Cool fundraising: Sixteen noted authors will auction the right to have your name (or in some cases the name of a willing designate) be affixed to a minor character, a storefront, or otherwise appear in an upcoming novel. All proceeds benefit the First Amendment Project. (via Copyfight).
I love Neil Gaiman, but all in all do I want my name on a fictional tombstone? Probably not.
In “The Strategy of Conflict” ur-game theorist Thomas Schelling discusses a special type of coordination, which he illustrates [I’m working from memory here, so forgive me if I slur details] with the following example:
Suppose you find yourself in New York city, and you have to meet a stranger. You have no way of communicating with them, but you know that they too want to meet you. Where and when do you go?
Apparently, someone did a study and found that a substantial majority of New Yorkers (in the 1950s) answered, ‘under the clock in Grand Central Station at noon’ — this being the stereotypical meeting place and time for Manhattanites. And, being the most common answer, it was therefore also the right one.
For a while there, it looked as if Meetup was going to be the Grand Central Station clock of the Internet — the default place to look for like-minded strangers. Then economics reared its head: Meetup, which was free and no doubt burning funds at a prodigious rate, decided to start charging for Meetups.
Naturally, meetings are fleeing to the free services. For example, the other day I saw this announcement via The Blogging of the President from the Dean for America campaign:
DFA-Link: DFA is finally moving away from using Meetup.com and has created DFA-Link, its own online organizing tools for local meetings, etc. Please sign up at DFA Link. After August 31, DFA will no longer be using Meetup.com for events or communicating with members.
That same day I got an email promoting a free version called Gatheroo, and promising that it “will not charge”:
Information technologies have been blamed for (among many things) increasing alienation (e.g., game potatoes). The Meetup phenomena moved in the opposite direction – using technologies to bring folks together and thus reversing if not a trend, a perception. … we feel technologies like ours are a response. I have expanded on this in our blog
As I’ve written previously (see Building the Bottom Up from the Top Down), I agree that meetup-style services are of great potential value and importance. The problem is that while there was one, famous, meetup.com, there are at present many free alternatives, with no one service seeming likely to achieve dominance. But this game is non-constant-sum: unless some player can evolve a dominant strategy — or someone can design a crawler/aggregator that combines them all into one feed — we are poorer for it.
Lots of people offer free congealed work product online, be it articles or software. But how many people offer free personalized classes? The Phantom Professor is thinking of doing it:
Here's the offer: The Phantom Professor's Online Writing Workshop. Open admission. Free tuition.
Using all the exercises, reading lists, quizzes and other tricks I have developed during 15 years of teaching, I will offer you, the blogistas, the benefit of my experience and expertise. I will also incorporate new things I learned at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshop, the most creative and inspiring haven for writers in America. You can find most of what we'll read on the Internet or in a library, so you don't even have to buy books. (Though some of them you will want to own.)
If you need help getting that novel or screenplay started, this four-month workshop will kickstart you into a creative mode that will get that sucker under way. If you're interested in journalism, here's where you can start. If you have just never felt confident putting words on paper, step right up. You don't have to be college age. My techniques work whether you're 12 or 92.
I will post short exercises to help you improve grammar, punctuation, spelling and style. You will do them at your own pace and grade them yourself.
Every couple of weeks, you'll have a short assignment (no more than 300 to 500 words) due. You can email them to me or post them in the comments section for everyone to read. We can “workshop” your output together. With positive but honest critiques to work from, you will rewrite these assignments until they are polished. You can even drop in and out as your schedule permits or your interest waxes and wanes.
Why am I doing this? Why not? As I watched my professor friends head back to classes, I just thought, “Why waste all the good stuff I've accumulated? Why not make it available for anyone who wants to do it?”
Even my agent likes the idea. Even though I'm doing it gratis.
So let me know what you think. Would you join this “class”? If enough of you do, we'll start a week from today. I always did like the Tuesday-Thursday schedule best.
I imagine there will be a stampede.
It’s official, or as official as a Google Fight can make it–War Beats Peace. See the details at googlefight (alas, may work better with IE than Firefox).
(This entry totally changed since it was eating the blog; apologies to anyone whose RSS feed I messed up.)
Argon Zark may be the best online comic book graphic novel on the Internet. It's certainly one of the most visually arresting. Great colorful art, lots of sly (and a few very obvious) technojokes.
Start with ARGON ZARK! Chapter 1.
And join the ranks of those who wish it were updated more often.
While I am in Crete attending a fascinating seminar, and Jon is doing such a wonderful job of blogging here, ICANN is having what promises to be a more-substantive-than-usual meeting in Luxembourg. At the heart of the debate are critical issues of DNS policy. (For the latest word on the politics of it all, see Kieren McCarthys ICANN Blog and his US Govt Interference Is a Big Deal, Says Europe.) One line you can expect to hear often is that it’s important to keep the Internet from being Balkanized.
The trouble is, the Internet is already being Balkanized. One the one had you have the Great Firewall of China and other national censorship efforts. And then there’s the roadblock I encountered today: Google. If you try to reach google.com from here, you are redirected to google.gr and all the prompts are in Greek. Go to google.us and you are redirected to google.gr. Run your search in English and you will get English language results (but the prompts are all in Greek). Amend the URL for that search, which used google.gr to one with google.com….and it’s still too smart and redirects to google.gr.
Are we Balkanized already?
Jotwell Blenderlaw