Jessamyn reports on the Jackson County Library Information blog, where you can read about the indefinite closing of all fifteen branches of this Oregon county’s library system. The reasons are complex, but it comes down to the need to cut lots of services as the county reduces its budget by $23 milllion. Libraries are apparently a “nice to have,” not a “must have,” in Jackson County. (It doesn’t help that a previous ballot measure removed the special levy for libraries.) [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Politicopia, a wiki for Utah citizens, is up. It’ll be very interesting to see if Utapians make use of it. (If not, some other site will arise.)

By the way, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the parties’ embrace of online activism. It says the Republicans are only a little behind the Democratics in this regard. [Tags: politics utah politicopia democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]

Now that Hillary has announced that her campaign is a “conversation,” Todd Ziegler rounds up the conversational elements of her site.

Political campaigns are perhaps the most corrosive of genuine conversations because campaigns make run-of-the-mill control freaks look like drunken libertines. Their idea of a great conversation is generally the sort of Bush town hall meeting where citizens are frisked for ideas before entering. The best hope for a conversational campaign is one that brings supporters together and then gets out of the way. But campaigns want to be at the center of every conversation.

For example, Todd wonders why campaigns have abandoned MeetUp.com for house parties. Part of the answer is that campaigns want to have more control over the meetings’ data and governance, and that’s not totally illegitimate; MeetUp.com is a civic-minded group (bless ’em), but it’s still a private company.

But campaigns generally are not re-creating MeetUp. They’re replacing meetups with house parties. That’s what the Kerry campaign did, and I could never convince Zack Exley (who’s also civic-minded, bless him), who was in charge of Kerry’s Internet campaign, that house parties are fundamentally different than the Meetups that fueled the Dean campaign.

First, and most obviously, house parties traditionally are traditionally fund raisers. Dean Meetups were not. The house party message is clear: Have a nice chat while you take out your checkbook.

Second, campaigns generally assume more ownership of house parties than Meetups. At times, the Dean campaign provided some topic they thought the group might want to talk about. A couple of times, Dean addressed the Meetups via TV. But there’s a real difference in feeling between that and arriving at a friend’s house and being dealt the official house party “kit” materials.

Third, and most important, house parties are in private spaces. Meetups were in public spaces. A house party is put on for the attendees. The host has an obligation to make sure it goes well. But a Meetup in a bar or a restaurant is an empty space within which we are trusted to figure out what to do…what to do during the Meetup and what to do to take our country back (as Deaniacs put it). House parties are parties with guests. Meetups are meetings among citizens.

It’s a subtle difference, and I can’t quite articulate it. But I’ve been to house parties and to Meetups, and the difference is very real. [Tags: politics hillary_clinton meetup campaigns marketing conversations everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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 ]