If you haven't deleted your Friendster profile yet (is anyone still using that?) here's another reason you may want to get rid of it: an employee was fired for blogging. [via matt]

I had a great conversation with Dr. Lisa Ede from OSU yesterday. Her area of expertise is rhetoric, and she gave me a quick lesson so I could understand her terms. We spent a good amount of time talking about the ways web authors present their identities online, and (in retrospect) how they establish ethos, pathos, and logos in this new medium. Though I "study" the web and weblogs every day in a haphazard way, I left our conversation wondering what it would be like to study the web full-time in a structured academic setting.

I should really set up one of those link-sidebar thingies again. Until then, an unordered list it is—

• George Lakoff on framing (update!)
• Last link via the new devoter.com, PolitiFilter
• JD Lasica's review of We the Media was rejected by Amazon for being too opinionated? [via wendy seltzer]
• AWS 4.0 beta (note to self: code now!)
• The Flickr API is already giving birth to new applications. Check out the Flickr API Group. (note to self: finish code now!)

Spotting similarities—

• Portland Tribune Photo -> Remixed Propaganda Poster
• Pat Buchanan -> Rep. Doug Bereuter
• SocialText -> Technorati [via Waxy]
• Blast Destroys Camera -> I found a digital camera in the woods... (heh)
• Goozilla -> Joogle

sk let me know that today is the one year anniversary of Amazon Hacks being released. ("Great," you're thinking, "but what have you done for me lately?") There's another birthday just around the corner. Not to mention (well, ok, to mention) my birthday in a mere ten days. *wink*

This is a very interesting read from the EFF: Best Practices for Online Service Providers (OSPs). (It's actually a PDF linked from this page.) But they're just talking to traditional Internet Service Providers like the cable and telephone companies, right? Nope, just about anyone can be an OSP:

"...virtually any website or access intermediary, not just established subscriber-based businesses, can be considered an OSP under the law. Indeed, even individuals may be 'accidental OSPs' if they set up WiFi access points to share Internet connectivity with friends and neighbors."

Because the government can subpoena any information they want from any service provider, the EFF recommends obfuscating or deleting all server logs. After all, "OSPs cannot be forced to provide data that does not exist." They even note that just "deleting" logs won't completely remove them from the disk, so they recommend complete server-log abstinence:

"The best way to protect against the risk of log artifacts on disk is to never create any user logs in the first place. This is the ideal and safest solution even though it is often impractical."

If you run a web service where people contribute data (my non-lawyer guess is that even weblogs with comments enabled count) these are definitely issues worth thinking about.

Everyone's talking about it, and they should: Organizr is a next step for web applications. (It's designed to manage/publish photos online.) Check it out!

Obviously I haven't been finding the connections recently, since it's been over a week since my last post. Here are a few quick links:

• Torrez -> Kottke -> DropCash
• Dinah -> Peter Pezaris -> Multiply
• Blogger -> Doug Bowman -> Blogger Navbar
• Jim Woodring -> Taruto Fuyama -> Animated Frank
• Philip K. Dick -> Flow My Tears -> Acts

I'm in the middle of reading Foucault's Pendulum and I came across this quote that could be a mantra for the web—

"No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them."

Eco's character was talking about detectives or intelligence agencies, but I think the same approach to data is true for Google, Amazon, and lots of successful web services.

I had a great conversation with Susan Palmer at the Eugene Register-Guard a week or so ago. We talked about weblogs, and also online identity, online writing that isn't Journalism, some Blogger history, and how weblogs differ from big media. Her story about weblogs was published today, and a few quotes from me made the cut: The Blog Connection. In addition to several Eugene-based weblogs, she mentioned this site and ORblogs (a site I run devoted to Oregon weblogs) in the links at the end of the article. I'm glad local papers are starting to tune into local weblogs—it seems there could be a natural symbiotic relationship there with enough respect from both sides.

sk and I took the dog on an 8+ mile hike this weekend. The hike starts about a mile or so from our place, and it's nice that we can just walk out the front door and be in the woods in no time.



The hike starts on flat, open ground and gradually climbs up. This gave us a good view of the fair going on at the fairgrounds. Saturday was also very clear, so we had a fairly rare look at the mountains to the east.



We also had a great view of Oregon State University and part of Corvallis from this trail. Here's a panoramic I stitched together (click for a larger version):



As the trail climbed up we eventually hit lots of trees.



We stopped quite a few times to rest and give Luna some water.



We gave Luna a few grapes, but found out after our trip that you're never supposed to give dogs grapes—it can cause kidney failure. So don't give your dog grapes like we did! Luckly, she's just fine and wasn't bothered by them.



As always, Luna was ecstatic on this hike. She was a tired dog when we got home.

Quick links—

• The Case Against W by Ron Reagan (Esquire)
• My Beef with Big Media by Ted Turner (Washington Monthly)
• Ted Turner Interview (Charlie Rose)
• CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog (The Onion)
• Full text in PDFs of We The Media by Gillmor
• Matt Webb on Brain Hacks [via waxy links]
• Henri Cartier-Bresson died a couple days ago. [via boingboing] (Sydney Herald: Cartier-Bresson dead at 95.) His photographs are inspiring.

Oh, and here's a great line from the Dyson talk during the audience Question & Answer—

Guy: What are your thoughts on the end of the universe?
Freeman: It's not looking good.

I spent all day yesterday at OSCON in Portland. The day started with a keynote by Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson (moderated by Tim O'Reilly).



One of the things that struck me from the conversation was the idea of the "domestication" of technology. Freeman felt that the failure of nuclear technology was in part due to the fact that you can't have a small nuclear project. In other words, you can't run down to Radio Shack and pick up a fission kit and power your home projects with nuclear energy—it's solely the domain of large projects. By contrast, biotechnology is becoming domesticated. Freeman mentioned plant and animal gene-splicing kits for backyard breeders that are only a few years away. He mentioned a future children's game where kids compete to see who can grow the prickliest cactus, and the fact that DNA synthesizers—while currently outrageously expensive—are coming down in price. What I took away from this is that decentralization and adoption by a wide number of people is a key attribute if a technology is ultimately going to be successful.

There were a lot of other good elements in the talk, and they did discuss the dangers and unintended consequences related to new technology. Though Freeman said luck would prevent catastrophe, as it always does. (hmm.)



For the rest of the day I was on the O'Reilly-track. I saw a preview of their new magazine, Make, which looks fantastic. It's produced by Dale Dougherty and edited by boingboing pioneer Mark Frauenfelder who were both on hand to describe it. One of the first feature articles is how to build your own kite photography rig. Dale mentioned the inspiration for the magazine came when he realized there was no Martha Stewart for tech geeks.

I also saw a demo of SafariU, a tool that lets teachers assemble custom books from various sources. This is definitely a disruptive technology for the college book market, but should be very appealing to professors who want more control over course material. And I gave a demo of the newly launched Safari Affiliate Program, and their related Web Services—a project I've been involved with for a while. Like I mentioned yesterday, Safari is doing the important work of making books available as bits in addition to atoms—something I first read about in Being Digital almost ten years ago. It seemed like a far-off future at the time, but here we are.

Dan Gillmor was the first mainstream journalist (that I remember) who published a weblog. What might be even more surprising is that the paper he writes for—The San Jose Mercury News—gave him the freedom to experiment with the format. (Many offline newspapers have yet to discover how the web's first native format can fit into their own websites.) So Gillmor has been participating through weblogs for a long time, and tonight at Powell's Tech he gave a personal history of his growing awareness of the ways new media technology are changing journalism.



I was surprised that his talk wasn't completely focused on weblogs. Of course he mentioned them, but his major "data points" where he realized journalism was changing revolved around mailing lists. He also talked about his new book, We the media, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Gillmor's message about weblogs and the web is not about revolt against big J—or dismissing weblogs as narcissism. I think it's easy to pick one of these camps and fight, but Gillmor has a stake in each camp. All of the ideas he mentioned tonight about these new channels of communication were intertwined with stories from his own experience, which is a very blog-like way to present things. Maybe blogs will end up helping mainstream journalists speak to people on a more personal level.

The energetic Paul Graham was also there to talk about his latest book, Hackers and Painters. He read from the endnotes, and I'm sure it didn't do his book justice. There wasn't much about the spirit of hacking in what I heard. They ran out of his book so I'll have to pick it up another time.

Amazon is encouraging reviewers to use their real name for reviews. [via anil] awww, but that might ruin Andy's Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game for future generations. Won't somebody at Amazon please think of the children?