What Have You Done For You Lately?

For Earth Day this year I decided I was going to try to make a real change by commuting to work under my own power instead of using my car. I’ve been riding a wave of endorphin high as my body goes through the shock of experiencing exercise again for the first time in a long while. I can feel the winter doldrums lifting [1], and I asked myself: when was the last time I did something that makes a positive change in my life?

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

Book Review: Halting State by Charles Stross

If you’re a programmer/gamer geek and looking for a gripping book that you won’t be able to put down then look no further than Halting State.

Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet

Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.

Book Review: Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

The thesis behind the book is simple: if you look at the popular media culture over time it is becoming more and more complex. There have always been avant garde examples that wove complex stories but over time the same techniques are used in mainstream pop culture. IE: It is becoming common place to produce tv shows and movies that require multiple watchings to fully digest.

The Attention Age: Accelerando, Software Agents, Filters and Gatekeepers

Last night I finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Like many of the books I read these days, I heard about it from another blogger. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Brunner’s the Shockwave Rider and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. It is about information overload to the nth degree and too much change in too short of a time.

Book Review: Overclocked by Cory Doctorow (and Fair Use Day)

Last night I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new collection of short stories, Overclocked, and I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Electronic Civil Disobedience

People are calling the Digg user revolt the “Internet story of the year.” The Digg community fixated on the 32-bit encryption key for HD-DVDs protests against the site owners giving in to potential censorship requests by HD-DVD producers (who are also advertisers on the site) and censoring stories that published the key.

Five Ways to Fix Digg’s Comment System

Many negative things have already been said about the Digg comment threads.

Cyber-bullying - Not just for teenagers

I’ve been thinking about featuring 31 bloggers over 31 days for my one year anniversary and Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users would be tops on that list. Which makes the death threats and cyber-harassment against her even more saddening and sickening. It constantly amazes me how “Just Add Internet” and people get up to the kind of actions and harassment they’d never do in real life.

Blogging seems to attract lonely, obsessed and unhinged people.

In the Future This Blog Post will be Obsolete

Push button publishing has lead to ever increasing content. The librarians of the future have their job cut out for them — but that’s okay because the physical storage space for all this data continues to shrink.

The bigger question is how do you keep it accessible?

The Internet is for Trolls

Meek, normally polite people can turn into the biggest assholes when they don’t have to look each other in the eyes.

Cory Doctorow on Building an Audience

Cory Doctorow is a prolific author and runs the most popular blog on the planet: BoingBoing. He’s also been challenging the publishing industry traditions with his writing. I still haven’t read any of his books, but I should. Forbes as an interview with him where he talks about giving the milk away for free, but [...]

Project Cleanfeed Canada

(this is a follow-up to the Great Firewall of Canada)
spyblog.org.uk notes how “systems like British Telecom’s CleanFeed are inherently vulnerable to reverse engineering attacks, which can reveal the list of censored websites”. While I doubt the technique mentioned in the paper still works, it does give more technical information about CleanFeed than I’ve seen [...]

The Great Firewall of Canada

The title of this article is, of course, a reference to the Internet censorship that is rampant in China.

Mark Goldberg pointed me to the press release of “Project Cleanfeed Canada”. Canadian carriers Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, MTS Allstream, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw, TELUS, and Videotron have all opted in to a blacklist provided by Cybertip.ca, [...]