by David Burn | Apr 22, 2006 | Digital culture
According to The Creative Coast Initiative, the Savannah area is home to more than 300 knowledge-based businesses, representing multiple industries including: internet/web design, digital media, consulting, software development, among others. In my estimation, one new startup that has a real chance of standing out and becoming an international player is Evoca, a spontaneous podcast provider.
The democratic impulse of the Internet, the ubiquity of the cell phone, and the power of oral expression have convinced us of one thing: it’s time to mobilize the voices. Our concept is simple. Just call one of our world-wide numbers from your cell phone or Skype account and record a message. Or you can upload a recording from your digital recorder. We’ll automatically store whatever you give us in your account. From there, you can organize your recordings, you can share them with the world, or you can keep them all to yourself. It’s spontaneous, it’s far-reaching, and, most importantly, it’s so easy. At Evoca, we intend to enrich the world by empowering your voice.
I signed up for their free service yesterday. Now I have five voice recordings of me performing my poems to offer. Just like that.
Evoca is basically Flickr for voice. A social media site with a million possibilities for users.
by David Burn | Apr 7, 2006 | Digital culture
Elizabeth Spiers, formerly of Gawker, started a new blog recently. DealBreaker covers the underbelly of Wall Street. One of the writers on the site is named Muffy Benson-Perella. She’s an investment banker in Manhattan who holds a B.A. in French and Art from Vassar College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Sort of. You see, Muffie is a character. Purely a work of fiction.
In one recent post, a commentor dared to call her a joke. Someone, called “MBA_Overlord” came to Muffy’s defense.
Muffie writings are not a joke. Rather, she offers more common people valuable insights into the rarified world of finance. Her trenchant observations illuminate investment banking’s mysteries.
After all, those, like you, who do not possess her level of erudition, acomplishment, and breeding, cannot possibly even hope to walk Wall Street’s hallowed halls of power. I should know as I enjoy a similarly advantaged provenance.
Her voice is the clarion call. You would do well to heed her words. As I have said before, Muffie’s existence uplifts us all.
This is good shit. Just look at the name. Muffy Benson would not suffice. This character has Continental flare!
Here’s how Vulture Droppings sees it:
What’s amazing about this blog is the immediate and hateful response it is getting from readers. Check out some of the comments on the “Ask Muffie” section, where we get to hear overworked traders, brains fried by constant exposure to the Bloomberg terminal, tear their hair out over a ditzy and COMPLETELY FICTIONAL MBA columnist.
Nice work, Ms. Spiers.
by David Burn | Feb 24, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
In the Mormon faith, members baptize thier ancestors into the LDS Church posthumously, ostensibly overriding whatever beliefs the person may have had while alive.
Now we have a similar take on dead writers from present day Los Angeles writer, Paul Davidson. For certainly, great thinkers of yesteryear would have blogged, had they had the technology to do so.
Davidson’s book, The Lost Blogs, imagines what some of these entries into the narrative database would look like.
According to the description on Amazon, the book offers hundreds of blog posts from the most famous minds in history, such as: John Lennon’s thoughts after meeting a young woman named Yoko Ono. Tips of the trade from Jesus Christ’s carpentry blog, including how to build a combination water and wine rack. Shakespeare’s treatment for a new play about two princes who misplace their horse and carriage and spend the entire play trying to locate it. How a stray hot dog nearly derailed Ghandi’s hunger strike. Jim Morrison’s original lyrics to Light My Fire. And the missing two cents from everyone else who matters.
When Davidson is not busy writing someone else’s blog entries, he makes some pretty funny ones of his own.
Find me someone who is willing to use mayo from someone else’s house other than their own and I’ll show you someone who likes to live on the edge.
For whenever I visit a friend’s home for lunch and I’m given the choice of tuna salad or turkey, egg salad or roast beef, ambrosia salad or an apple, potato salad or french fries, cole slaw or a side salad I will always choose the non-mayo item.
This is primarily because I am afraid of mayonnaise that isn’t mine.
by David Burn | Feb 10, 2006 | Advertising, Digital culture
With my recent inclusion in Morph, “the Media Center conversation,” I’m asking myself if I am now part of the mainstream media. Better yet, part of the media elite.
With the inception of AdPulp, just 16 months ago, something shifted for me. My career took a strong turn towards writing, editing and publishing (and away from the brand-sponsored “writing” that had been the centerpeice). I feel like I’m in a better place now.
I still write copy and I still help big brands construct and implement their communications strategies. Perhaps, I always will. But I don’t enjoy doing it for strangers, nor for firms at odds with my fundemental beliefs.
I want to help companies working to improve the world in some way. Advertising is powerful stuff. So is media, in all its varieties. I want to apply advertising and media to powerful ideas–like solar, wind, biodiesel and hemp. All emerging industries that need my drive and experience (and yours!) to help move hundreds of millions of energy consumers to a post-oil economy.
I miss my youthful ambitions and idealism. It’s time to bring them back.
by David Burn | Jan 11, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature, Politics
Lyricist, internet freedom fighter and former cattle rancher, John Perry Barlow, hadn’t written a blog post in nine months. As of a few days ago, he’s back. Here’s some of what he has to say:
I began numerous BarlowSpams and blog entries only to have them slam, half-written, into the next improbability, where, beached with awe upon the present, I no longer felt like reporting yesterday’s apocalypse. (Perhaps one day I will bundle up some of these half-vignettes and post them here.)
Certainly, pioneering the electronic frontier is no longer the riveting mission it once was. While there remains much to be done, and the liberty of our descendents still hangs in the balance, that world has become too complex for me to think I can change it, as I once could, with the help of a few smart friends. Now I leave it more to the professionals at EFF. They’re smarter than I am and a lot more diligent with the details. Of course, I will go on toiling in the vaporous vineyards of Cyberspace, but without the same grand sense of personal urgency. Like any old mountain man, I’ve become just another settler, filling in the margins and grumbling about the government.
Previous passages through these interstitial storms felt like my own lonely struggle. Now, everywhere I look, I see others in the same condition. Fundamental life confusion – generally endured invisibly with a toxic sense of private embarrassment – is pandemic. Your personal mileage may differ, but my guess is that you are presently more riven with doubts and questions than you’ve letting on.
Most of the people I know who are still conscious enough to back away from their televisions are in a kind of life-shock. Metanoia, anomie, paralysis, catatonia, existential dread – whatever you want to call it, it’s wide-spread. Everywhere I look, I see people white-eyed and still as though caught in the Headlights of God.
Serious stuff. And then he turns to politics, which for Barlow brings to mind William Butler Yeats’ famous poem, “The Second Coming,” written in 1919.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It’s hard not to equate the end of the first stanza with today’s religious right, which is what Barlow does, and in that analysis he has many sympathizers, myself included. He does manage to conjure up some hope for the future, as well as some appreciation of the present, in his new post. Perhaps, the best do not lack all conviction, rather they lack convinction all the time
by David Burn | Jan 6, 2006 | Digital culture, The Environment
c|net: A Scottish university is testing solar-powered streetlights that also deliver wireless Internet access.
The Project Starsight technology is being tested as part of a deal between Compliance Technology, a company based in Fife, Scotland, and the Abertay Center for the Environment (ACE) at the University of Abertay in Dundee.
The solar panels provide a free energy source for the streetlight and also for the Wi-Fi or WiMax connection.
by David Burn | Jan 2, 2006 | Digital culture, Literature
Cory Doctorow: For the first time in my life, I am a full-time writer. Effective today, I’m no longer an employee — effective today, I’m a full-time, freelance word-maker. It’s something I’ve dreamt of since I was 12 years old, and now it’s a reality. Whew. Scary.
I’m going to write. More blog posts, and longer ones. I have three novellas in the pipe. I’m tripling the pace of work on Themepunks, my fourth novel, and plan to have it in the can by early spring. I’m going to do a fix-up novel with Charlie Stross, completing our “Huw” stories (Jury Service and Appeals Court) and publishing them between covers. My podcast is going thrice weekly. I’ve got articles in production for a bunch of magazines and websites.
There’s also some big plans for a long, nonfiction DRM-book/research project lurking around here. With any luck I’ll be able to announce more about that in late January or early February.
This is the most exciting day of my life — the day I quit my day-job. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, all the readers and bloggers and friends and editors and agents. I’ll do my best not to screw it up!
by David Burn | Dec 26, 2005 | Digital culture
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, explores our comfort with Wikipedia, Google and “that whole blog thing.”
When professionals–editors, academics, journalists–are running the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it, Wikipedia “should be the first source of information, not the last.”
by David Burn | Dec 9, 2005 | Digital culture
Ethan Zuckerman on Ben Hammersley’s talk at Les Blogs:
Ben Hammersley has the afternoon keynote which is, predictably, both thought provoking and a standup comedy routine. It’s titled “Eight Big Ideas of the 21st Century (And Why Blogging Isn’t One of Them)”.
I’ll skip to the punch line and mention that blogging isn’t one of the big ideas, but the conjunction of all the eight ideas. (These eight big ideas are the focus of Ben’s new book.) They are as follows:
information wants to be free
zero distance
mass amateurization
more is much more
true names
viral behavior
everything is personal
ubiquitous computing
Ben believes that blogging, and other forms of content creation, signal the beginning of a period of huge change that, in retrospect, will be seen as “the first days of the Renaissance…you were the flatmate of Leonardo DaVinci.” Driving the analogy further, he argues that 1991 – when Tim Berners-Lee brought the web to life – may prove to be a more revolutionary year than 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
It’s a funny, hopeful, incredibly optimistic talk and Ben closes by trying to get us to take some responsibility for ensuring that the good guys win over the bad guys. I’m less convinced than he that there’s nowhere to go but up, but hopeful that the ability for people to speak to a global audience through these technologies really does help change society for the better.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a “recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger,” ain’t buyin’ it.
Ben Hammersley gave a very provocative talk about the future. (Provocative not only because he was wearing a kilt!) He believes “We are on the tipping point of the next step in the evolution of human society.”
I must admit, I don’t believe that technology – or anything else for that matter – is going to enable human beings to transcend our fundamentally flawed human nature. I tend to feel that we’re better off if we plan for the future based on the assumption that human capacity for evil and stupidity will remain pretty much constant, and then make sure to build in the requisite institutions and systems to protect ourselves from the dark side of our own nature.
by David Burn | Nov 22, 2005 | Digital culture, Media
By a unanimous vote, the Federal Election Commission issued Advisory Opinion 2005-16 which concludes that the Fired Up! Network of blogs qualifies for the “press exception” to federal campaign finance law. The Commission adopted the draft opinion without revision.
The AO states:
Fired Up qualifies as a press entity. Its websites are both available to the general public and are the online equivalent of a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication as described in the Act and Commission regulations.
The Commission concludes that the costs Fired Up incurs in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its websites are encompassed by the press exception, and therefore do not constitute “expenditures” or “contributions” under the Act and Commission regulations.
Lot 49 further notes this passage in the ruling: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…”
