IRELAND -- In "Wired on Friday", Danny O'Brien dissects the meaning behind Microsoft stepping up its patent process. In the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor warns that Microsoft is prepared to sue governments that infringe on its patent properties. As everyone knows, you don't have to have a winning case. You just have to have money to grind down the opposition.
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EBAY -- What would you do if you made a grilled cheese sandwich and saw an image of the Virgin Mary staring out from it? Why, take it to eBay and offer it to others who might not be as lucky. For a limited time, you can be the proud owner of "Virgin Mary in Grilled Cheese" but you can't be a newbie to ebay (zero referrals need not apply) and you have to have a minimum of €5000 to have any hope of succeeding in the bidding process. If you don't have the cash but want this much-sought-after item (seven people have bid on it), there is a financing package available on eBay and you don't have to pay until April 2005.
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FLICKR -- One of the joys of 2004 has been the gift of Flickr and the wonderfully cross-cultural community living there. People have always connected through visual imagery faster than through text or sound. After all, most of the sighted can read an image faster than they can maneuver through the text or the backing tracks. Me shooting graffiti in a mirror attracted the most visitors of 2004 but that's probably because the image stayed on the front page of my blog for more than a week. Pictures of people generate the most buzz in terms of real e-mails and follow-on links to other pages outside of Flickr. I think the photos of people bring the greatest legitimacy to my virtual presence.
Continue reading "Softly spoken visual community" »
AP -- Motor Trend has named the Chrysler 300, the "baby Bentley" that has proved appealing to everyone from rappers to grandmothers, as its Car of the Year. The 300 hit American showrooms in April. It beat out 23 other new or significantly revised models, including the revamped For Mustang, the Buick LaCrosse and the gas-electric version of the Honda Accord.
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WSJ -- I used to have a job where my teaching was worth $1096 an hour for a one-on-one session. That's how much the US government would charge foreign ministries of defense for each hour of my time in the cockpit of a T-38 formation training mission. The billing covered my flight and the solo flight of the wingman. So when the wingman messed up severely enough to be grounded, an essential element was deconstructing the situation. For me, it meant getting inside the head of the student pilot. I discovered a lot of strange things flew around the minds of Saudi, Italian, Dane, Portuguese and Norwegian pilots. Part of the flotsam could be tracked back to the sheer velocity of random events surrounding their daily lives in the American culture. So when something terrible happens around a military soldier in Iraq, I often find myself playing shrink first and reader second. There are lessons from my past that can be applied to the Marine who shot an unarmed combatant on the floor of a mosque in Fallajuh. As I mentally thumbed through them, I discovered a Wall Street Journal editorial that said it best.
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GOOGLE -- I've discovered that I have Google scholars in my blogroll, starting with Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Clay Shirky, Sean McGrath, Dave Winer, Micheal O Foghlu, Karlin Lillington, Philip Greenspun, Patrick O'Beirne, Gary Noone, Justin Mason, John Sterne, Diego Doval, Antoin O Lachtnain, Euan Semple and at least 20 others with more references than myself.
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DUBLIN -- If you believe the Research and Markets people, blogging is a threat to internet users. It would be relatively easy to find bloggers who were fired for their online musings and I imagine the report includes high profile cases of jourmalists, cabin attendants, and IT staffers. By purchasing the research report, you can learn how employees can reduce the risks associated with blogging and also set up a blogging policy for your company. This could be a critical concern for HR professionals who could "raise their awareness of the importance of using extreme caution if and when it becomes necessary to visit blogs as part of the employee’s job performance." In academia, many authors visit blogs because they contain the work of scholars.
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TEMPLE BAR -- We've spent yet another afternoon in Central Percs nursing the best coffee in Dublin's cultural quarter, reflecting on Mark Garry's latest exhibition in the Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. It's difficult to get an appreciation of what he's doing to string, light, refraction and space unless you walk up to the work. Some people have walked through the work since it runs from window to ceiling to floor in two locations in the gallery space. Multimedia students appreciate what Garry has done. And the glowing testimonies in the gallery comment book span several continents.
