Yeah, I know Gutenberg died in 1468, but you know what I mean. Anyway, the Nieman Foundation has posted an amazing report, with tons of articles about the future of newspapers, by some very smart people (including RMack and Ethanz of GlobalVoices and Craig Newmark). Also, lots of folks from the newspaper side of life. I have only begun to poke around in it. It’s riches given to us for nothin’.

Thanks, Nieman! [Tags: news media nieman ethan_zuckerman rebecca_mackinnon craig_newmark everything_is_miscellaneous]

I’ve been using SimplyHeadlines for the past few weeks and like enough that I continue to use it. It aggregates news feeds and the results of customized queries (mine are for my name, “taxonomy” and “folksonomy”), and puts these into an email I receive each morning. It also lets you know what your registered friends are reading, but I have no friends, which is all that I deserve.

SimplyHeadlines now has a beta program that enables bloggers to offer their readers a customized aggregation of news and sites. It’s free. They promise not to spam anyone. You can customize it as you like. There are no ads. I don’t make anything out of your signing up; I’m not affiliated with them in any way. I offer it to you as an experiment.

If you’re interested, click here for the form…

[Tags: news aggregators media simplyheadlines everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Chris Anderson at his Long Tail blog has a perfect example of the power of the miscellaneous. Zappos organizes its massive warehouse of shoes by just putting shoes wherever there’s room. Now that we have them new-fangled computer-a-bobs, Zappos can find each pair by looking up their UPC. As Chris says, “No single trip is optimized, but the system as a whole works as a minimum-effort machine.”

The comments to the post are great, also.

(Chris has been saying nice things about Everything Is Miscellaneous ever since my publisher sent him a blurber’s draft. Thank you, Chris.)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous warehouse inventory zappos chris_anderson long_tail ]

My blog, like your blog, has been trawled by some suspiciously large nets. For example, yesterday I received an invitation to join the Global Petroleum Club, which is not a customer consortium or for hobbyists, but is for “oil, gas and energy professionals.” Since I am strictly an amateur, I will be declining the offer, with thanks.

A couple of messages down, I was invited to the Bathing Cultural Carnival 2007 in China. The message notes: “Cultural centers in various activities: bathing, sauna experience Museum, the Museum SPA life, health Museum springs, foot care settings health Museum, the Museum bathroom Fashion.” I’m afraid I’m not going to be live-blogging that one. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous humor]

Amsterdam 17 January 2007 – On Friday 26 January 2007 at 20.00 the exhibition ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ by Martin Butler will open at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Martin Butler presents four human avatars to play with. Using Skype you can log in at home with your character of choice. Direct the avatar, explore the space and challenge him or her. The avatars of The Girlfriend Experience will be available every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20:00- 23:00. They can also be observed live in the Analog Villa, the Mediamatic Exhibition space, at the ground floor of the Post CS building in Amsterdam.

The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft has enabled the creation of a personal online social and economic existence. Simultaneously this triggers inherent questions about this existence, as it questions what the consequences will be for first life, or reality.

When you use virtual avatars you can do as you please. In The Girlfriend Experience you will have to get to know each other first. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and how far the avatar wants to go to execute specific desires. It is ambiguous who is really controlling the situation. You have ten minutes to figure out what you can do with your avatar. After that, your time is up and another player can take your place.

More here. (Thanks to Hylton Joliffe for the link.) [Tags: avatars art games everything_is_miscellaneous ]

After lunch, we went around in small groups to stations where folks each had 7 minutes to demo their sites. Some very cool stuff is going on, including (and, damn, I lost my notes so I apologize for what I’m forgetting):

Metavid takes C-SPAN feeds of public domain video of our government in action, strips out the copyrighted stuff, and makes it all searchable by indexing the close captioning provided by our government. Once you’ve found the clip you want, they give you the code to embed it in your site. Way cool.

Front Porch Forum is a Vermont-based service that uses email listservs and the Web to let geographical neighbors talk to one another. It’s a terrific and simple idea that happens to have been executed so well that in one case, 90% of homes have signed on. They’ve found that the optimum size for a virtualized neighborhood is about 300 real homes.

Congresspedia is an open Wikipedia-style wiki with entries for every congressperson, every bill and every rule.

Can you guess what FedSpending has lots of data about? You’re right! It’s a project by OMB Watch, and is funded (as several of these projects are) by the Sunlight Foundation.

The Capitol News Connection feeds 230+ public radio stations with stories pertinent to their localities.

MorePerfect is a wiki where people can use the wisdom of the political crowds to craft language for bills, proposals, referenda, etc. Rather than aiming at “neutrality,” the way Wikipedia does, it aims at contributors being “constructive.” So, if you disagree with a bill, you’re asked not to reverse its meaning and insert stupid comments. Instead, create your own bill. They even have posted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as wikis, asking people to improve them.

The Gentilly Project has volunteers in New Orleans color coding houses on maps according to their state of repair. Part of the story is what they’ve learned about getting volunteers to do the work efficiently, which includes having a deadline, breaking a big project down into little steps, and being sure all the sub-projects are transparent to one another. The other part of the story are the results, which reveal that we have to make lots more progress, and that the progress is not as unevenly distributed as one might think.

The Campaigns Wikia is an ambitious attempt to gather information about significant campaigns around the world, using the Wikipedia format.

Lots and lots going on, building an infrastructure of facts and relationships that is direclty valuable, but, perhaps even more important, will be the source for mashups and visualizations we haven’t yet thought of. [Tags: sunlightberkman berkmansunlight berkman politics everything_is_miscellaneous]

On second thought, just read Ethanz’s descriptions of the projects. Way better than mine.

Lots of great discussion here which I’m not reporting on because there’s too much, but Dan Newman’s MapLight.org intersects my interest in the miscellaneous, so I’ll mention it here. It lets you slice, dice and — most important — associate information about who’s contributing how much to whom and how that correlates with actual votes (CA only). For example, trying playing around the bill that would have required bottled water to meet the same health standards as tap water. (It lost.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous maplight politics sunlightberkman ]

WikiLeaks is a Wikipedia-style wiki for people to place leaked documents, untraceably. According to the FAQ, “It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface.” “Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.”

It’s ambitious. The FAQ says:

Wikileaks may become the most powerful “intelligence agency” on earth — an intelligence agency of the people. It will be an open source, democratic intelligence agency. But it will be far more principled, and far less parochial than any governmental intelligence agency; consequently, it will be more accurate, and more relevant. It will have no commercial or national interests at heart; its only interests will be truth and freedom of information. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks will rely upon the power of overt fact to inform citizens about the truths of their world.

It’s got a million leaked docs already and expects to surpass Wikipedia in number of entries. But it’s hard to see how it becomes anything like an intelligence agency if it only consists of leaks; if a citizen wants information about a topic, seeing only the leaked material is going to give quite a skewed and incomplete view. On the other hand, if you’re researching a topic, I can see the value of checking in with Wikileaks to see if there’s anything you’re not supposed to know about it.

Here’s another bit from the FAQ:

Couldn’t leaking involve invasions of privacy? Couldn’t mass leaking of documents be irresponsible? Aren’t some leaks deliberately false and misleading?

Providing a forum for freely posting information involves the potential for abuse, but measures can be taken to minimize any potential harm. The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this works out in the edge cases. Does posting the names of covert agents count as a leak? [Tags: wikileaks wikis wikipedia intelligence politics media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Kevin Gamble asks a really interesting question: Can anyone come up with an example of a taxonomy that has scaled sufficiently to keep up with the insane in-rush of information we now take for granted? [Tags: kevin_gamble taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy ]

When I posted yesterday about my problem with Thunderbird and its possible solution, I did so in part because I wanted to make it findable by others with the same problem. So, I did the most basic search-engine optimization stuff of making sure I used some words and tags people are likely to search for. Then, yesterday afternoon I was part of a brief conversation with Andy Oram in which he talked about his interest in the phenomenon of bottom-up tech support. Googling for solutions to problems works but only sort of, says Andy. And that got me thinking that it’d be useful if we started tagging such posts with some standard tags, such as (perhaps): troubleshooting, operating system, application name, error message, problem area, solved/unsolved. So, my post on Thunderbird would be tagged: troubleshooting, xp, thunderbird, “rebuilding index”, folders, solved. Something like that.

In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. [Tags: microformats troubleshooting andy_oram everything_is_miscellaneous]