Company policies prohibit it. Your moral compass might fight it. And it might be difficult to find the time. But I have a hunch - a sneaking suspicion - that if you’re reading this blog entry, you’ve committed the act.

YOU HAVE BLOGGED AT WORK.

C’mon, admit it. On the company dime you’re getting your personal blog on. I’m curious to know the following:

- How frequently do you blog at work?

- Which aspect of blogging do you handle at work (writing, editing, posting, research, etc.)?

I actually spend a good portion of my lunch hour writing blogs or brainstorming for topics. The only blog business I take care of ‘on the clock’ is some light research or copyediting. On rare occasions, when a big news story hits, I’ll actually login to WordPress from work. But since I know Big Brother is always watching, I make sure this doesn’t become a regular habit.

So let’s hear it. Do you blog at work? Take the poll and leave a comment.

How often do you blog at work?
( polls)

• How to host your own Flash player and movies on your blog (and why you probably shouldn’t)
• How I Blog: John Evans, Syntagma Media
• Google descriminates against blind/ sight impaired bloggers with CAPTCHA introduction

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.
2. How many days till the moon is full? (Plus or minus a couple of days.)
3. Describe the soil around your home
4. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?
5. Where does your garbage go?
6. How long is the growing season where you live?
7. Name five resident birds and any migratory birds in your area.
8. What primary geological event process influenced the land form where you live?
9. From where you are reading this, point north.
10. Were the stars out last night?

1. How to apologise.
2. How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings.
3. How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue.
4. How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator.
5. How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action.
6. How to tell and elicit stories.
7. How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration.
   

• Protest sign carried by Iraq Veterans Against the War at the RNC: "You can't win an occupation"
• From Coelho's The Alchemist, via Jen Lemen:

• Dick Jones, from Patteran Pages, on the start of a new school year: 


I’m sitting here in an empty house. Not a derelict one this time but my own warm, untidy much-loved home. Maisie is at nursery and Reuben and Rosie are at school. It’s Rosie’s first day at school and, on delivery, she viewed the busy pre-school playground with large, solemn eyes. Within seconds of her arrival, fellow newbie Franzie gathered her up and, hand-in-hand, they ran off towards the play equipment.

After the bell cleared the playground and coats were hung up, bags and belongings disposed and children passed into the custody of the classroom, I walked back to the car. The drive home through the lanes between the villages was a pensive one. Rosie’s first day in full-time school and my first day out of it. Forty-one years ago, pretty much to the day, I stood before my first class and began to earn my first salary. Forty-one years on, my last salary cheque has been paid in and now I draw just a pension. Forty-one years ago I was a teacher and now I am – what...a civilian?

But no great existential crisis is at hand as I sit here pondering. I am, as ever, resolutely, stubbornly, passionately and substantially me. The same deepest fears; the same most pressing needs; the same most aggravating shortcomings; the same most cherished hopes; the same most fierce convictions. For all the territory covered, all the memories stored and filed and all the lessons learned, the road, it seems, goes ever on.


• Sam, at Bitterbrush: 


Can I relate it before sleepiness numbs me? Well, it was only this: I just unexpectedly--not "suddenly," which implies a sort of violence, but quietly, like a kind of interior melting, slow and certain and plain and obvious and clear--had the feeling that my life has been wonderful. Wonderful. I have known a dozen kinds of love at a hundred intensities. The people I've touched and who have touched back. I've made babies and fed them with my body and watched them grow up and seen their babies and accomplishments--inexpressible joy. Great successes, great failures. I've known overwhelming rage and tremendous fear, blackest hate and the blinding-white nearness to a kind of God-level agape. The closeness of families and an aloneness so complete I went mad from it. Faith, betrayal--my own and others'. So many colors and intensities in the spectrum of human emotion.


And it's all good. Amazing, even. And, yeah, fading a little, finally. Remember, dammit.

David Simon, executive producer and writer of HBO's The Wire, ruminates on Baltimore and the USA.

"Well, there are about 350 television shows about the affluent America, the comfortable America, the viable and cohesive nation where everyone gets what they want if they either work hard or know someone or have a pretty face or cheat like hell. That America is available every night, on every channel in the Comcast package.

For a brief time, there was one television drama about the other America."

An anonymous "award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker and screenwriter" shows the Conservative Party of Canada why it might be a problem to cut $44 million in arts funding before an election.

From the Red Pepper Obama Blog:
The story of the left’s infatuation with Barack Obama follows an established storyline. So many hopes that "this time", things will be different: that Obama won’t be like Lula in Brazil in 2002 – who came to power on a Socialist platform only to bow to the power of global finance once in office; like Tony Blair in 1997, when a generation of progressives who’d grown up to hate Thatcher and the Tories could not but rejoice; the Green Party coming to power in Germany in 1998, where – no use in hiding it – I, too, had high hopes; the African National Congress in South Africa – backed by Communists, but soon a key driver of Neoliberalism in Southern Africa. So many hopes dashed. And yet, the infatuation continues…

Ronaldo Lemos says that Sony offers 13 new CDs a year to all of Brazil. But there is tremendous activity online. But sites like TramaVirtual only works for people with computers. His group researched Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina. E.g., in the Brazilian province of Parà “tehcnobrega” (cheesy techno) is popular. There every year they produce 400 cds and 100 dvds. They’re not available in store. The producers have a deal with the people who sell pirated cds on the street. The cds are sold at the “raves.” The economic system is entirely different from the traditional music industry’s. The artists also sell higher-end versions at their concerts. This is a multi-million dollar market. The number 1 well-known artist in the country, Calypso, is completely outside the media-record industry complex. Baile funk is another example.

Brazil produces 51 films a year. Us: 611. India: 934. Nigeria: 1200. In Nigeria, they skip the usual distribution channels. They sell them directly on the street. Movies provide the #2 source of employment in Nigeria, for a million people.

Henri Langlois in 1969 said that cinema will only reach its destiny until people have appropriated the means of production, Ronaldo says.

He says people say that this music and these movies are in bad taste. But, he says, the samba in the 1930s was also perceived as in bad taste.

This is a global phenomenon: Grind, dubstep, hip hop, kuduro, champeta, etc.

[Now there is a general discussion with the panel I'm on. Too hard to live blog...] [Tags: music copyright ronaldo_lemos ae08 ars_electronica ]

Jonah Brucker-Cohen (link link) says open systems encourage audiences to become active co-ccreators, reconfigure rule sets and create opportunities for now types of engagement. He lists some open tools, both hardware (Aduino, Freeduino, OpenPCD, Sun Small Programmable Object Technology) software, and art (Open Museum of Open Source Art). He shows a video of a literal breadboard by Teppien [sp?]. [NOTE: Live blogging. Error-full. Posted without proofreading.]

What are the benefits of subverting network context? Altering rule-sets shifts the engagement structure of a system. Forcing openness creates opportunities for risk or plahy. Hacking into systems challenges their general use.

Public wireless space allows community groups to serve local citizens, creative projects engaging with users. In privatized wireless spaces (e.g., in airports), they’re claimed by individuals. This raises the question: How do we allocate public wireless resources. Two of his projects challenge these relationships: Wifi-Hog challenged Starbuck’s (et al.) assumption that its pay wifi should be allowed to drive out free public wifi. Wifi-Hog blocks everyone else’s use of wifi. Jonah was asking about the acceptable use policy of public wifi nodes and about the promise of the “public sphere as a social leveler” (Habermas).

Wifi-Liberator toolkit (hw and sw) allows you to get around security in locked hotspots. But it only gives you access if you share.

Q: (James) Jamming wifi is to openness as screaming so loud that no one else can hear is to free speech. How does this move us toward openness?
A: It points out the points of control. That’s a requirement for change.

Q: (yochai) How about creating a trivially implementable meshing algorithm for residential wifi.
A: Fon is doing this.
Q: Fon is still commercial and wants to be compatible with the business model of the carriers. [Tags: ae08_ars_electronica dyi wifi jonah_brucker_cohen ]

James Boyle is chairman of Creative Commons and teaches law at Duke. He’s talking about the nature of openness. [Note: Live blogging. Error prone and error-full.]

We have patterns of behavior that economic theory does not predict. We are risk averse. For example, it makes no sense to buy a warranty; we buy them out of an absurd sense that buying the warranty affects the device’s outcome. There is another kind of bias that we wouldn’t predict from economic theory: A systematic bias against openness. We don’t expect openness and collaboration to generate what they do. We overestimate the risks. We underestimate the risks of closed systems and overestimate closed systems’ benefits.

Suppose in 1990 I came to you with two proposals: Build an open system. Or, build something like Minitel, Compuserv or AOL; it’s controlled and permission-based. Which would you pick? If you pick the first, you’ll have piracy, spam, massive amounts of crap, flame wars, massive violations of IP, use for immoral purposes. “I think you’d pick network #2″ because those risks are foreseeable, but you couldn’t imagine wikis, blogs, Google maps, etc. It’s hard for us to imagine the benefits of open systems. It’s not intuitive.

Again, in 1990 you are asked to assemble the greatest encyclopedia, in most languages, updated in real time, adopt a neutral point of view. In 1990, you’d say that you need maybe a billion dollars, a hierarchical corporation, lots of editors, vet the writers you’re hiring, peer reviewers, copyright it all to recoup the money we’ve invested, trademark it. And someone else says, “We’ll have a web site, and people will like put stuff up and people will edit it.” How many of us would have picked #2. We don’t understand openness.

Free software is the same story.

What conclusions should we draw? Some people are raised in places where they learn how to drive in snow and ice. They learn to turn into the skid, contrary to our impulses. We can train ourselves to overcome our biases. But open doesn’t always work. Sometimes we do need closed, controlled. E.g., open won’t get us all the way to a phase 3 drug trial. Open doesn’t always work for privacy. We need a world with both open and closed.

So far, James says, we in the audience agree. Now for some things that will not flatter our sympathy.

He talks about Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” that talks about the loss of civil organizations in America. But, Putnam noticed that in the early 1900s American intellectuals noticed that the move to cities fragmented the old ties. But they didn’t say that history will just automatically correct itself. Instead, they created organizations like the Kiwanis, the Elks, etc. They invented institutions to make up for a problem they saw. Eventually, those institutions worked.

So, if we are bad at judging the boundaries between open and closed, if it’s important to get it right, then it’s beholden on us to create the institutions of civil society that enable us to get past our biases. Creative Commons is one such. It provides an infrastructure for sharing our work.

Science Commons is another such group. The Web was created to exchange scientific info, but the Web currently works much better for buying shoes or porn than doing that. The vast majority of scientific literature is behind the pay wall. You can find it but not read it. Nor can you build a sort of Google Maps mashup — take all the literature on malaria, find all the geo locations, all the proteins, overlay it, build a wikipedia for science. You can’t do that because it’s illegal, technologically impossible, and even if you could, you can’t reassemble it and do a click and buy. “The World Wide Web doesn’t work for science.” Science commons tries to address that…

Q: Is the bias a metaphor or an inherent inability to understand openness?
A: About 80% is explained by the fact that for most of my generation’s lives, our experience of property was with physical things; if I have it, you can’t. There are economic benefits to knowing who owns it. The closed intuitions generally work there.

[I have to stop to get read to give my talk ...] [Tags: ae08 ars_electronica james_boyle creative_commons copyright ]

I’m sitting on the speakers panel at Ars Electronica, listening to AKMA. “Theological discourse intrudes awkwardly into tech conferences,” he says. Theologists and technologists frequently talk past one another, he says. They are mutually suspicious. Theologians sometimes suffer from “replacement panic,” the fear that online will replace real world interaction. The church needs to “indiginate” itself online. [Live blogging. Poorly. Omissions, typos, mistakes. That's just the way it.]

Jacques Paul Migne discovered in the 19th century the most efficient means of editing a paper: outright plagiarism. He’d copy an entire article, while introducing it by noting where it was first published. “He scraped newsfeeds and republished them.” Migne owned five steam presses in 1861. He published a “universal theological library” comprising 25 vols of Biblical commentary, 25 vol encyc, 18 vol of Christian apologetics, 13 vols in praise of the blessed Virgin Mary, and many more. While most relied on public domain sources, he sometimes republished volumes still within copyright. It was a “theological literature Pirates Bay.” Charles Sheldon’s “In His Steps” (”What would Jesus do?”) had a technically flawed copyright notice, so it was republished without permission.

So, situate all of this in the transition to digital media, AKMA suggests. Theological might serve as a useful “fishbowl” for technological innovators. There are online libraries of theological works, but “no organization has broken through to offer open access digital works” in comfortable, readable formats. “The conditions for publishing will go through some sort of convulsive change.” It will not replace books. But it will enable a “vastly more open exchange of digital literature.” We need “shareable, searchable, downloadable, disposable” texts, as well as durable, ownable printed texts. We need an open, standard format with a direct correlation to print copies (because print will survive and will generate cash flow). This will provide users wioth the “tools and the incentive to particiapte in the production of knowledge.”

Q: (James Boyle) You say technologists should see in the theological domain an opportunity to expand the commons. Why have not the faithful seen IP issues as something that gets in the way of the practice of their faith? E.g., many pieces of sacred music is under copyright. The organist at a local church said that she has a parishoner who is dying of cancer and I want to send her a cd of the music. They want $5,000 for a hymn.” I told her to go ahead and when they sue you, come to me. Why isn’t the world of the faithful looking at these issues?
A: The Bible publishing industry was one of the startups in 19th century US because the King couldn’t enforce copyright on this side of the ocean. Replacement panic causes the church to fear that personal interactions will evaporate. And assimilation to the culture of property rights. [Tags: ae08 ars_technica akma religion theology ]

When I was in Norway last week, in a shopping arcade in Kristiansand there was a bakery selling sandwich bagels. The bagels seemed to have categorized as such simply because they were tori made out of bread: ovoids eight inches in diameter and about as high as the edge of a pizza crust. Was this the least bagel-like bagel on the planet?

This is something only the wisdom of the crowds can answer. If you’ve come across a national, regional, or industrial version of a bagel that is less bagel-like, let me know. Otherwise, the laurel will remain on Kristiansand’s brow. (It’s a lovely city. I just wouldn’t go there for the bagels.)

[Tags: puzzle bagels norway crowd-sourcing ]