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Random Crap
Life has got in between me and the several interesting things that came up yesterday that I had planned to write about. By life, I mean the SCOTUS doings and, well, late night Harry Potter reading (Who is this half blood prince? I don't even have a good guess. Also, a point on which I am confused -- are Hermoine's mother and father both Muggles or is she 'half blood' herself? There seems to be some ambiguity on this.) As today will likely be a busy one, I'm going to simply run through a few of these things quickly. First, behold the power of the the Internets -- they raised more than $100,000 in one day for Paul Hackett, a candidate in Ohio's second congressional district. Second, and strangely concerning Ohio, Grow Ohio seems a remarkable new thing. Third, CivicSpace-based and free Gatheroo has emerged as an alternative to Meetup. Fourth, Bobby Fischer's randomized chess game with 960 possible opening boards that is gaining in chess-world acceptance. And finally, Ezra Klein has laid out some intial thinking on one potentially reasonable way of approaching the John Roberts nomination. (Also, fun fact -- if Roberts is confirmed, six of nine sitting justices will have passed through Harvard at some point.)
In Case of Emergency
Now here is something that I just love to see. The idea, from a British paramedic, is to have people to label entries in their cell phones with "ICE" (in case of emergency). So, on the slim chance that this needs further explanation, I might, for example, have an entry in my phone that reads "ICE -- Jane." And then if I'm ever in a bad situation and emergency services personnel finds my phone, they know to call Jane and tell her what happened. It's a simple and free architectural tweak that might actually do some good. I love it.
(You have to know it's a good idea when the criticism of the plan that a "senior emergency services analyst" [one whom you might expect would be supportive of this sort of thing] is that you might forget to update your entry and when something horrible happens to you they call your ex-girlfriend or boyfriend.)
The Gladwell Revolution
I've gone and spotted a phenomena. It's reporters using this idea of a "tipping point" a la Malcolm Gladwell in news articles and the like. For example, yesterday it was E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post with "is there a tipping point, where the presence of Mr. Rove would simply not be worth the unwanted attention that goes with it?" And this morning it was Anne Kornblut in the New York Times with "the issue now is whether the Karl Rove leak affair marks a tipping point in the way President Bush's administration is viewed by the public." A two example phenomena so far, yes, and both in the Rovian context, but I'm going to keep my eyes open.
While we're on the topic of tipping points, I've noticed lately that for more and more things that I google, a link to Wikipedia is among the first or first several results. For example, it's the first result returned in a search for "Karl Rove," the fourth for "Darfur," and the seventh for "World War II." Given the dominance of Google, and given that PageRank rewards resource sites (and as long as we suppose that more people are going to link to an encyclopedia-like site over time than to one particular news story or the like), we should perhaps resign ourselves to a world where things are largely what Wikipedia says they be.
Potter Experiment: Amazon Success
Okay, so this may not have been the most scientifically rigorously of experiments because I decided to go ahead with a planned trip to go see the wild ponies of Assateague Island and camp out overnight, despite the miserable weather forecast. But my Amazon-ordered Harry Potter was waiting for me in my mailbox when I got home on Sunday.
Harry Potter Experiment
I'm doing a bit of an experiment. When it was announced last December that the new Harry Potter was coming out, I pre-ordered it on Amazon. I could have just gone to Kramers last night and gotten it right away, as they're open all night on weekends (I could have gotten a slice of cake too -- cafe is also open all night), but I wanted to see how quickly Amazon could get it to me after it was released on Friday at midnight. It's only 8:15 on Saturday morning so I didn't expect it yet, but I'm expecting to see it around mid-day.
Ipodizing News
There's an interesting idea in this Bill Powers article in the National Journal on how news could be better. Like I find with a lot of the ideas I find most exciting, I'm not sure what it means in any real sense. But that's okay this time because Powers doesn't, as far as I can tell, seem to have any real idea either. The general idea is this: newspapers and others in the business should focus on making the news an overall consistent quality experience. The part that I love is that Powers' holds up as a model what he nicely calls the "exquisite perfectionism" of the iPod. What with its beautiful design, intuitiveness, and adaptability.
As I said, I have no real idea yet what this would actually mean for any part of gathering news, creating news, or sharing news. But it's not like iPod was built in a day.
We Are Not Afraid
 This is rapid response. Within hours of the bombings in London last week, We are Not Afraid (WordPress-powered and Creative Commons-Licensed) was up and running. The early posts are consist mostly of Londoners (I'm presuming a bit that they're Londoners -- they either identify themselves as Londoners or look a lot like they could be) expressing their defiance of the terrorists by holding up hand-made signs with some variant of "we are not afraid" written on them, like the one to the right. One thing that's interesting is how little time it took for folks to start playing with the medium. Newer posts -- many coming in from outside London from, for example, the US, Italy, Germany, Chile, and Brazil -- involve, for example, South Park mock-ups, and a guy hitting a bong and wondering what there is to be afraid of, and, not surprisingly given the blog-like format of the site, cats. (Sorry, the site has no permalinks.)
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