a thaumaturgical compendium

• Nokia 3220, with “wave messaging.” (Via Joi Ito.)

• Bush keeps the gun they found Sadam with in the oval office and shows it to visitors. WTF.

Hadn’t run across this one before…

When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained. – Edward R. Murrow

I advise my grad students who are looking toward an academic career to have a Plan B. Part of that process is to think about the kinds of companies and kind of work you would be interested in doing.

I just found a list of companies I would have loved to work for seven years ago, had I decided not to go the academic route, I probably would have been knocking doors here:

Origin (Atos Origin)
General Magic
Anderson Consulting (Accenture)
Crystal Dynamics (Eidos Interactive)
Sony
Kaua’i Institute for Communications Media
Gartner
Microsoft
The Dalton School
Reuters New Media

Funny; most of these actually survived in some form, and I would still love to work for any of them. (well, I guess with the notable exception…)

I figured I’d better document this before one of the half-dozen threatened creative defacings occur. It was made using the rasterbator, but don’t follow that link right now unless you want to encounter the nastiest 404 ever devised. Hopefully it will come back.

Why did I do this? (1) I had more deadlines than usual, so I had to really overdo it in terms of procrastinating. (2) The doors are so identical going down our hall that I frequently miss my own office door and have to double back. (3) I am an egomaniac.

Steven Kurtz, on the faculty at UB’s school of art, and a member of the Critical Art Ensemble was detained when the FBI decided his art was a bit too dangerous-looking. OK, I get that his art might be, in the words of the local TV correspondent, “it is some weird stuff,” but isn’t there such a thing as a measured response?

And if that’s not enough, some offhanded comments by a couple of Canadian ministers turned around a plane departing from the Buffalo International Airport. An FBI official suggested that the men probably made a mistake in judgment when they decided to pray aloud. I wonder if praying is only considered dangerous (and I’m making an assumption here based upon one of the passengers’ names), when you aren’t white.

Buffalo needs to chill. It’s not as if this holds some special symbolic or economic value to the US. You are probably safer here than anywhere else. If you need any proof, just take a look at the worst the FBI can dig up in their spare time.

Steve Rubel is going on a one-week Blog-Only News Diet. In other words, all the news he gets will be from blogs. At the Blogging Ecosystem workshop at WWW last week, someone asked whether people went to the web before news, and almost everyone raised their hand, and then someone asked whether they relied entirely on the web, and more than half raised their hands. I would be very surprised if this was only blogs, but the idea isn’t that strange.

After all, how many people do you know who simply do not follow the news. They don’t take a newspaper, they listen to music on the radio, and they don’t (even) watch television news. Yet, somehow, they have a basic idea of what is going on. Knowledge of the news—and this means an understanding of why it is important as well as simply “facts”—has always been closely tied to opinion leaders in a community. You formed your opinions by talking to others whom you trust. They help to filter the news, help you to decide what is important, why it is important, and what are trustworthy sources.

For some people these filters are now in the form of blogs. That is interesting, I think, for a lot of reasons. It means that blogs have the potential, in my opinion, to be far more important than traditional mass media. In other words, I think that those who look at the possibility of blogs being “citizens’ journalism” may be aiming too low. This role of opinion leader is an extremely important one, and—while not uniformly the case—it’s often been tied to slow-changing social structures that place certain people in influential positions.

Take another example: Cablenewser, who broke the story on CNN’s web-based video news service. The NYTimes reports this as a kind of “odd” nobody-knows-your-a-dog-on-the-internet type of story, since Stelter (the author of the blog) is an 18-year-old college student. But I think the importance of this is more than just a kind of “ooh, there’s a man bites dog story.” The idea that someone that young could be an opinion leader within a community is surprising. That he could be a “journalist” is maybe not so surprising. I suppose it would be strange these days for someone without a college degree to be starting out as a journalist, but probably not strange enough for the New York Times to run an article on it. What makes this special is that the technology has allowed a kind of subversion in terms of opinion leadership. We’d expect an 18-year-old to be an opinion leader on cutting lawns or new hip-hop albums, but not on the cable news industry.

I suspect, that if Rubel reads the right blogs, he will find himself far better informed then the average American over his week-long diet. But I think what is most telling is what he refuses to give up. He won’t stop reading news about his clients (he is a PR professional). Why is that? Because he is expected to be an opinion leader on that particular topic, and he isn’t—with very good reason—about to give that up.

• C. Marlow’s ICA paper looks at linking authority via blogrolls as opposed to “in text” permalinks. (In case you haven’t seen it yet.) I have a big chunk of comments there, which I won’t duplicate here.

• Blackboard (popular course delivery system UB uses) is getting a wiki.

• “Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession.” – NY Times

• I’ve always dreamed of making one of these. Now I just have to find a grand! (or convince the Finn that this is a good idea.)

• Yum, soy(lent) sauce

• Photo touchups using the Gimp