Had a "lovely" time in London. Goodbye and thanks for all the chips.

I'm off to Finland today. I'll be giving a talk at the EVA conference tomorrow.

Wired News

GarageBand.com Leaves Door Open

GarageBand.com -- a site that both hosts independent music and uses a peer-review process to identify hot bands -- is offering the Creative Commons Music Sharing License to artists who want to distribute their tunes for free, the company said Monday.

Nice. GarageBand is one of the biggest legal mp3 sites and it's cool that they are offering a CC license to their artists. Alternative distribution of music using CC licenses is clearly a good idea and helps people understand the whole Free Culture concept. I really do believe that the issue will become more and more about how to gain attention, not how to charge for delivery. It is changing from a delivery problem to a discovery problem as storage and bandwidth become commodities. Discovery is cheap only when you have a monopoly on people's attention. Obviously, media companies like Clear Channel are trying to keep that monopoly, but I think users are going to dump those locked up modes as new modes of discovery become available. I think that the main way to get attention will be to become part of the conversation and you can only do that if you promote active sharing of your music and content.

Sorry about the light blogging. Have been a bit distracted with my travels.

British Midland lost my bag on a direct flight from Naples to Heathrow. Unsure who's fault it was, but no apology (not that I expected one) from anyone. Luckily, it arrived that night.

Staying at the Park Lane Hotel on Piccadilly. Looked like a nice room at first glance, but the fax machine was broken, room safe broken (they've tried to fix it 3 times, still broken), drippy faucet, door lock broken (took 24 hours to fix), wifi in room, but a credit card based T-Mobile network with spotty coverage in my room.

The room is much better than many places I've stayed, but it would be SO MUCH better if they just had their shit together a bit more. (Maybe it's because I'm using mileage to pay for the room...)
Anyway, I expected much better from a "five star" London hotel. What a pity. I'm never going to stay at this hotel again.

On the bright side, I've gotten to meet a bunch of the UK bloggers and so far the food is MUCH BETTER than I remember it from visiting years ago.

People have been auctioning Google gmail invitations on eBay. Jonas has set up a gmail invitation exchange for people who donate invitations and for people willing to do something "good" in exchange for an invite.

Jonas

It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.

I'm about to leave Naples. I had a wonderful time. The total chaos of the city, the extremely warm and interesting people, the great food and the wonderful weather was just delightful. I'm sure I only scratched the surface, but I really enjoyed the Napolitan style. I only wish I could speak Italian.

I was also excited to meet all of the interesting people and the level of civil activism that could easily be sparked into an even more vibrant blogging community.

One thing that was confusing to me was that everyone says "Naples" when they're speaking in English. Why don't they say "Napoli"? Dean Martin says "Napoli", why do even the Italians say "Naples". Strange. In Japanese, we say "Napoli", "Torino" and "Milano" not, Naples, Turin and Milan.

I'm off in a few minutes for the UK. Look forward to meeting the folks there.

Special thanks to Derrick and his hosts for letting me use their place and to Giuseppe for inviting me!

Nigritude Ultramarine. Here you go Anil.

A post about using NoteTaker, Ecto and TypePad together. Can't wait to try it.

I heard from one of our hosts last night that when driving in Naples, "there are three kinds of red lights. Some you must stop at or you will die. Some provide advice to be careful. Others are merely decoration." Seriously though, I have never seen so many drivers completely ignore traffic lights in my life.

AKMA

Incredible - Perhaps Not True

Somebody tell me that the Patent office hasn't actually granted Microsoft's application for a patent on double-clicking.

This is why I don't like software patents.

Cory @ Boing Boing

Enron traders gloating about screwing California

CBS has got hold of tapes of conversations between Enron employees during the California rolling blackouts. The conversations are amazing, basically a bunch of crooks gloating about the savage rogering they're giving to the people of California and how much money they're making. This has put fresh fire into the bellies of lawmakers who have renewed their vows to decapitate Enron's management and stake their heads on pikes outside of every polling place before election day.

Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?

Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.

Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a—for f-----g $250 a megawatt hour."

Link

(via Making Light)

Sometimes I worry about privacy and security. Sometime I wonder if it is good that Japan does not have "discovery" (in the legal sense). Then I see stuff like this and I'm glad we have investigative journalism and they have the right to make such things public.

Dan Gilmor blogs about this too.

Xeni @ Boing Boing

More on blocked sites for .mil websurfers

Following up on this BoingBoing post about rumors that access to TheMemoryHole is being blocked on military computers in Iraq...

[John continues:]If the request was denied due to the Content Filter configuration is a sentence fragment, but with The content category reported is Gen. News. and If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the Help Desk the meaning is clear enough. For whatever reason, "General News" is not fit for our troops. I've been meaning to send her a list of links and ask her if she'd be willing to try to access them (Newsweek? New York Times? Common Dreams? Freerepublic.com [a conservative site]? townhall.com [another conservative site]?) I'm also curious what other kinds of sites she can't visit (geek news? music news? yahoo? wikipedia?) and whether she's prohibited from visiting these sites at work because she's /at work/, or if she's encouraged not to pursue the news in general.

Zaku, can you or anyone in the military in Iraq corroborate this or look into this?

Thanks to all of the newspapers that picked up the somewhat embarrassingly nice article by Yuri Kageyama of AP. AP syndication is really amazing.

One thing. The article doesn't contain links to Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad mentioned in the article.

I'm going to try to help plan a dinner/party that I can't attend. David Beckemeyer et al to are working on Heckelbot so I can be there virtually. The dinner/party is scheduled for June 23, the day before Supernova 2004 at the Westin in Santa Clara. I ALWAYS go to Supernova, but this year I just can't make it since I have to be in Tokyo for a shareholders meeting.

Here a wiki page for the planning.

Speaking of Supernova, I'm hoping I will be able to participate in the conference via rigged Hecklebot as well. Stay tuned for more on this. ;-)

Going to Naples today, the UK on the 6th, Helsinki on the 9th, Stockholm on the 11th, back to Helsinki on the 13th and back to Tokyo on the 17th. Speaking at Culture Digitali on the 4th and the EVA conference in Helsinki on the 10th. Meetups in Naples on the 5th and UK on the 6th. See you then!

Thanks to everyone who gave me ideas for stuff to do in Europe this trip!

In the comments on an earlier post on this blog about an artist suspected by the FBI of bioterrorism, there was a great deal of speculation about the incident and the facts. (Read the link above to my previous post for the background.) I emailed the artist, Steven Kurtz, asking him for the facts, and here is his reply.

Posted with permission.

Steve Kurtz

Hi Joi,

Its a long and complex story.

To shorten it:

I was detained for 22 hours by the FBI
They seized my wife's body, house, cat and car.
These items were released a week later
In the house they seized computers, science equipment, chunks of my library, teaching files,
I-D, and all my research for a new book.
The only thing I have gotten back is my wife's birth certificate
On Sunday, two members of CAE got summons to appear before a Grand Jury. (This is bad. It
means I will be charged. Grand Jury is a closed court--only the FBI gets to present its case).
The Grand Jury will meet on June 15
In all proabability, I will be arrested shortly thereafter.

Best,
Steve/CAE

Many people talked to me about this incident and strongly support the FBI's position on this. I still don't know enough details on the FBI's handling of the matter, but I DO think biotech as art is a legitimate form of art. At Ars Electronica, we did a whole festival on Life Science as art. Artists, including Steve, publish their works, talk about the impact, and often teach. Terrorists do not.

One famous example of biotech art is the bioluminescent rabbit created by genetic engineering, adding genes from a jellyfish to a rabbit to make it glow in the dark. This created a great deal of controversy and debate. It was the intention of the artist to cause this debate with an extremely tangible project.

I believe this form of expression is important and mistaking artistic expression for something else is a great risk to society. However, I suppose it would be prudent for artists to be aware of the risks involved in handling the "supplies" they use for their art.