brentashley

My uncle in Australia asks me on the eve of this impending war with Iraq what my observations are. Here’s my reply:

While on the whole my philosophy is not to fret unduly about things that are beyond my control, here are my thoughts:

The US decided long ago that this war was going to happen. The last 6 months has all been posturing to spin public and foreign opinion. At no time was there any chance whatsoever that circumstances could avert their course. Unfortunately, they have failed miserably to convince us to fall in line behind them:
http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/archives/000455.html

http://prosodic.ods.org/?v=iraqattack

I don’t even necessarily disagree with their ends, but their means has been to feed us bullshit rather than to give us the straight goods:

http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/archives/000461.html

Iraq notwithstanding, America’s fabric has been imploding what with the Patriot Act and other real and proposed erosions of constitutional freedoms. If this is the direction of the American state, the terrorists have truly won.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that Dubya to me is nothing but a talking head attached to a larger machine that determines direction and fabricates the necessary spin to pave the public relations path of least resistance. I watch him speaking and I can’t for the life of me feel that he is speaking from anything but a teleprompter. If I am to hearken to heads of state who could actually write their own speeches by virtue of their deeply held convictions, their natural leadership and a personal level of eloquence that allows them to express truly heartfelt intellectual convictions as inspirational prose, I have to go as far back in Canadian politics as Pierre Trudeau, and in American politics I don’t even know when. Look at newsreels of Pierre Trudeau addressing the nation during the invocation of the War Measures Act – you feel that he actually sat and wrote the speech himself. Dubya seems as though he’s a pitchman for the propaganda of the day, like never an original (much less cogent) thought ever sprung from his conscience.

I’ve been trying to find time to explain to my friend Noel Presley (linkless but not for long I hope) how exactly it is that I can keep up with things on the Net without getting overwhelmed. The secret, of course, is news aggregation. I finally showed him my Radio aggregator today and told him how it all works. Since Noel is a heavy Outlook user, I think I’ll point him to an Outlook-based aggregator – if anyone has suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them.

In talking with Noel about aggregation, we also got onto searching. While he was no stranger to Google et al, I showed him Scott’s new Feedster service and the Wayback Machine.

We agreed that Feedster, Google and Wayback represent the short, medium, and long-term memory of the net. It’s really cool how each of these engines orthogonally services its particular slice of net recollection.

Even Scott himself had to have this lightbulb turn on as it just did for me when reading this description of his epiphany.

I had thought that Feedster was cool but wasn’t quite sure of its killer usefulness. You see, since it’s based on current RSS feeds, its relevance follows a fairly narrow sliding window stretching only a few days at most into the past. After all, Google and the Wayback machine have much longer memories.

The cool thing is, though, many times I have seen something within the past day or so but can’t tell you where. I know it has been on one of the 100 or so blogs I regularly visit, or one or two clicks away from them. Drives me up the wall all the time.

Also, one of the features I love/hate best with Radio is that once I have read something, I mark it and delete it and it doesn’t remain to clutter up my reading. I love that. I also hate that, because oftentimes I hit the delete button and two minutes later wonder who had said that interesting tidbit. It’s too early to go looking on google for it – won’t be indexed yet. Even so, I’d rather search only my sphere of relevance rather than pull in the entire net’s search result.

Ben Nolan points me to his Feeder thingmy. Much like Feedster except, I’m told, with cunning heuristics. <Gomez>Oooh, Tish, I love it when you speak freedom.</Gomez>

I understand from my wife that if I’m a good boy, I could be in for some freedom kissing. Wow, I’d better stock up on freedom letters just in case. Maybe I should surprise her with a freedom tickler!

Ross certainly gets it about the World of Ends. Providing services on a network is all about being an endpoint yourself, but acting as a middleman between the consumer of your service and the value they seek. Tucows isn’t so much a place IN the net that is a source of downloadable files as one ON the net that acts as a proxy whereby a seeker of files can be matched up with a producer of files – an enabler of the two-way conversation.

Since, as David Weinberger discusses, a world of ends means Spam filtering must be done at the ends, that doesn’t mean it has to be done at the terminus of the conversation – interlocutors play an essential role.

Only in town for a couple of days, Doc Searls managed to find time to come and meet with a few of us who could make it out.

Michael O’Connor Clarke was first to arrive. He had a nice adjunct to the World Of Ends discussion – I’ll let him explain it.

Tim Aiello, my partner in crime on many projects, was there.

Tara Cleveland, who when not designing is driving the research for the MACCAWS group, came along.

The Accordion Guy serenaded us with a sweet rendition of (You Shook Me) All Night Long. He also managed to rank high on the nerd compatibility scale with me reminiscing about the Rockwell AIM with its 1802 microprocessor and heat-transfer printer.

Doc arrived with two colleagues from Tucows. I talked with one of them, Ross at length about some anti-spam stuff that Tim and I have been up to. Just added his blog to my subscriptions list. The other, DarrylG, yakked with Tim at length but alas, has no blog to link to.

Interesting conversation was had, some debate. Absolutely no mention whatsoever of foreign policy, thankfully. We should do this kinda thing more often.

Tim took this picture of me with Doc.

I’m arranging to meet Doc Searls about 6pm at The Academy of Spherical Arts near King and Dufferin. Come along if you can.

I understand that there might be wireless available:

Address and map if you follow the link.

I’ll try to get up on blogchat while we’re there if anyone wants to contact us.