Gleaned from a perusal of this year's delicious bookmarks, listed in vaguely chronological order.

First off, why the political world desperately needs people who understand technology. Second, how technologists can get involved in politics. And third, why that hasn't happened yet.

I'm going to strangle the council with their own stupid hats.

Had those boys read Dune, they might have thought twice about occupying Iraq. Not least because of the sandworms.

ACK WTF OMG NEED AUTO_DETECT_LINE_ENDINGS PWND N00B r0X0rZZZZZZZ

For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less.

If internet entrepreneurs created “Protestr” as a web 2.0 tool for activists, no repressive goverment would leave it unblocked. But blocking a tool that is mostly used for amusement or communication between friends has consequences - the users looking for cute cat videos get annoyed that YouTube is blocked… and learn about their government’s willingness to constrain speech...

Yogaball — the greatest sport you haven't played — has reached a crossroads.

If a African Chihuahua dog gets pregnant in the Netherlands they’ll blame it on hip-hop.

I found out that if you put the phono or quarter-inch jack halfway in, it filters the high frequency. Now I just got the bass part of the sample. I was like, "Oh, shit, this is the craziest thing on the planet!"

1) the fallout following the Imus incident, including the identity of the real culprits, and their roles in perpetuating stereotypes; 2) the disproportionate impact of negative media on the African American community; 3) the beneficiaries of negative and stereotypical media messages; and finally, some Industry Ears recommendations to address these problems.

Rich on the SEED Conference:

it was pretty good

maybe a little repetitive and most of the questions were like, how can i run my company like you guys except take fewer risks?

and they'd be like, well, we certainly aren't getting rich, but we don't work 24/7 and are pretty fucking happy

and people would scratch their heads

Susan Faludi's Op-Ed in today's NYTimes is one of the coolest pieces of cultural/political criticism I've read:

Sept. 11 cracked the plaster on that master narrative of American prowess because it so exactly duplicated the terms of the early Indian wars, right down to the fecklessness of our leaders and the failures of our military strategies. Like its early American antecedents, the 9/11 attack was a homeland incursion against civilian targets by non-European, non-Christian combatants who fought under the flag of no recognized nation. Like the “different type of war” heralded by President Bush, the 17th and 18th century “troubles” — as one Puritan chronicler of Metacom’s Rebellion called them, refusing to grant them “the name of a war” — seemed to have no battlefield conventions, no constraints and no end.

Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.

Jessica Lynch to Jack Bauer, it begins to tie together a lot of important clues.

Scratch notes from PDF:

1. A great vibe and great people. I suggest that PDF is to IPDI as SXSW is to most tech conferences: Beyond the standard kabuki of vendor-pitches and celebrity presentations, there's a smart idealism and subculture that is excellent.

2. An extra mega interesting-looking book, heartily recommended by Noel and Beka: Dream: Re-imagining Politics In The Age Of Fantasy. From the dust jacket: "What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald's commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much."

3. Aldon showed me a hack to synch his blog with his twitter with his Facebook status, using TwitterFeed.com. Twitter also became an ad-hoc back-channel chatroom when Confabb, the "official" conference web presence, didn't work. Consensus was that Twitter should add some kind of grouping/tagging capability to make networked microblogging more effective. I'm not sure I agree. Hoppin is excited about a new similar service called Jaiku.

4. Also buzzing: Freebase.com, an open repository for structured data. Change.org, which I never caught what exactly it IS, but everyone seemed really excited by it. Bokardo.com looks smart.

5. A good conversation lead by Winer about open hardware/software platforms. Worth investigating: OpenMoko, which claims to be an open mobile platform, and Rockbox which ditto for music.

In October, I jokingly predicted that Image Macros, previously confined to LiveJournal-Land, would soon emigrate into Blogland-Proper. I'd like to say that I consequently feel way vindicated by the recent LOLCATZ epidemic. I picture it as a chaotic procession of strangely-captioned felines migrating outward from LJ across xkcd's map of the internet on their invisible bicycles.

Of course, it's also possible I'm just inaccurately perceiving the trend's chronology.

Footnote: Great post from Anil considering it all w/r/t Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I am, as always, a sucker for academic examinations of internet silliness. Lest we begin to think such things may be unimportant.

Writing tonight exhausted on the train home from a way fun Personal Democracy conference.

I've been reading Before The Storm, Rick Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater and The Rise Of American Conservatism. An old hat to some readers, I know, but totally new and interesting to this compsci/theater major. Plus Jon Chait called it the bible of the left-wing blogosphere, so I figured I had better check it out. Plus I'm reading it simultaneously with this crazy anthology of space opera, and so am finding all kinds of exciting Goldwater/Heinlein Libertarian/Militarist parallels.

Here, an excerpt, a fascinating intersection of political history and audio production history. It's in the discussion of the LBJ campaign's awesome 1964 Daisy Girl Ad, which, watch it if you haven't:

When DDB (LBJ's ad agency) scraped its civil rights spots... it was Tony Schwartz whom they called upon. Schwartz was a sui generis American genius, a sculptor in sound, a manufacturer of moods. He was the inventor of the first portable tape recorder, with which he took to the streets to produce LPs that were celebrations of all things audible: cabdrivers' chatter, Times Square at rush hour, Jamaican songs sung by a shop girl at Macy's. He also produced commercials. His masterpiece was a series of radio spots for American Airlines. He sold the romance of America's great cities by crafting the aural equivilant of skylines. For one spot, Shcwartz waited for an overcast day in his West Side Manhattan neighborhood and recorded Hudson River foghorns while hiring a local hobo called Moondog to walk around with the bells, drums, and pots and pans he perpetually carried on his back: instant San Francisco. The commercials brought an immediate spike in the airline's bookings.

(Perlstein cites this NPR profile as his source, which I havent listened to yet.) It is way reminiscent of Ramyond Scott, another intense American musique-concrete pioneer of the 1960s whose work focused on radio-ad production. And it's crazy to remember that audio recordings of day-to-day sounds had never been heard before then.

And Schwartz was the brain behind the Daisy Girl. It's similarly stunning to remember that there was a time in US politics when both candidates contested to see who could appear more ANTI war, rather than today's basically-unquestioned who-can-appear-more-militarist contest.

More visualized Facebook networks: From Rich, from Emily, from Andrew. Consider me hypnotized.

Over the past few months, it's been great to see so many great bloggers rise to the defense of Pandora, which has been in danger of being destroyed by a sudden hike in licensing fees. Its demise once seemed inevitable, but we have so far won a surprising stay of execution, and astoundingly might even win this battle altogether.

But it's important to remember that the issues here are way bigger than Pandora. Pandora is basically a mutant. ("Freakishly innovative," as Nancy Scola puts it.) It's grown to fill the bizzare nonsensical contours of current US net-radio law, giving users as much customizability as is legally possible, but no more. The result is mega-useful, but also inherently fragile. Any tiny change in current regulations will pose a real challenge to Pandora's legality and business model.

But net-radio law needs more than tiny changes, it needs huge sweeping reform. Not to retread the obvious, but it's been written by RIAA lobbyists to reflect that consortium's own priorities. It hurts artists, it hurts listeners, and it hurts innovation of all kinds.

Example: My personal frustration this week was falling in love with a Public Radio show, American Routes. It came on FM randomly while I was driving somewhere, and I was instantly enamored. This guy draws lines between bluegrass, jazz, R&B, rock; he'd play ten killer songs from totally different genres and you could hear the same melodic / lyrical themes connecting them. From an hour of listening, I made a list of three records I want to buy.

So this is clearly a good show for any artist featured on it. If you own copyright to this music, you should want everyone to listen to this show as often as possible. So can I get a podcast?

Unfortunately, we can't sell or otherwise distribute copies of American Routes on tapes or CDs because each show contains so much copyrighted music that it isn't financially feasible for us to get clearance for all of it. With the same reason, we can't archive American Routes as a whole on our website or provide podcasting.

So this is clearly idiotic. My point is that we, meaning online music fans, need to think much bigger than fighting to save the status quo. The current surge of activism focuses on HR2060, which is important and a good start; but what should come next?

Btw, Pandora isnt the only awesome mutant produced by the current laws. WFMU's Coffee2Go is currently my favorite podcast. DJ Noah's solution to the problem is brilliantly simple: sidestep the RIAA altogether and only play unsigned or independently-released records. Freaking brilliant, and hopefully a harbinger of the new music economy to come.

This Facebook Network Visualizer mashes up the TouchGraph flash-vector-graphing software with Facebook's developer API and produces cool graphs like this one.

Real interesting to see how my network maps out. A giant tangle of extraordinarily networked and wired political/tech folks whom I know mainly from the past three years. And some outlyers, most of whom I've known for a longer time, but generally not as members of an interconnected posse.

Rich Orris has a special and odd role as the sole person whom I knew in college who is now a significant part of my more recent network. So while Rich is very much tied in to that central cluster, there are also a hard half dozen folks here with whom Rich is my only listed mutual acquaintance. I sort of knew this intuitively, but it's startling to see it visualized so clearly.

Of course the major factors confusing reality here are who's on Facebook and who isn't, and the lack of any contextual information about the strength or nature of my relationship with anyone. And yet, despite all this, the broad generalizations appear to be more or less accurate.

Footnote: Facebook is the first of the major social networking services I've tried (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace,) to offer the kind of serious developer API that makes stuff like this possible to create. That is really cool, and is a big part of why I expect FB to outlast the others.

Update: also interesting that while Facebook's structure is based around college-oriented networks, my college friends are probably the least networked individuals in the whole map. And yet the site always redirects me to "wesleyan.facebook.com". Yet another way community-driven tech strays from its intended purposes.

If you use facebook, take a screenshot of your map and send me the link!

This afternoon, an older relative of mine stopped by the house to coerce me into helping fix his company's website. Consequently, I have a viscerally renewed appreciation of the urgent need for intelligent web content management software.

He and his wife run a salon/spa in New Jersey. Their website was built a few years back by a frat-brother of his son-in-law. It's woefully out-of-date and awkwardly-constructed. Edits are made through a weird web-based file-management-and-wysiwyg thing, so just making basic basic adjustments is painfully tedious.

I am a little overwhelmed with this guy's willingness to jump headfirst into a completely bewildering medium. He listened intently and took several pages of notes while I explained things like the difference between editable text and fonted graphics, how to resize and replace an image, why changing a phrase's text-color to blue does not automatically turn that phrase into a link, how RGB hexcodes work, and why the page looks completely different in the wysiwyg editor than it does in the actual web-browser.

As we were finishing up, he summarized for me: "It's not easy for folks of my generation to understand this stuff. But what's frustrating for me is when I have instructions that say 'Do A then B then C, and then a window will pop up that says X,' but when I do those things no window pops up at all! Something completely different happens! And I do not have the intuitive understanding of things to know what to do next. I'm completely lost."

I had to correct him that, conventional wisdom aside, this is not a generational issue. If your instructions say something will happen, it ought to freaking happen, regardless of how old you are. And updating a basic ordinary brochure-style website should not require photoshop expertise or knowledge of RGB hexcodes.

Come on people, it's 2007, why haven't we got this problem licked yet?