Archive - 2004
October 8th
The Power of Many
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/08/2004 - 12:10(Originally published as a book review on Amazon)
The other day I received my copy of The Power of Many by Christian Crumlish. I don’t recall exactly when I first met Christian online. The earliest emails that I can find have from him are from December 2003. During this time, I was working as a volunteer for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.
In particular, I was working with DeanSpace, an effort to help many small groups easily set up powerful interconnected websites. A lot has happened since then. DeanSpace has evolved into CivicSpace. Kerry is now the Democratic nominee. My wife is now a candidate for State Representative in Connecticut. Many of us have been using our experiences from the Dean campaign to help other campaigns, and many people are fishing around for a good book to try and understand how the internet is changing politics and all aspects of our lives.
The Power of Many is the book you should read if you want to get a real, on the ground, grassroots perspective of what happened during the Dean campaign and what it means for our country today. Christian has done a great job of speaking with many bloggers and grassroots activists. He explains the actions and technology in a way that many can understand and appreciate.
For people who want to understand what my involvement was like, and the involvement of many others, start with The Power of Many.
Plink: A FOAF update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/08/2004 - 09:08Plink “has shut down. For now.”
Why? Julian Bond writes at Ecademy, “The interesting thing here is that there are approximately 15 Million structured data files out there on the web in XML of which FOAF is just one type. And the search engines currently do nothing with it. And when a programmer does try to do something, they get abuse from people who don't realize they didn't have any privacy anyway.”
Dom Ramsey writes at rdfweb-dev, “It was fun to do, but I'm now getting way too many complaints from people who have appeared without permission in other people's FOAF files and have found themselves via Google.
Trying to explain FOAF to these people generally doesn't work, and more often than not, they're too irate to care. So the easiest thing for me to do is just take the site down.“
I wrote about this on a CivicSpace developers mailing list, commenting that, “I suspect it may have something to do with the Dean campaign”
Data about Dean volunteers from Dean Commons was available via FOAF and much of it got imported into PLINK. I know that many people accused the Dean campaign of selling its mailing list and were angry and/or confused about the data getting out onto the internet as a whole. I spent a lot of time trying to explain this to people, as did several other people who understood the issue.
As an aside, the standard for the SHA1 hashsum in FOAF is to use the URI of the mailbox, so, as an example, my hashsum is ffe69246682d35f080b865433d08d274d9b19657 which is the sha1 hash of mailto:ahynes1@optonline.net However, in the Dean Commons, they left out the protocol section and assigned a hashsum of ahynes1@optonline.net Because of that, PLINK and the other FOAF crawlers never linked up my FOAF information from the Dean campaign with FOAF information from other sources.
As noted before, there is FOAF information about me at Ecademy, Tribe.net, and LiveJournal. Christian Crumlish points out that PeopleAggregrator and TypePad are also publishing FOAF information. Boris Mann observed that for tools being developed for CivicSpace, “James' FOAF module is opt-in -- the user goes to their account and allows export of the FOAF file. The lesson is to be very careful about privacy issues, and to give the user control.”
I suspect this may be the tip of the iceberg as more and more people discover the power of FOAF and want to take advantage of it, and at the same time want to protect their privacy.
Predictions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/08/2004 - 08:25Mathew Gross challenges bloggers to predict the election results, so I've put my comments there, but I'm putting them here as well.
In Greenwich, CT, a town where many of the Bushes live and which has voted Republican in every election since 1964, I am finding many Republicans that are planning to vote for Kerry this year.
October 7th
Expanding the Discussion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/07/2004 - 12:52(Originally published in Greater Democracy)
On October 4th, I wrote an entry which pointed to a blog by my daughter’s political science professor.
October 4th
To the hospital
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/04/2004 - 22:25I just received an IM from my nephew letting me know that my mother, "just had to go to the hospital due to some pains in her arms, shoulders, and chest area."
My mother is 73 years old. She isn't in the greatest health, so I am worried but not surprised. I called my sister and one of my cousins.
Update: My nephew just IMed me again. My mother is "doing alright and they're going to hold her over night for observation."
It feels strange to be at that stage of life where one talks with ones siblings about ones parents medical conditions. It seems even stranger to be getting updates via IM.
Update 2: My mother is back home and is doing okay. I am talking with my siblings about what should happen next, and I hope to see my mother on Columbus day.
