From a Boing Boing posting by Xeni Jardin, here's an update on Comcast and the net neutrality issue. She writes:
The internet service provider has been under investigation for blocking file-sharing among subscribers, but announced a change of heart today, promising to treat all apps equally -- but they'll still slow down traffic for customers who consume larger amounts of bandwidth than others.
Since user reports of interference with file-sharing traffic were confirmed by an Associated Press investigation in October, Comcast has been vigorously defending its practices, most recently at a hearing of the Federal Communications Commission in February.
Consumer and ''Net Neutrality'' advocates have been equally vigorous in their attacks on the company, saying that by secretly blocking some connections between file-sharing computers, Comcast made itself a judge and gatekeeper for the Internet. They also accused Comcast of stifling delivery of Internet video, an emerging competitor to the cable company's core business.
Comcast has said that its practices were necessary to keep file-sharing traffic from overwhelming local cable lines, where neighbors share capacity with one another. On Thursday, Comcast said that by the end of the year, it will move to a system that manages capacity without favoring one type of traffic over another.
Update: here's a press release issued by Comcast about a hollow, face-saving, baloney-scented deal with BitTorrent announced today. The bit about "a capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic" effectively means that heavy P2P users will still be throttled, they just won't be identified by protocol.
We, Bruce and I, are getting our garden ready for planting. We've been composting through the winter and now it's time for rototilling and mulching the soil. And as my thoughts turn to the green and growth outside I'm reminded of the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. What he can do with stone, wood and plants is amazing. If you get a chance to see Rivers and Tides, do so. It's a documentary on Goldsworthy skill in handling nature and natural material in an extraordinary way. Here is a sample of his work.
Our house, when I was growing up, was always filled with the smells of a boiled dinner on March 17th and the scent of green carnations that we wore to school. I meant to post this on Monday the 17th but was on a plane heading home, then yesterday I forgot..... so to share a bit of Irish sentiment I offer a listen to an Irish classic......
If you go to thisyou'll see my visual experience that I have each night as I leave work and head home. It's a twelve picture journey that starts at the end and ends with the beginning. I did try and straighten out the sequence but alas flickr did not oblige my efforts.
Bill Simmon, filmmaker, blogger extraordinar and friend from my public access days in Vermont produced this video, Digital Pamphleteer. It's an interview with Steve Benen, a political writer and blogger talking about what inspires him politically and how blogging is helping to change politics.
Here's an excerpt I pulled from Henry Jenkins' blog on Obama. It was posted Feb 18 and today is March 4, an important primary day for the democrats....Go Barack....
The article is lengthy but full of insight into our current political landscape. It starts off as:
Obama and the "We" Generation
Several years ago, I heard my colleague and friend Justine Cassell sum up what she had learned after more than a decade of tracking the lives of hundreds of young people from around the world she had been helping to facilitate through the Media Lab's Junior Summit. These young leaders had been working both face to face and via electronic communications to try to bring about changes in their society, focusing their energies on problems both local and global, and finding solutions through both policy and technology. Cassell is a linguist so one of the things that interested her was the language these young people used. Adult leaders, she suggested, tend to rely heavily on the first person pronoun: 'Here's what I will do for you', 'this is my position on the issues,' 'I have the experience needed to do the job.' By contrast, the youth leaders tended to deploy a third person language: 'what do we see as the problem here,' 'what do we want to do about It,' 'what are our goals for the next steps.' The young leaders were interested in the process as much as the product, trying to make sure that every perspective got heard and weighed appropriately before reaching a decision. They pooled information from multiple sources, valuing diversity of input because of what it would contribute to the final outcome.
All of this came back to me as I have been listening to Barrack Obama in recent weeks. Commentators have noted his tendency to use "We" far more often than first ("I")or second person ("You" pronouns, often with only minimal understanding of what is at stake in this language choice. Some of this no doubt emerges from Obama's experience as a community organizer, a very different role from Hillary Clinton's early experiences as a litigator or legal council for nonprofit organizations.
Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement. Campaigns are very much top down organizations focused on short term results -- let's get this person elected president -- while movements are constructed bottom-up with more long-term goals -- let's reshape the American political landscape. What Obama has been building can last longer than the individual campaign because it is as much structured around connections between voters as it is around connections between the candidate and the electoriate. We see this in the use of MySpace, Facebook, and other social network sites, which both build on the set of social ties (of all kinds) that link voters together and also enables new people to get into contact with each other. I predicted in Convergence Culture that the parties and the political leaders were going to lose control of the campaign process in a world where the general public was increasingly taking media in its own hands. In a campaign season strongly influenced by grassroots media contributions, it is striking how many of the so-called "viral videos" -- from the 1984 ads and the Obama Girl spots through to the recent "Yes We Can" music video were dedicated to supporting Obama's efforts. Grassroots media makers seemed to be welcomed into the political process by Obama's staff and he seems to inspire more people to apply their craft as contributions to his efforts.
This is a video I produced (wrote, camera, edited and vo) a while ago. It's documenting the first international internet academic debate that occurred between the University of Vermont and the English Speaking Union in 2000. It runs appx. three minutes.
This is a sweet story of one man's dream to have the Dali Lama be part of the procession that carries the Olympic Torch to the Beijing Summer Olympics.
It appears I have cracked the embedding code ... streaming video on demand. Yah!
