Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Democracy: A government by the people
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/13/2004 - 16:05(Originally posted in Greater Democracy)
Greater Democracy was formed, in part, to explore the roots, goals, and intentions of democratic governance. I love democracy, from Jefferson, to Wilson, to others who have fought for and written about democracy that I don’t yet know about.
Yet democracy is a fairly broad concept, a government by the people. How do the people decide to govern themselves? To they require consensus? Do they elect people to represent them in a governing body? To they use Robert’s rules of order to suspend Robert’s rules of order? Democracy can take many shapes.
News of the Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/12/2004 - 12:14A little over a week ago, I wrote, October Surprises talking about how October has always been a surprising and disconcerting month for me. This October is turning out to be no different.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, last Monday my mother was hospitalized with chest pains. She is home now and seems okay, although we do need to follow up on it. My wife’s opponent was arrested for DUI the same evening. Kim has been getting a fair amount of media inquiries about this. We want to keep the campaign focused on issues and not personal mistakes, and Kim has her comments about it on her campaign website. To top it off, a table blew off a passing truck and hit Kim’s car on Wednesday. She swerved to avoid the accident, and the only damage was the driver side review mirror being sheared off, and some dents in the driver side door. Kim was shaken up a little, but is fine.
Beyond this, we celebrated Fiona’s third birthday this.
As I mentioned earlier, , Christian Crumlish’s book, The Power of Many has come out. It is a good book to read to get a sense of what is going people online getting offline and involved. Jerome Armstrong just wrote about it on DailyKos. In the discussion that followed people have linked The Power of Many to what is going on with Sinclair Broadcasting. There are many articles about Sinclair Broadcasting out there, if you haven’t read them. Mitch Ratcliffe provides a good summary.
Over at Greater Democracy, Jock Gill does a good job of contrasting the Sinclair Broadcasting mess with a great post by Britt Blaser in his blog.
And for the final news, there is the sad news about Christopher Reeve’s passing. Kim had road with his brother in Pony Club. Miranda went to nursery school with his son. He lived not far from us. It struck use fairly personally.
We were driving to a family reunion when we heard the news, and a lot of time explaining it to Fiona. In particular, we talked a lot about hope, and how he symbolized hope for so many people. We talked about embryonic stem cell research and the hope that that brings. If you read my recent post about Strengthening the good, you will know that I am a big fan of bloggers promoting worthy charities. I urge everyone to do their little bit to help, and now would be a wonderful time to contribute to the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.
Positive Stories about Strengthening the Good
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/09/2004 - 20:07Recently, I’ve been surfing random blogs through BlogExplosion. I plan on writing more about that later. Today, I stumbled across an interesting blog, Positive Stories.
In this story, they talk about Strengthen the good. STG “the nexus of a network of bloggers committed to raising awareness for small charities around the world”.
As I read through it, it made me think of some of the activities going on at Omidyar.net, which I’ve mentioned in passing before.
If you haven’t checked out Omidyar.net or STG, please do.
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.
