Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Bloglines and Twitter underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
With good wifi, ’tis Paradise enow!

??
No, Omar, I don’t think so!

Originally uploaded by Orange Cremecicle

Susan Mernit astutely diagnoses her own reading shift to (more and more) on the internet. The New York Times and (more recently) Newsweek now look like problems in paper disposal rather than information–but Susan finds one very interesting exception:

“I am still a huge fan of monthly magazines–the womens/shelter/travel magazines that I get–Country Living, Oprah, Domino, Lucky, Sunset, Food & Wine, Blueprint–are tremendous fun and I enjoy browsing through them and savoring the photos, travel ideas, and things I like but will never buy.

So where’s the paradigm shift? Information versus entertainment.

Very astute, but let me shift her shift some more. I see the difference as more like fast food drive-through versus gourmet picnic basket.

Paper can’t compete with pixels on serving up small bites of information to people hungry for information that’s new–now!

Text on a computer screen can’t compete with printed take-anywhere pages that you savor slowly anywhere you want them–from deep in your favorite chair or on a beach blanket.

Mmmmm! Which not to say I don’t love RSS!

Linnés Hammarby

Originally uploaded by pk01.

On May 23, Sweden says happy 300th birthday to the scientist just quoted–the not-very-modest Carolus Linnaeus.

The bright-red cabinet shown is Linnaeus’s “hard disk,” quips its photographer. Linnaeus’s claim to fame was his simple method for organizing the vast confusion of plant and animal species, using two-part scientific names. One giant step for Homo sapiens!

One could do the math (though I won’t) comparing the complexity of all those genomes to the number of infobits on the Internet. David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous makes a compelling case that we Web 2.0 folk are creating value as each of us mini-adds our own tags, playlists, and hyperlinks to that vast digital pileup of miscellanity.

David says that Linnaeus’s reliance on paper to organize his thoughts fell far short of the tricks computers can do with pixels and bits. Very true–and yet, no matter how smart computers become, there’s still an important role for human beings in finding some simple thread through the world’s vast labyrinth and putting that thread in the hand of a fellow seeker.

As Weinberger himself does — and as Linnaeus did.

NYPD Museum

Originally uploaded by happytam.

Frank and I strolled from west to the east of Manhattan yesterday, from Battery Park to the New York City Police Museum.

This photo shows some old billy clubs, one of which doubled as a teargas dispenser. Irish officers of that earlier era might whittle their own out of “bog oak” shipped in from the Old Country. And the point of a billy club, editorializing here, isn’t to kill or even arrest your bad-guy target, but to stop him from doing some stuff you don’t want him to do.

The museum has more than 100 years’ worth of artifacts, plus a bunch of police-narrated videos on different kinds of crime fighting. “Every time we arrest one, all the rest get smarter,” says one policeman–talking about the arms race against–not spammers or malware authors–but the organized gangs who steal automobiles.

Another POV that might be some help against internet crime:

“Crime doesn’t pay–or does it? Our goal is make the criminals work hard enough that crime does not pay.”

That seems like a much more plausible goal than catching all internet bad guys to send them to jail.

Ready to Strike

Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

This giant lizard ( I downloaded the original, 4200 pixels by 2789) now sits on my desktop, motivating me to get finished dealing with whatever data sits on top of him in windows so that I can once again enjoy his glorious colors.

Thanks to Trey Ratcliff, aka Stuck in Customs, for sharing so many great hdr photos on Flickr!

Wow–Christina Aguilera’s music video for Candyman gives you the double pleasure of 1) totally shiny high production values plus 2) the illusion of a retro time-machine view onto 1940s USO totally shiny high production values.

But I repeat myself.

As does Ms. Aguilera, who sings all the parts and co-stars with herself as multiple (blonde, brunette, redhead, etc.) glamorous 1940s performers.

Much as I love the Web 2.0 “authentic” experience of amateurish web video–I have to admit that I also appreciate witty scripting and…did I mention? shiny, shiny high production values!

Picture an activity that sounded so, so foolish until you tried it….but then…!!!…no, I’m not starting to write an X-rated post. And I’m not referring to Gilbert and Sullivan, either. I’m talking about the silly webservice called Twitter.

Twitter is like a tiny newsreader I keep at the side of my desktop in a browser window because a lot of online-friends drop little notes into it from time to time. Some notes are chatty, some are short insights, and some are just plain great stuff that I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise, for example:

• I heard about a haiku contest to win a Joost beta invite — and my haiku won! (WebVideoDoctor.com, which ran the contest, is also a site that I’m glad I discovered.)
• When my brother had trouble getting Windows to make a screencapture, I asked friends in Twitter for help. Both Laura Moncur and Mr. Noded gave me the solution in minutes.
• Twitter let me re-connect with faraway friends, not to mention local friends I see too rarely–for example, Jack Hodgson, whose fine blog steered me to that Pirates of Penzance YouTube video.

Ronni Bennett says that Twitter sounds stupid–ok, and she’s right, it does sound really stupid. But it’s also fun and rewarding in ways that would be hard to justify to somebody who hasn’t yet moved past the silly part into the wow, amazing! part.

Just like, for example, Gilbert and Sullivan?

Waterlily from summer 2003

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

I took this photo hoping to get a good focus on the honeybee inside the flower. Instead, I got a sharp focus on all the surface-tension-droplet action at the surface of the pond itself.

Then in springtime 2007, I rediscovered this photo and re-cycled it into a background image for my posts at Twitter.com.

Surely there are some metaphors for life itself here?

Gloria

Originally uploaded by The Department.

I get Google traffic looking for “E.B. White essay“; AKMA gets it for Good Friday sermon advice. He just posted some very good Good Friday sermon advice, so keep pointing there, Google!

For more (if more pagan) inspiration, I love the Marge Piercy poem Kalilily just posted.

…The soil stretches naked. All winter
hidden under the down comforter of snow,
delicious now, rich in the hand
as chocolate cake: the fragrant busy
soil the worm passes through her gut
and the beetle swims in like a lake.

As I kneel to put the seeds in,
careful as stitching, I am in love.
You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we are, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you…

It’s worth reading more of, as is Kalilily, so be your own angel and go check it out!

It’s not the cover of Rolling Stone

Originally uploaded by scriptingnews.

Now here’s a picturesque cover, full of good blog jokes–Dave Winer’s sneaker and XML-orange couch, in honor of his ten-year bloggiversary.

• Ten years blogging!
• Dead software guy lives on
• Podcasting genius
• Blogging foooool
• Spicy noodles man
• Master of coooool
• He’s still diggin
• Singin a song [mp3]
• Fighting for justice
• Righting the wrong

Amen! And it’s giving me huge satisfaction this morning, thinking about all the things that I learned from Dave–e.g. blogging, RSS, and unconferences–that this just may be something that Dave learned about from me!

;->

Dave Winer’s Scripting News, still going strong at the ripe old age of ten (that’s 110 in blogyears)…

Doc Searls got it right, in “A Post of Thanks.”:

“When they scroll the credits of my life, Dave’s is going to be one of the first names on the list. And when they scroll the credits for blogging, outlining, writing, scripting, journalism, XML, RSS, SOAP, podcasting and a pile of other technologies, standards and practices we will all eventually take for granted, the same will be true for those as well.”

In 2003, I quoted what Dave said about “Why weblogs are cool”

Later, I called Dave a “big hairy non-girl”, while praising him for something that now is just a broken link. Update: Here it is!

Dave’s contribution to my first year of blogging, when he was a Harvard Berkman Fellow, may be overshadowed in the view of history by his use of Berkman Thursdays and Bloggercons to assemble a critical mass of bloggers, “real news” people, and technophiles and get them excited about stuff like campaign blogging. At Bloggercon 1, Dave showcased audiobloggers in front of a roomful of Apple-toting technophiles–those people, including Dave, soon pushed those concepts forward into podcasting.

For more of the wit and wisdom of Dave, see his own blog. Happy tenth, Dave, we look forward to the next ten!