In an unscientific poll, currently, over 93% of voters would prefer a peanut butter sandwich over George W. Bush as the next president.

The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Deans flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble. The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of medias role in the American power structure.

• MozWho, AndyEd’s ongoing work on creating a personal adaptive hompage. See also the MozWho Labs, tabWatcher, and prior art
• Bookie – centralized Java bookmark server
• del.icio.us
• Bookmark Links from last year

New review of bookmark tools:

• del.icio.us – I can see the good things about it, but the interface is clumsy and I don’t really care about the social software aspect of it. still very alpha, no organization (see REST api
• Between Book Pages (BBPS) – pretty minimal
• ol’bookmarks – mature, but fat rendering
• online-bookmarks – YABS
• PHP Bookmarks – simple listings, has separate admin/browse views
• SiteBar – very feature rich, has DHTML tree view (not dynamically loading)
• Tasks – it’s not bookmarking software, but has nice features that could be applicable when designing a bookmarking system
• b. – collaborative bookmarking w/ some interesting features/ideas; nice looking also, but clumsy interface, very shoestringy (flat files/cgi)
• Booby – nicely done, has import/export, also has contacts, todo, notes and news (RSS), but is a big slow fat interface
• Bookmark4U – lots of features, not sure how many are useful, refresh too annoying to take closer look
• Bookmarker – this is the OG. Err, it hasn’t really been updated for the past 3 years though

Desired Features:

• Mozilla Integration
• Multiple Bookmark lists
• Multiple Sorts, Filtering, Fuzzy Searches
• Faceted Navigation
• DHTML/XUL interface, remote scripting
• Ability to handle duplicates
• Rating/data collection
• Metadata storage, Caching (what is an ‘url’ object model composed of?)
• Import/Export single links, RSS, XBEL
• Eventual Browser History integration
• Eventual KB/Wiki integration
• Bonus: Multi-user/group, fine grained access control
• Bonus: locally caching?

I’ll give SiteBar and Bookmark4U a try, but I have a feeling that I’ll probably not like either enough to stick w/ them.

I’ve been looking around and am sort of surprised that no one has created a comprehensive PHP secure cookie/session library. Am I missing something?

• DB sessions
• Optional Client-Side Login Hashing
• Request-based Session Regeneration
• Page Tokens (even better w/ Session ID masking)
• Optional IP Locking
• User/Session checking/limiting
• Cookie Envelopes
• Forging/Brute Force detection, actions (tarpitting, lock-outs/bans)
• Cookie shredding

DSS Papers to write:

• Methods for controlling personal data propagation within SSNs
• Trust models in DSS systems

Oh Lordy:

“NOBODY showed up? I would think having a high Sardonix rating would be a nice piece of “hacker-street-cred”

This isn’t Compton.

You’re not going to go on an interview and throw up your Linux “signs.”

Slackware beeyotch. Represent.

apt-get 4 life, thug.

Werd.

So, I’ve only had layovers in Alaska and Missouri. Does that even count? In any case, yes, I’m due for a big-ass roadtrip sometime.

Ha! Got a request to buy a text link on my blog from an SEO company. (and what’s the link you ask? a link is to search engine submittal service). Sorry, PageRank is supposed to be used in the service of finding what you want, not making the web less useful.

USC is a Pepsi campus. Who wants to set up cap-collection boxes around campus?

• Recycle some of your 100 million Pepsi Songs – /. thread on Tune Recycler BTW, as I’ve pointed out before, Menomena rocks. Oh, and so does Derek: CD Baby’s Digital Distribution – FREE! (see also Derek’s responses to DD criticism)

Personally, while the recycler is good for those that won’t/can’t redeem the iTunes, I think that a list of recommended artists/labels might be useful as well, for people who are looking to support the artists and find new music.

Some good reasons by iTunes is bogus. Remember, you own a CD you buy, but you get a EULA for your iTunes. You have no first-sale rights, no unregulated or fair use.

It may be time for me to write a paper, if only to find referers from people who are working/thinking about interesting things within the space.

• While I’ve been zoned out, Eric’s been writing good stuff and getting boku linkpop on the DSS. w00t w00t
• Xanadu Redux: Citizen Kane, Deep Hypertext & Interactive Authoring – April 22 @ DML, USC
• How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think
• procrastination diagram – blog of Karl Ramm, MetaCarta employee; interesting thoughts on social networking software
• WiredReach – the world’s first decentralized social networking software – have they done everything already?
• The Circle – australian P2P dark-net w/ decentralized hashtable (Chord), DRM privacy
• The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet
  

  This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age.

• Tree Hash EXchange format (THEX) – still toread
• The case for generating URIs by hashing RDF content (PDF)
• Hashing Spatial Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks (PDF)
• Ivy: A Read/Write Peer-to-Peer File System (PDF)
• [Csci551-talk] content-hashing in p2p nets
• Google: Merkle Hash Trees
• A distributed approach to high-performance information retrieval
  

  A distributed architecture and indexing algorithm for high-performance information retrieval has been developed. A prototype system has been built that achieves a throughput of 500 queries per second with a response time of less than one second on an 8-node network of workstations. The algorithm is robust in the presence of lost and duplicated messages as well as failures of nodes of the network. The architecture can be scaled up to larger networks and higher levels of service. The retrieval model allows for semantically rich queries and information objects.

• Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia – by Cory Doctorow, Aug 2001, on why metadata is intractible
• Social Bookmarks Manager Right-Click Context Menu
  

  Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

• How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
  

  This follows Putting Facets on the
  Web: An Annotated Bibliography, and is the second paper I wrote for
  Prof. Clare Beghtol of the Faculty of
  Information Studies at the University of Toronto, who led me in a
  reading course named “Applying Faceted Classification in an Online World.”
  (It’s also available as a PDF (215K)
  which is formatted for printing.)

• PubSub
  

  PubSub Concepts provides real-time, content based publish and subscribe systems at internet scale. This site is a Beta version of our home page, which will provide a PubSub interface for weblogs and other information sources.

• Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics
  

  The Internet is a giant semiotic system. It is a massive collection of Peirce’s three kinds of signs: icons, which show the form of something; indices, which point to something; and symbols, which represent something according to some convention. But current proposals for ontologies and metadata have overlooked some of the most important features of signs. A sign has three aspects: it is (1) an entity that represents (2) another entity to (3) an agent. By looking only at the signs themselves, some metadata proposals have lost sight of the entities they represent and the agents ¾ human, animal, or robot ¾ which interpret them. With its three branches of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, semiotics provides guidelines for organizing and using signs to represent something to someone for some purpose. Besides representation, semiotics also supports methods for translating patterns of signs intended for one purpose to other patterns intended for different but related purposes. This article shows how the fundamental semiotic primitives are represented in semantically equivalent notations for logic, including controlled natural languages and various computer languages.