Praise the Gods, the excellent wp-cache has been updated to version 2.0.20 with a few minor but very needed bugfixes.
Monthly Archive for December, 2006
As I discussed in my last post, the Time Person of the Year for 2006 is “You”.
Check out the ad that you see when (at the time of this writing) you go to read the article announcing the Person of the Year:
Clearly Chrysler made this ad before the Person of the Year was announced, and didn’t expect that the person of the year is, in fact, YOU! Hilarious.
This is awesome. The Time Person of the Year for 2006 is You.
The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.
[snip]
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
I really see this as a sign of change. I’ve long had a problem with the Person of the Year concept. At best, it’s annoying pop journalism drivel; at worst, it perpetuates the hierarchical one-to-many idolatry of Special People and Heroes that I’ve hated in our culture even before I considered myself a media activist/thinker/consultant.
Time is recognizing in a very real way that what happened in the past few years is special and important. That because of our new tools and models, power and change are distributed and contributed instead of passed down from above.
One wonders who the person of the year will be next year… back to Very Important Politician/Philanthropist? Of course, I would like to see this as a declaration of “no more persons of the year! it’s over and we are glad!”.
But overall, kudos to Time.
As an aside, Dan Gillmor made the excellent observation that Time chose to say “You” instead of “Us”, ironically perpetuating the separation between provider and receiver that this year’s person of the year was theoretically aiming to dismantle.
Although, to be fair, You is singular, and it could be seen as meaning “anyone who picks up this magazine, including people who work at Time”. So if the person of the year had been “Y’All” or “Yous Guys”, Gillmor would have more of a point. :-p
A little over a year ago, there was some buzz about Leo Stoller, a slimey guy who claims to have the intellectual property rights of thousands of words that he claims are his trademarks and brands.
My buddy and hero Kembrew McLeod, who is a professional prankster, tenured professor, and filmmaker, happened to actually own a trademark on the phrase “Freedom of Expression” (for use as a periodical title, now expired). For completely unrelated reasons, I had registered the domain freedomofexpression.org. Turns out, Leo Stoller also claimed to have a trademark on this expression.
Kembrew came up with the brilliant idea of sending a cease and desist letter to Stoller. My friend Julie Gilberg was game for making us some art, we got a couple other domains registered, and soon we had the Freedom of Expression Security Consortium: Regulating Freedom in the Marketplace of Ideas.
People were pretty into the whole thing, and it was even covered on Boing Boing. Whoo hoo!
But Stoller never responded, and the whole thing faded away as a happy memory.
Well, I recently got a nice surprise in the comments section of my post on the stunt:
links cleaned up by me
Stoller has now been enjoined as a vexatious litigant and barred from filing any more lawsuits or trademark oppositions without first getting permission from the court. The bankruptcy judge has also revealed how Stoller’s business scheme was working. See, document 1 (pdf) and document 2 (pdf).
Wow! I don’t know what enjoined means, but it sounds like justice to me! And how cool is it that a lawyer involved in the case found my blog and left an update on the story! (this is why I love blogs and other new media… the simple, powerful ways through which people can connect).
So it seems that Leo Stoller’s racket is shut down. Clearly Kembrew, Julie, and I are at least partially responsible…
Here is a site that pairs random The Family Circus comics with random Nietzsche quotes: The Nietzsche Family Circus. The results are simply amazing.
A while back I blogged about a Citizen Journalism Unconference that I attended. Coté’s interest was piqued and he invited me to join him for a podcast on the matter. A few weeks later, it happened.
If I remember correctly I was getting over some manner of sickness at the time, I may have been hungover and/or not sober, and either the transmission or recording method mangled the sound. I don’t usually sound like a hyperexcited flamboyant duck. (I’ve heard my voice recorded a lot and am very familiar with the difference between my voice in my head and my voice as heard by others).
That said, I’m very pleased with how the podcast turned out. We covered a lot of ground and I think discovered a few things. Check it out.
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