A huge portion of it is devoted to the section Kids and Teens: Stay Safe When Going Online and Using Social Media

I’ll try to get a better photo where the safety tips are legible. It’s great to see this sort of thing — I imagine it’s much more relevant to most kids than the Don’t Do Drugs tips from a decade ago that it replaced.

The scene presented is pretty amusing — do kids these days bring their laptops to school and hang out on the school’s wireless between classes? I honestly have no idea. Also, they really went the extra mile on diversity of race and personality on this one — if I’m not mistaken, that half-asian girl is wearing a necktie.

What’s up with the 9 year old in the back, who looks like he’s seeing something he’s not supposed to? Clearly, all the other 12 and 13 year olds have been looking at porn at middle school for years, but the kid in the back is losing innocence as we speak.

It’s dishonest and manipulative. I think most people will realize what is going on, I don’t think this is a major problem in society, but it’s something I like to laugh at.

I was at the dentist and came across this Before and After photo, which takes honesty to a whole new level:

The two photos aren’t just taken under similar conditions — they are actually the same photo, with the new white, straight teeth photoshopped onto the second one. Hilarious.

I guess these are the Before and After photos that are appropriate for contemporary society — consumers are very familiar with sophisticated visual effects in all forms of media, and are even literate with sophisticated visualizations demonstrating complicated information. The only thing the dentist will change is your teeth, so it’s only appropriate for the example photos to show the teeth as the only thing being changed.

This tool – a controlled experiment/demonstration – is the sort of thing that scientists have been familiar with for decades or centuries. 20 or 30 years ago, such a set of photos might have been considered surreal, ridiculous, or perhaps even horrific to a typical consumer. But now it is not only something with which consumers are familiar and comfortable, but also something that they expect.

All solutions create new problems. The problem now becomes: just how much of either photo was photoshopped? Has the color or position of the teeth been modified in either of the photos? Right now there is no way for this information to be communicated to the consumer, short of issuing something like a “statement of honesty” paragraph next to the photos. Perhaps in a decade or two, the authenticity of such things will be communicated to consumers, maybe with some sort of still-image metadata standard similar to MPEG-7, allowing for a checksum/signature to be carried all the way from the photo capturing device (camera) to the presentation device (printout / computer screen).

(tetrad structure emphasis mine)

Blogging enhances “many to many” communication. As a medium, blogging allows me to get my message out to many without the need of access to television, radio, print or film production facilities. Blogging also allows me to receive messages from many sources.

Blogging obsolesces one to one or many to one communications. Telephone chats and television binges are replaced by blogging connections.

Blogging retrieves the habits of 18th letter correspondents or diarists. Though this varies widely, at the minimum blogging requires that we capture and express our thoughts via the keyboard. Some bloggers go much further than that.

When pushed to an extreme, blogging reverses into total narcissism. I write only to myself, for myself. I put myself into the blogosphere, and seeing my own image, become entranced.

I searched far and wide for a third-party program or script and was surprised by how poor the solutions were. I found a handful of shareware programs that were either flakey, underfeatured, overpriced, or all of the above, and a smattering of shell scripts that didn’t do quite what I was looking for.

Finally I came across this applescript, and it does precisely what I want (and what I imagine everyone with this problem wants): finds duplicate songs according to user-specified metadata dimensions, and put “all but one” of each file in a playlist. Select all, option delete, DONE.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.

Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007

That might sound silly, but go there and see if you agree. With all that juicy up-to-the-minute content, and in particular the “ObamaHQ” blog (with weak IA semantics in the title tag for both the main blog and individual posts, btw), can’t you just imagine Obama chiming in any minute? “Hi folks. We just got back from Austin. I don’t have time to write much but I just wanted to make a few quick notes about what I learned about what’s on Austinites minds these day.”

Which I feel indicates that they are doing a LOT of things right. But there is just this one missing piece…

WNBC wants to take advantage of a more distributed information collection model. Fine. But this does not bridge the gap between old media (TV) and current media (blogging/internet). The internet is about conversation, removing degrees of separation between people, feedback…. I could go on. If WNBC is serious about participating in our world, they need to make their content accessible and usable after it has aired, allow feedback on their stories either via direct comment threads or forums on the website, and PARTICIPATE in these new tools. Have a presence on their forums. Adapt programming to the feedback… I know, I’m dreaming.

I mentioned this at the “symposium” and got a good response from the crowd. In fact some people cheered and clapped when I requested that the URLs to the videos never change. I know that was a little detailed given the context… maybe I should have told them to validate their markup and implement a semantic/style separation architecture….

You can see their spiel about it here, and if you watch the top video in upper right, you’ll see my face and hand making motions, almost as if I were making important points. But of course this is television and they did not include the content of what I was saying, only the visual appearance. In fact, even thought they recorded the entire symposium, I think they didn’t use ANY of the audio from audience members.

Why should we purchase music/movies/television/software when we can download/share it for free?

Content distributors have two answers:

1. Because downloading/sharing content is Wrong.
2. We have no answer, so we are going to remove the download/share option by introducting DRM into every single playback device.

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.

Ari has finished producing and uploading the videos, you can check them out here.

In general the party was a blast, free food and drink, nice people, great music. A couple days before the party I just happened to be corresponding with Ben Hammersley and I mentioned to him that I had just moved to NYC, and if he was ever in town we should get a drink. He replied back and said that he was in fact in NYC and we should get a drink the next night! I told him I was pretty booked the rest of the week, but that he should try to score a ticket to the Wired party if he knew anyone. A few hours later he replied back and said that he had done just that.

Why am I telling you all this? Because as fate would have it, Ben and I were the only two folks quoted in the article about the party on CNET’s media blog! And boy is my quote a dandy. I won’t ruin it for you, go read it.

It was put on “Unconference” style, where the content was largely audience-driven. I think most people regard BarCamp to be the prototypical Unconference, where the sessions are literally organized by the participants the morning of the conference. The conference on Monday had a very open and informal atmosphere, and there were no panelists, only moderators, but it still had significantly more predetermined structure and content than I would expect from something that is touted as an Unconference. I think a lot of this pre-planning did happen on the wiki, but still, it feels a lot different from BarCamp.

Which is in no way a criticism, I think this was the best format for the group and subject matter. There needs to be a new name for these kinds of one-day, everyone-in-the-same-room, lots-of-group-discussion, wiki-planned conferences (such as the conferences ibiblio put on over the last couple years: BloggerCon and PodcasterCon. WikiConference? ColabConference? DemocroCon? Okay I will stop now.

It was great to be observing and participating in this conversation with this group of folks. Being the developer of Lyceum, an occasional activist/filmaker/journalist, and sometimes convinced to participate in partisan politics, citizen journalism is something in which I am extremely interested.

Several folks took great notes at the conference, most notably Doc Searls, who sat in front of the room all day and generated his “docNography” [seems I can't do a direct link to the Citizen Journalism notes, as of this writing they are at the top of the page]. Also check out the notes on the wiki and posts from technorati. And wow do I need a haircut.

In general the conversation was mostly interesting throughout the day. In one sense, not much new happened. But what became abundantly clear (to me anyway) is that the citizen media issue is tightly bound to the evolution of the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent (for now), social software. In that regard, I wish that we had spent more time exploring how, as the nature of communication fundamentally changes (phone/cable tv -> email -> IM -> blogs/myspace, to put it very simply), how this will effect perception and reception of mainstream media and of citizen media. Instead, I feel the conference was more focused on how new tools and models were being adopted by those who already identify in some way as citizen journalists.

I was mostly an observer throughout the conference, but piped up in the last session when Ethan Zuckerman was giving an example of how one of the Global Voices bloggers got quoted in the Wall Street Journal (I think that was the context of the story– at any rate he was showing an example of a blogger’s story getting attention by the mainstream media). I raised my hand and presented what I thought would be on most people’s minds (given the crowd) but no one else was mentioning: we are too cool for the mainstream media, The Long Tail will save us, and if we all get on The Cluetrain, we can forget about the mainstream media altogether. Zuckerman did not like my line of thinking at all, and clarified that Global Voices’ very mission was to float underattented issues up to the mainstream media. I receded, but that line of discussion continued throughout the session, much to Zuckerman’s frustration. I think Zuckerman had more to say and would rather have not had to spend a lot of time discussing if gaining the mainstream media’s attention was worth it. But clearly this was an issue that was on the minds of a lot of folks in the room, so from that regard it was worth spending some time.

After the session ended, I approached Zuckerman to continue the discussion. He quickly convinced me that he was not in the business of developing new tools or models, but instead organizing a community around a common goal. I agreed that the work he was doing was valuable and apologized for having sounded overcritical. I then tried to chat about my ideas regarding what would happen to media in the mid- and long-term, and referenced a few ideas from media ecology. Zuckerman was unamused and and inattentive, and glared at me like I was some ivory tower scum. I fully understand his sentiment — he is trying to bring attention to wars in Africa that are almost completely ignored by western media and governments, and here I am trying to illustrate how communication patterns between teenagers on MySpace illustrate secondary orality and the coming establishment of a true global village.

The conference ended with Dan Gillmor giving Doc Searls a hug while everyone applauded. It was a touching Conversationerati moment, and a fitting end to what was a great day of conversation about conversation.

Of course, it would have been nice if they did this, and deployed a widespread education campaign, many many months ago.

In fact, the conspiracy theory side of me thinks that they don’t want Net Neutrality to be maintained, but they want to go down in history as being the good guy when the battle was being fought, even though, whoops, now they are profitting from their synthetic ability to fragment a commodity market.

The Net Neutrality bill already died yesterday in the House.

The original, unaltered, unedited versions of episodes 4, 5, and 6. I thought we’d never see this day, or at least not for another 20 years when the Criterion Collection would dig it up.

One confusing thing:

In response to overwhelming demand, [we] will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you’ll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.

What is “the 2004 digitally remastered version”? I’m pretty sure this is the version with all the absurd edits. To just refer to the as “digitally remastered” is silly, and a little insulting. Furthermore… I want the “theatrical editions” to be digitally remastered too… I just don’t want the content to be changed. Hopefully the “theatrical editions” have been rescanned and processed like the 2004 version was. I can’t imagine that this is not the case, it would in fact be cheaper for them to do that.

To add even more confusion:

Jim Ward, President of LucasArts and Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Ltd:

We returned to the Lucasfilm Archives to search exhaustively for source material that could be presented on DVD.

This isn’t stated in the context of special features or anything… it seems like he is implying that delivering undedited versions of the same material used in the 2004 DVD required “exhaustive searching in the archives”. WTF?

Anyway, overall, very good news.