs an ocean of Super-men/women (i.e. heroes) who help first and worry about money later. How do we inspire philanthropic inventaholics?

[Image from Inventaholic]

One of the great things that I recall from our conversations is the idea of having a process for creating designs that solve a problem.

• Identify the need. There is some problem that needs a solution.
• Gather some information: What do you need to know about the problem?
• Build a working prototype of your solution. Gather whatever materials make it work.
• Test it out and get some feedback: How well does it work?
• Then onto the manufacturing process: Identify the techniques and processes to actually make some working models of the device.
• Create a process for making 5 to 10 copies of the design
• Create a workflow for making 50 to 100 units of the design
• Create another plan for making 500 to 1,000 units of the design.

By having a decent design, and a plan for making the design in various quantities, you can make your design in however many units you can sell. If you get an order for 20, run your plan for 10 twice. If you get an order for 4,000, run your plan for 1,000 four times. If you need more that that, hopefully you are making money off of it and can hire out for parts of the manufacturing process.

Well, you see, Perry is an Inventaholic. If you feel like you might or could be an Inventaholic, then make sure you come play with him at the Inventaholic Prototype Playground at Maker Faire.

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It seems like not a day can go by without another oddity popping up having to do with The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden. There was the labels pretending the ruling said stuff it didn't. Then there were the charges of a biased judge -- followed up by charges of bias against not one but two of the judges put in charge of figuring out if the original judge was biased. Oh, and then there was that oddity where Warner Music apparently hired the lead police investigator in the case while he was still investigating the case. The latest such news is that Sweden's Cultural Minister told a gathering of entertainment industry folks that she supported the ruling. Now, to many of us outside of Sweden, that may not seem like a huge deal, but apparently the laws in Sweden state that a gov't minister cannot influence ongoing litigation -- and these comments could be seen as an attempt to support one side of the case. It seems like the oddities around this case are not going away any time soon.

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Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news. Photo credit: Paulino Figueirido Unfortunately, popular belief has it that news coming from official, mainstream channels is superior in quality and reliability than news reported by a blogger or someone with a shaky camcorder. Traditional media keep being preached as the source of truth, but what they lack is exactly the essence of truth: validation. How do you establish what is true form what is false? Mainstream media have a one-way dialogue with their audience: there's no way to check back what was told or written. Participatory journalism, on the contrary, finds its very strength in the continuous, ongoing validation process operated by a large community. You can easily share your opinion, agree / disagree with what is being said by taking advantage of new technologies and the web. This is why it is also called Participatory Journalism. Participatory Journalism is:

The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

If you want to understand better the spirit behind citizen journalism, and why it might be a long step forward in the way you both produce and consume information online, this classic report is a must read. Here all the details:

We Media: Introduction To Participatory Journalism

by Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman
In his 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that in the future, online news would give readers the ability to choose only the topics and sources that interested them. "The Daily Me," as Negroponte called it, worried many guardians of traditional journalism. To actively allow a reader to narrow the scope of coverage, observed some, could undermine the "philosophical underpinnings of traditional media." The vision that seemed cutting edge and worrisome eight years ago seems to have come partly true. The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, The Washington Post and CNN, to name a few, all offer readers some degree of personalization on the front pages of their sites. Millions of Yahoo members customize their MyYahoo personal news portal with the same news wire reports that editors use in daily newspapers across the globe. Google's news page uses a computer algorithm to select headlines from thousands of news sites - creating a global newsstand, of sorts. And media outlets from Fox News and the Drudge Report to individual weblogs offer the kind of opinionated slant to the news that Negroponte envisioned. But is the future of online news simply a continued extrapolation of this trend - news a la carte? Does greater personalization necessarily mean greater understanding for a democracy? In the view of futurist and author Watts Wacker, the question is not about greater personalization but about greater perspectives. According to Wacker, the world is moving faster than people can keep up with it. As a result, there are fewer common cultural references that can be agreed upon. Ideas, styles, products and mores accelerate their way from the fringe to the mainstream with increasing speed. To combat the confusion, consumers are seeking more perspectives, Wacker says. They research an automobile for purchase by spending time online and reading both professional and amateur reviews alike. But what are they doing when it comes to news? And what will they be doing in the future? To understand that, Wacker advises, you must seek out people from the future today and study them. How do you find people from the future? Locate early adopters - people who are using and appropriating technology in new ways. In South Korea, it looks like one future of online news has arrived a few years early. OhmyNews.com is the most influential online news site in that country, attracting an estimated 2 million readers a day. What's unusual about OhmyNews.com is that readers not only can pick and choose the news they want to read - they also write it. With the help of more than 26,000 registered citizen journalists, this collaborative online newspaper has emerged as a direct challenge to established media outlets in just four years. Unlike its competitors, OhmyNews has embraced the speed, responsiveness and community-oriented nature of the Web. Now, it appears, the vision of "The Daily Me" is being replaced by the idea of "The Daily We."

Behind The Citizen Journalism Revolution

Chriss Hogg and and David Silverberg of DigitalJournal.com analyze the citizen journalism phenomenon and its most famous examples. Duration: 7' 23''

The Rise of We Media

The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but, potentially, by the audience it serves. Armed with easy-to-use web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information. And it's doing just that on the Internet:

• According to the Pew Internet Project, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, generated the most traffic to traditional news sites in the history of the Web. Many large news sites buckled under the immense demand and people turned to e-mail, weblogs and forums "as conduits for information, commentary, and action related to 9/11 events." The response on the Internet gave rise to a new proliferation of "do-it-yourself journalism." Everything from eyewitness accounts and photo galleries to commentary and personal storytelling emerged to help people collectively grasp the confusion, anger and loss felt in the wake of the tragedy.


• During the first few days of the war in Iraq, Pew found that 17 percent of online Americans used the Internet as their principal source of information about the war, a level more than five times greater than those who got their news online immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (3 percent). The report also noted that "weblogs (were) gaining a following among a small number of Internet users (4 percent)."


• Immediately after the Columbia shuttle disaster, news and government organizations, in particular The Dallas Morning News and NASA, called upon the public to submit eyewitness accounts and photographs that might lead to clues to the cause of the spacecraft's disintegration.


• ABCNews.com's The Note covers 2004 political candidates and gives each an individual weblog to comment back on what was reported. In addition, presidential candidate Howard Dean guest-blogged on Larry Lessig's weblog for a week in July 2003. (A future president of the United States might be chosen not only on his or her merits, charisma, experience or voting record but on the basis of how well he or she blogs.)


• College coaches, players and sports media outlets keep constant vigil on numerous fan forum sites, which have been credited with everything from breaking and making news to rumor-mongering. "You can't go anywhere or do anything and expect not to be seen, because everyone is a reporter now," says Steve Patterson, who operates ugasports.com, a web site devoted to University of Georgia sports.


• Before the Iraq war, the BBC knew it couldn't possibly deploy enough photojournalists to cover the millions of people worldwide who marched in anti-war demonstrations. Reaching out to its audience, the BBC News asked readers to send in images taken with digital cameras and cell phones with built-in cameras, and it published the best ones on its web site.

Citizen Journalism - What Is It

Robin Good has edited a short video published by Cambridge Community Television explaining what citizen journalism really is about - Full video here Duration: 9' 49''

Weblogs Come of Age

The Internet, as a medium for news, is maturing. With every major news event, online media evolve. And while news sites have become more responsive and better able to handle the growing demands of readers and viewers, online communities and personal news and information sites are participating in an increasingly diverse and important role that, until recently, has operated without significant notice from mainstream media. While there are many ways that the audience is now participating in the journalistic process, which we will address in this report, weblogs have received the most attention from mainstream media in the past year. Weblogs, or blogs as they are commonly known, are the most active and surprising form of this participation. These personal publishing systems have given rise to a phenomenon that shows the markings of a revolution - giving anyone with the right talent and energy the ability to be heard far and wide on the Web. Weblogs are frequently updated online journals, with reverse-chronological entries and numerous links, that provide up-to-the-minute takes on the writer's life, the news, or on a specific subject of interest. Often riddled with opinionated commentary, they can be personally revealing (such as a college student's ruminations on dorm life) or straightforward and fairly objective (Romenesko). The growth of weblogs has been largely fueled by greater access to bandwidth and low-cost, often free software. These simple easy-to-use tools have enabled new kinds of collaboration unrestricted by time or geography. The result is an advance of new social patterns and means for self-expression. Blog-like communities like Slashdot.org have allowed a multitude of voices to participate while managing a social order and providing a useful filter on discussion. Weblogs have expanded their influence by attracting larger circles of readers while at the same time appealing to more targeted audiences.

"Blogs are in some ways a new form of journalism, open to anyone who can establish and maintain a Web site, and they have exploded in the past year,"

writes Walter Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

"The good thing about them is that they introduce fresh voices into the national discourse on various topics, and help build communities of interest through their collections of links. For instance, bloggers are credited with helping to get the mainstream news media interested in the racially insensitive remarks by Sen. Trent Lott (R.-Miss.) that led to his resignation as Senate majority leader."

Mossberg's description of weblogs as a new kind of journalism might trouble established, traditionally trained journalists. But it is a journalism of a different sort, one not tightly confined by the traditions and standards adhered to by the traditional profession. These acts of citizen engaging in journalism are not just limited to weblogs. They can be found in newsgroups, forums, chat rooms, collaborative publishing systems and peer-to-peer applications like instant messaging. As new forms of participation have emerged through new technologies, many have struggled to name them. As a default, the name is usually borrowed from the enabling technology (i.e., weblogging, forums and usenets).

Dan Gillmor and Matt Buckland On Citizen Journalism

Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, and web publisher Matt Buckland are interviewed about the nature of citizen journalism and the value of this approach opposed to the traditional journalism model. Duration: 2' 54''

Participatory Journalism Starts The Conversation

The term we use - participatory journalism - is meant to describe the content and the intent of online communication that often occurs in collaborative and social media. Here's the working definition that we have adopted:

Participatory journalism: The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

Participatory journalism is a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in which there is little or no editorial oversight or formal journalistic workflow dictating the decisions of a staff. Instead, it is the result of many simultaneous, distributed conversations that either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web's social network. While the explosion of weblogs is a recent phenomenon, the idea of tapping into your audience for new perspectives or turning readers into reporters or commentators is not. Many news organizations have a long history of tapping into their communities and experimenting with turning readers into reporters or commentators. In the early 1990s, newspapers experimented with the idea of civic journalism, which sought participation from readers and communities in the form of focus groups, polls and reaction to daily news stories. Most of these early projects centered around election coverage. Later, newspapers sought to involve communities in major deliberations on public problems such as race, development and crime. According to a report from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, at least 20 percent of the 1,500 daily U.S. newspapers practiced some form of civic journalism between 1994 and 2001. Nearly all said it had a positive effect on the community. Civic journalism has a somewhat controversial reputation, and not everyone is convinced of its benefits. While civic journalism actively tries to encourage participation, the news organization maintains a high degree of control by setting the agenda, choosing the participants and moderating the conversation. Some feel that civic journalism is often too broad, focusing on large issues such as crime and politics, and not highly responsive to the day-to-day needs of the audience. Yet, the seed from which civic journalism grows is dialogue and conversation. Similarly, a defining characteristic of participatory journalism is conversation. However, there is no central news organization controlling the exchange of information. Conversation is the mechanism that turns the tables on the traditional roles of journalism and creates a dynamic, egalitarian give-and-take ethic. The fluidity of this approach puts more emphasis on the publishing of information rather than the filtering. Conversations happen in the community for all to see. In contrast, traditional news organizations are set up to filter information before they publish it. It might be collaborative among the editors and reporters, but the debates are not open to public scrutiny or involvement. John Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox Corp., further elaborates on participatory journalism in the book The Elements of Journalism:

"In an era when anyone can be a reporter or commentator on the Web, 'you move to a two-way journalism.' The journalist becomes a 'forum leader,' or a mediator rather than simply a teacher or lecturer. The audience becomes not consumers, but 'pro-sumers,' a hybrid of consumer and producer."

Seely Brown's description suggests a symbiotic relationship, which we are already seeing. But participatory journalism does not show evidence of needing a classically trained "journalist" to be the mediator or facilitator. Plenty of weblogs, forums and online communities appear to function effectively without one. This raises some important questions:

• If participatory journalism has risen without the direct help of trained journalists or news industry initiatives, what role will mainstream media play?
• And are mainstream media willing to relinquish some control and actively collaborate with their audiences?
• Or will an informed and empowered consumer begin to frame the news agenda from the grassroots?
• And, will journalism's values endure?

Citizen Journalism and You: Partners In Press Freedom

A 1950's educational video parody explaining what citizen journalism is about, in simple words. By UWA Comm2203 Project for Group 11. Duration: 2' 53''

Journalism At a Crossroads

In his 1996 book News Values, former Chicago Tribune publisher Jack Fuller summed it up well: "The new interactive medium both threatens the status quo and promises an exciting new way of learning about the world." This deftly describes both camps of opinion concerning participation by the audience in journalism. It's not just the Internet that threatens the status quo of the news business. In their 2001 book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel make a compelling argument that the news business is undergoing "a momentous transition." According to the authors, each time there has been a period of significant, social, economic and technological change, a transformation in news occurred. This happened in the 1830s-40s with the advent of the telegraph; the 1880s with a drop in paper prices and a wave of immigration; the 1920s with radio and the rise of gossip and celebrity culture; the 1950s at the onset of the Cold War and television. The arrival of cable, followed by the Internet and mobile technologies, has brought the latest upheaval in news. And this time, the change in news may be even more dramatic. Kovach and Rosenstiel explain,

"For the first time in our history, the news increasingly is produced by companies outside journalism, and this new economic organization is important. We are facing the possibility that independent news will be replaced by self-interested commercialism posing as news."

Kovach and Rosenstiel argue that new technology, along with globalization and the conglomeration of media, is causing a shift away from journalism that is connected to citizen building and one that supports a healthy democracy. Clearly, journalism is in the process of redefining itself, adjusting to the disruptive forces surrounding it. So it's no surprise that discussions about forms of participatory journalism, such as weblogs, are frequently consumed by defensive debates about what is journalism and who can legitimately call themselves a journalist. While debating what makes for good journalism is worthwhile, and is clearly needed, it prevents the discussion from advancing to any analysis about the greater good that can be gained from audience participation in news. Furthermore, the debate often exacerbates the differences primarily in processes, overlooking obvious similarities. If we take a closer look at the basic tasks and values of traditional journalism, the differences become less striking. From a task perspective, journalism is seen as "the profession of gathering, editing, and publishing news reports and related articles for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio." In terms of journalism's key values, there is much debate. After extensive interviews with hundreds of U.S. journalists, Kovach and Rosenstiel say that terms such as fairness, balance and objectivity are too vague to rise to essential elements of this profession. From their research, they distilled this value: "The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing." In the case of the aforementioned South Korean news site, we see that traditional journalism's basic tasks and values are central to its ethos. The difference essentially boils down to a redistribution of control – a democratization of media. "With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media," said Oh Yeon-ho, editor and founder of South Korea's Ohmynews.com. "The main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter," Yeon-ho says. "A reporter is the one who has the news and who is trying to inform others."

Citizen Journ vs Traditional Journ

A short pardoy in stop-motion of the Mac vs PC advertisement series about why citizen journalism is dirìfferent from the traditional journalist. Duration 3' 21''

The New Evolving Media Ecosystem

The most obvious difference between participatory journalism and traditional journalism is the different structure and organization that produce them.

• Traditional media are created by hierarchical organizations that are built for commerce. Their business models are broadcast and advertising focused. They value rigorous editorial workflow, profitability and integrity.
• Participatory journalism is created by networked communities that value conversation, collaboration and egalitarianism over profitability.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University who has consulted on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, sees the difference this way:

"The order of things in broadcast is 'filter, then publish.' The order in communities is 'publish, then filter.' If you go to a dinner party, you don't submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact."

Many traditional journalists are dismissive of participatory journalism, particularly webloggers, characterizing them as self-interested or unskilled amateurs. Conversely, many webloggers look upon mainstream media as an arrogant, exclusive club that puts its own version of self-interest and economic survival above the societal responsibility of a free press. According to Shirky, what the mainstream media fail to understand is that despite a participant's lack of skill or journalistic training, the Internet itself acts as editing mechanism, with the difference that "editorial judgment is applied at the edges … after the fact, not in advance." In The Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel take a similar view:

"This kind of high-tech interaction is a journalism that resembles conversation again, much like the original journalism occurring in the publick houses and coffeehouses four hundred years ago. Seen in this light, journalism's function is not fundamentally changed by the digital age. The techniques may be different, but the underlying principles are the same."

What is emerging is a new media ecosystem, where online communities discuss and extend the stories created by mainstream media. These communities also produce participatory journalism, grassroots reporting, annotative reporting, commentary and fact-checking, which the mainstream media feed upon, developing them as a pool of tips, sources and story ideas. Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon.com, explains,

"Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn't have existed before the Web. It should be obvious that weblogs aren't competing with the work of the professional journalism establishment, but rather complementing it. If the pros are criticized as being cautious, impersonal, corporate and herdlike, the bloggers are the opposite in, well, almost every respect: They're reckless, confessional, funky - and herdlike."

Dan Gillmor, one of weblogging's most vocal defenders and a technology journalist and weblogger for the San Jose Mercury News, describes this ecosystem as "journalism's next wave." In a post to his weblog on March 27, 2002, Gillmor described the principles that define the current "we media" movement:

• My readers know more than I do.
• That is not a threat, but rather an opportunity.
• We can use this together to create something between a seminar and a conversation, educating all of us.
• Interactivity and communications technology - in the form of email, weblogs, discussion boards, websites and more - make it happen.

How To Be a Citizen Journalist

Retrò-style short film about what it takes to become a citizen journalist. Duration: 3' 16''

Originally written by Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman, and first published on September 21st 2003 as "We Media: Introduction To Participatory Journalism"

About the authors Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman work at Hypergene, a media consulting and design firm that develops, designs and produces communication and commerce projects for clients in business, media and technology.

Photo credits: The Rise of We Media - IreneK Weblogs Come of Age - vacuum3d Participatory Journalism Starts The Conversation - Luis Fernandez Journalism At a Crossroads - jarcem The New Evolving Media Ecosystem - aixm

Combat Wombat sends the news that the government in Australia has begun waffling on whether country-wide Internet censorship will be mandatory. "The Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory Internet filtering plan. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today told a Senate estimates committee that the filtering scheme could be implemented by a voluntary industry code. ... [The shadow communications minister] said he had never heard of a voluntary mandatory system. ... Senator Conroy's statement is a departure from the internet filtering policy Labor took into the October 2007 election to make it mandatory for ISPs to block offensive and illegal content." The censorship plan, which has been called "worse than Iran," was bypassed even before trials started. A minister's defection may have effectively blocked any chance of implementation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Credit-card companies are looking to new technology to help them cut down on fraudulent purchases, but online retailers are looking at a slightly different problem. They say that "friendly fraud" -- when a customer purchases an item, then later disputes the purchase -- is on the rise. It's not clear exactly what's "friendly" about this kind of fraud, but it usually entails a customer ordering an item, then saying they never received it, or claiming they were sent the wrong item. Travel site Expedia says it runs into the same problem, with people purchasing travel services, then claiming -- after they've taken the trip -- that they never made the purchases. The companies are getting a bit wiser, doing things like taking photos of shipments before they're sent out, and it sounds like most people back off their claims once they're presented with some evidence of just how easy they are to debunk. The retailers cited by the WSJ seem to be saying that this is a manifestation of buyer's remorse, with people looking for a way out from credit-card purchases they've made, but that seems pretty generous. It's a little odd, since it sounds like they try to handle this stuff pretty gingerly and not upset the customers by accusing them of fraud and theft, and then using the "friendly" moniker. Friendly or not, fraud's a growing problem for online retailers and credit-card companies.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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postermmxvicom writes "I program only occasionally and mostly for personal interest. I went to update my favorite free IDE, Dev C++, yesterday and noticed that it had not been updated since 2005! I went looking for other free IDEs and came across Code::Blocks and Visual Studio Express. I work from a Windows machine, use C++, and make mostly console apps; but have written a few Windows apps and D3D or OpenGL apps. I wanted to know what free IDEs you use and recommend. What do you like about them? What features do they lack? What about them irritate you (and what do you do to work around these annoyances)? For instance, when I used Visual C++ 6.0 in college, there was an error in getline that had to be fixed, and the code indenting in DevC++ needed to be tweaked to suit my liking."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, we noted that the major record labels were already trying to stretch the disputed ruling in The Pirate Bay case, pushing to get the site taken offline and to increase the damages for every day the site stays online. It was notable that the original ruling, while fining the four defendants and giving them jail time, included no injunction to take the site down or any formula for continuing fines. That's no problem for the record labels, who just asked the court to add those fines anyway. At least initially, that strategy appears to have failed, as the court has rejected the request, at least until The Pirate Bay defendants have a chance to respond. Once again, though, it's fascinating to watch the record labels slowly realizing that the "big win" they thought they got from the case has been pretty much the exact opposite of what they hoped for. It didn't shut down the site. It increased interest in the site and the political movement behind it. And it exposed a potentially biased judge. At some point, you have to wonder if the recording industry would have been better off just letting the obscure (at the time) Swedish site continue living in obscurity, rather than generating all sorts of attention by trying to get it shut down.

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Daisuke Hiraiwa's "Stamen" lampshade is made from bazillions of toothpicks (12,500 or so). He makes complementary "Petal" lampshades from plastic spoons.

stamen and petals at ICFF 2009 (via Craft)

Kids with extremely snotty heads can be trained to clear their sinuses by teaching them to inflate "nose balloons":

The balloon helps a kid put air pressure on their eustachian tubes from the pharynx, which opens them and helps keep the middle ear drained. Us grownups do the same thing easily by just closing our eyes, holding our noses and "pushing", like on air trips or while driving in mountains or scuba diving. But try to explain that push to a little kid!

My daughter uses the balloon with great gusto mornings and nights, and often she comments on the wind she then hears blowing inside her ears. That's when an obstructed tube opens and admits air into her middle ear.

Nose Balloon

On the Neurophilosophy blog, a fascinating look at confabulatory hypermnesia, a rare disorder in which people with various kinds of amnesia (including amnesia resulting from alcoholism and Vitamin B1 deficiencies) invent a continuous stream of detailed, fictitious events to fill in the gaps in their memory. The write up comes from a paper published in the journal Cortex:

Most strikingly, LM confabulated plausible answers to questions about both his personal life and public events, which would normally elicit from most people an answer of "I don't know". When the researchers asked him "Who won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980?" he replied "Fernandel"; when asked what he had for dinner on Tuesday two weeks ago, he answered "Steak with french fries"; and when asked "Do you remember what you did on March 13th, 1985?" he replied "We spent the day at the Senart Forest."

LM thus has a "pure" amnesic syndrome, in that his impairment is not associated with other cognitive deficits which might interfere with memory function. He scored normally on short-term memory tests, and the evaluation revealed mild, diffuse neurodegeneration, rather than damage in a specific part of the brain. False memories are not uncommon in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome - indeed the condition is also referred to as amnesic-confabulatory syndrome. However, the confabulations of such patients are sometimes extraordinary, bizarre and verging on being delusional. LM's confabulations, on the other hand, were always plausible, and therefore quite unlike those reported in other Korsakoff's patients.

Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome

As we see more and more empty, abandoned street newspaper boxes, Posterchild converted this one into a lovely planter with a simply-shaped plywood insert.

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Canonical, the folks who maintain the Ubuntu flavor of the GNU/Linux operating system, have demoed code that lets you run apps from Android phones and devices (like Google's G1) on your desktop. Given that I'm a G1 user and an Ubuntu user, this is good news!

Google's Linux-based Android platform is attracting a lot of attention. The new version significantly improves the platform's reliability and could make it look a lot more appealing to carriers and handset makers. The availability of an experimental x86 port has caused some people to speculate that Android might have a place in the netbook market.

Canonical developers aim to make Android apps run on Ubuntu

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: stuff made from bones.

Dem Bones, Dem Bones 2

Dawn sez, "Etsy crafter has created tiny knitted meercats in TOS uniforms - including one "he's dead" redshirt and, I assume, Kirk and Bones, who has a tiny bead med-scanner."

Star Trek Meerkat Bones McCoy Original Series (Thanks, Dawn!)

While most of the coverage of the old school paper media industry struggling to update their business models has focused on newspapers, there are lots of questions around the magazine industry as well. Magazines are losing ad revenue and trying to reinvent themselves to retain readers. Some are giving up and shutting down completely. However, I've seen a few stories lately pointing to smaller, less well known magazines that are really doing some unique things to give readers a real reason to buy, rather than trying to force them to buy. The first comes courtesy of Surinder, who points us to a story about Monocle magazine, who has focused on a strategy of giving readers a real reason to buy:

There are, on this type of thinking, two kinds of reader: fans and the indifferent. Monocle's strategy is to find fans and then, boy, make money out of them. So, if you missed an issue, back issues cost double - because in the end it is only completists, eyeing an irritating lacuna on the bathroom shelf, who will want to buy. And they might as well pay up.

There are Monocle accessories - bags, pens and Lord knows what else - to buy and of course it is the fans that do, as they rather like being some sort of trans-national club, who fancy flying for a holiday in Costa Rica/Brunei/South Africa. And if you missed them in the magazine, you can head down to a Monocle shop. There is one off Marylebone High Street in London, with others in Los Angeles, or in Mallorca this summer, on the off chance that you happen to be in those locations at the crucial time.

Now, some readers may snort with derision at this point. After all, it would not be hard for more demotic types to describe Monocle as pretentious, although this is in fact unfair. But it does not matter; if there are enough fans you can make good money from them, a strategy that never did Madonna much harm. The snorters - a majority for any publication if you think about it - are irrelevant.

Then, the Wall Street Journal covered five different magazines that are all coming up with creative ways to add value and give fans a reason to buy. Some of them are incredibly creative, often turning the "magazine" into a piece of artwork itself (i.e., something you want to posses and own, not something you read and toss out). For example, there's T-Post -- a magazine built into a t-shirt:

It's the magazine you can wear.

Every six weeks, T-Post sends its 2,500 subscribers a new T-shirt: It has a true story printed on the inside, chosen to make readers think, while on the outside an artist interprets the story to create a stylishly unique piece of graphic clothing. The idea behind the magazine is that each design will provoke onlookers to comment -- and give the owner of the T-shirt the opportunity to spread the story printed on the inside.

Other magazines include one where every issue is round and comes inside a designer frisbee, another where the magazine is made of unique and unusual materials (the latest one is "a book of black-and-white photographs that turn to color when exposed to the sun." Then there are magazines that blur the lines between magazines and objects, such as La Mas Bella and La Lata, which comes in a can you have to pry open.

While a lot of these are (not surprisingly) art magazines, that doesn't mean non-art magazines can't take a lesson from this: provide something worth keeping that creates a real reason to buy.

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Six German states have banned Red Bull Cola after lab tests turned up trace amounts of coca leaf extracts in the beverage. According to authorities, the substance requires the beverage to be classified as a narcotic, requiring a license for sale. (Of course, even Coca-Cola didn't become entirely cocaine-free until 1929.) From BBC News:

(Red Bull) said coca leaf extracts were used worldwide as a natural flavouring, and that its own tests had found no traces of cocaine.

The illegal cocaine alkaloid - one of 10 found in coca and representing only 0.8% of the plant's chemical make-up - is chemically removed before use, as mandated by international anti-narcotics agencies.

"There is no scientific basis for this ban on Red Bull Cola because the levels of cocaine found are so small," Fritz Soergel, the head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Bavaria, told Time magazine.

"And it's not even cocaine itself. According to the tests we carried out, it's a non-active degradation product with no effect on the body. If you start examining lots of other drinks and food so carefully, you'd find a lot of surprising things."

"Germany bans cola after drug test"

ThinSkin writes "Building a computer that can handle today's games doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, you can build one for less than $800, especially given that many hardware manufacturers have cut costs considerably. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech shows gamers how to build an $800 gaming PC, one that features an overclockable Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 and a graphics-crunching EVGA 260 GTX Core 216. The computer exceeded expectations in gaming and synthetic tests, and was even overclocked well over spec at 3.01GHz."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(I'm traveling and blogging from Guatemala right now, so expect a number of posts from me specific to this region. - XJ).

I've spent much of the past week in a K'iche' Maya village in the highlands. One of the children there took this snapshot on my iPhone by accident, I'm pretty sure.

I love it. We were gathered around the wood hearth, trying to stay warm. I was watching the women of the household slap tortillas from corn grown in the nearby milpa. I'd offered the kids my iPhone -- a foreign, seemingly magical device (their dad described it in those words, anyway).

I was showing them how to play around with some apps. I didn't actually show much, they figured things out on their own. Their favorite apps, btw, were: Eno's "Bloom," and "Koi Pond" (Which I learned would be called "Uk'ob'al Kar" in the Kiche' language, that's how you'd say "small pond full of fish.")

I'm blogging the photo because -- I don't know. I loved the composition, the dreamy-floaty quality. It reminds me of a painting I saw in a famous person's home in LA a few weeks before I left the USA. I like it a lot more than most of the "real" photos I've "deliberately" taken on this trip with "good" cameras (yes, I love over-using quote marks).

Sometimes accidents, or chance creations in the hands of children, are better than things we might choose or control.

I'm heading back to the pueblo shortly, but here is another phone-snap of where I'm sitting and typing now. Guatemala is extreme beauty, and extreme suffering.

Over at the Mother Ship, they're having a drawing. Send a picture of your DIY project, any DIY project, and the randomly-chosen winner will receive 2 full adult weekend passes to Maker Faire.

County of San Mateo Declares May 30th & 31st Maker's Weekend

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We've noticed in the past that there are two massively conflicting ideas pushed by politicians: privacy laws that require companies to dump data they collect on users and data-retention laws that require companies to hold onto data for law enforcement or anti-piracy efforts. That seems to be showing up in Sweden now, where the recent IPRED law required ISPs to turn over data on those accused of file sharing. However, that simply led many Swedish ISPs to stop keeping log files. So, of course, some Swedish politicians put forth a data retention amendment, requiring ISPs to keep logs, which sounds great until lots of folks recognized this would clearly violate privacy laws already in place (via Michael Scott). You get the feeling we're going to see a lot more of these sorts of conflicts in the near future.

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An anonymous reader notes Ars Technica's report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, where Canonical has unveiled a prototype Android execution environment that will allow Android applications to run on Ubuntu and "potentially other conventional Linux distributions." "Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. Canonical is creating a specialized Android execution environment that could make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu desktops in Xorg alongside regular Linux applications. The execution environment would function like a simulator, providing the infrastructure that is needed to make the applications run. Some technical details about the Android execution environment were presented by Canonical developer Michael Casadevall... They successfully compiled it against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc and they are running it on a regular Ubuntu kernel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has announced a firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR enabling manual exposure when shooting videos. With the updated version, users will be able to manually adjust the shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings in the video mode. The new firmware will be available for download on 2 June 2009 from Canon's website.

The New York Times says the growing use of texting among teenagers "is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists". Apparently all the texting kids do creates anxiety, keeps them from getting enough sleep, and causes repetitive stress injuries. Sure, texting could have some some negative impact on some kids, but like with so many things, for every citation of some horror texting causes, you can find studies touting texting's benefits, too. And finding one girl who texted so much it made her thumbs hurt really isn't a sign of an epidemic, either. It certainly makes for some good headlines, but is the rise of texting among teens really any different than the growth of any other technology, none of which seem to have killed us off yet?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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