Jon Stahl's Journal

David Brooks: Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he [sic!] enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it.

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I listened to a good chunk of Paul Krugman’s recent talk at the Commonwealth Club on the radio tonight. Damn, he’s good. History will judge him well as someone who spoke truth in the face of power.

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Saturday, September 8th.  Leavenworth, Washington.  A little after 5:00 PM, PDT. We are both thrilled to have shared this past weekend with so many dear friends and family — and with each other.Big thanks to Steve Andersen for the above photo; there will be lots more here soon.

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…is of my dear friend Yoram Bauman, the Standup Economist, illustrating a feature article in the University of Washington Weekly.  That’s right, Yoram is a Ph.D. economist who is also a stand-up comedian.  His “Principles of Economics, Translated” comedy routine has over 213,000 views on YouTube.  Who’s laughing now?

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… the leader of a successful, social-mission business to be a bit smarter than this: For seven years, Mr. Mackey had an online alter ego.Using the pseudonym Rahodeb — a variation of Deborah, his wife’s name — Mr. Mackey typed out more than 1,100 entries on Yahoo Finance’s bulletin board over a seven-year period, championing [...]

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Jeff Brooks offers some sound advice on organizational logos: You can agonize all day and night about getting a logo just right, but you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. Your logo will never bring a lot of meaning to the table. The best logo gets out of the way and lets reality do the work. Instead, work on making [...]

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Transitman! To dramatize the hard, quiet work demanded of transit riders, Seattle artist Christian French created a persona, TransitMan, a superhero who takes public transportation as his superpower. Then he actually donned a superhero costume and spent a lot of time commuting and traveling and documenting the travails of a man in tights dedicated to reducing personal automobile use. Fantastic. Hat [...]

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WWF Canada have commissioned this very clever billboard, which casts a shadow on itself that creates a shadow-animation of rising waves, to dramatize the reality of climate change.Obligatory YouTube video, which is itself a very smart way to get more mileage out of the stunt.  (Although with only ~21,000 views so far, YouTube is hardly [...]

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For all you Norwegians and Norwegians-at-heart, a happy Syttenden Mai!

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… that certain ONE/Northwest staff members are moonlighting as freelance journalists.

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NPR’s recent hour-long special The Partisans of Ali is an concise and engaging historical overview of the long sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims.  Well worth a listen if you want to understand the deeper long term conflicts that we’ve gotten uncomfortably close to these past few years.

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The staff at ONE/Northwest also thought of this in about 1997, but we lacked the skill/will to implement: LinuxWorld: And one of the internal commands at SGI was the burrito command. Allison: Oh, I vaguely remember that — yes, yes. You could specify your burrito. LinuxWorld: You’d type in burrito, and depending on either the command line options you supplied or [...]

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… that a Seattle condo marketing guy is named “Warren Ballard?”(Sorry all you non-Seattle folks.  Move along.)

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Alex Steffen of WorldChanging covered Eben Moglen’s Plone Conference talk.  Bruce Sterling comments skeptically.It’s great to see this speech getting out there. I’m really glad we invested in taping the Plone Conference so extensively.  You never know when something amazing is going to happen.

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Jonathan Peizer offers up some skepticism about Time Magazine’s designation of “you” as Person Of The Year: I am just not ready to give into a rose-colored panacea that seemingly lulls me into a false sense of who is in charge and the life-changing benefits of a “thing”. Just because a new form of interactive, networked [...]

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Ethan Zuckerman (who probably doesn’t remember me following along two years behind him at Williams) has a nice review of Cass Sunstein’s new book “Infotopia.”  I’m adding it to my reading list. Sunstein is still concerned with the formation of ideological cocoons. In his new book, Infotopia, he’s become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would [...]

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Eben Moglen’s keynote address at Plone Conference 2006, “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” was hands-down the most inspiring speech I’ve ever heard in my life. In just over an hour, he traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern [...]

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… Borat is very, very funny and in very, very poor taste.  But, like most of the audience, I laughed almost continuously when I wasn’t cringing. What does it say about our current national psyche when a film featuring two homophobic men wrestling naked in a hotel ballroom makes us laugh until snot drips from our [...]

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Just about two months ago I took the plunge, bought a SlimDevices Squeezebox network music player and finally committed to digitizing my music collection. Here’s a two-month report. First of all, a quick rundown on my setup. I’ve got: A Squeezebox 3 digital music player, connected to… A [...]

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Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to be part of an event that seems simple, but isn’t. An event that appears effortless, but is in fact based on a subtle combination of deep insight and hard-won experience. An event that quietly encodes a massive amount of tacit wisdom bubbling [...]

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