I was going through some of my video files and came across some Sifl and Olly episodes. Their website actually has a section called Underground Videos which has some early vids. The best one of these is actually not on that page, but on the Chester-ville page. Be sure to check out Chester’s message to the ladies.

Since those little underground clips are a pretty crappy introduction for sifl and olly, I thought I’d throw up a little divx clip that I had floating around:

• Sifl and Olly – Orgasm and G-Spot.avi – 13MB of Sifl and Olly goodness.

reemul asks: if the secret teachings of the Scientologists are actually ancient knowledge handed down by superior beings, wouldn’t the copyright period have already expired? If the works *are* copyrightable, doesn’t that indicate that the documents are a new creation authored in the last 75 years? Hmmm….

tikk posts an insightful comment which explains why the whole Google/Scientology thing hasn’t blown over and why the DMCA is bad news for search engines. (we knew the bad news part already).

/. sidenote: The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout will be an interesting experience. Personally, the comments are for me, pretty much the primary reason I read /. If I wanted just the latest tech news, I could do just as well following the register/inquirer or news.com. It’s too bad that /.’s community relations are so messed up (partly caused/perpetuated by some of the /. editor’s attitudes on the whole thing, I suppose).

I’m not sure why everyone seems surprised that ST:Nemesis is such a turd. Anyone who thinks that John Logan can write has obviously not seen the Time Machine (went to the premiere. even free and with free popcorn and soda, it wasn’t worth seeing – although it did serve as a sad reminder of the mediocrity that gets churned out regularly by the studio system. polished turds, but turds nonetheless and an embarrassment to all the craftsmen and artisans who had to work on the production of the film. what a waste of effort) knows better. Even if you liked Gladiator, you had to admit that the script was passable at best. This is the guy who wrote Bats!

Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver’s Licenses – Yay for National ID cards. Now you can enjoy all the loss of privacy (and more) in real life as online.

Life in Supermax: Notorious criminals talked politics, swapped “smut” mags – I was doing a quick search for Supermax prisons and came across this fascinating article on prison life, and the comraderie that formed between Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.

I put some SXSW 2002 photos up online. I need to flush out notes and do some writing, stuff is coming along slowly at http://randomfoo.net/sxsw/. If I stay motivated, I might even get around to putting up stuff from SXSW 2000 and 2001.

Blogspace: About: a powerful, hyperlinked system for building websites

MeatballWiki: WikiLog – an attempt to synthesize the best aspects of WikiWikis and WebLogs.

I’m about to go home, but I’ll throw in some thoughts in. Rusty and others have some very good thoughts on the page. Of course, currently, there’s no very good way to reference microcontent within a page. Sure, in theory XPath will solve this problem… but um, face it, probably not well, and certainly not for most extant stuff on the web. Someone could (and should) build a spidering tool/browser widget to facilitate intrapage linking, but I’m moving off tangent…

Back on target, rambling thoughts for a successful “Collaborative Hypermedia” tool. Nothing that hasn’t said before, just clearing my brain a little:

• Transclusion Engine: Often overlooked, but one of the best things about the Wiki simply has to do with the fact that it offers easy breezy, intuitive text->html and text->text conversions. This is a feature that can easily be wedged onto any system.
• Views: the weblog, that is, reverse chronological single posts (I’ll generalize posts and call them nodes), is a single view. The node can have various properties, which would of course include the contents, but may also include input/output templates, etc. Nodes could be typed (or of a classes, along with all the other OO ideas). Besides category views, problems can be solved by creating additional views, say based on activity, allowing pinning of certain topics, etc. A useful tool would be an interface that eases the generation and reorganization of these views to a one or two click affair.
• Categories: Categories should be m:n, that much is obvious. Whump and xBlog have been doing this for quite a while, it makes sense: things rarely exist in only one category. A tool like TouchGraph could even be a usable interface for say wiki’s which are composed entirely of a graph-like structure. One of the questions that comes up when dealing with categories is whether to allow some sort of hierarchy. If there is, it seems to make sense to use a graph-like structure than force a tree.
• Nodes: Nodes can be more than posts. They can be comments, or annotations, bookmarks, or journal entries. They might be attached in any number of ways, either within or without.
• Relations: Most systems don’t have complex relations. Having such a system opens up all sorts of possibilities. For example, a node could be attached to, before, after, in response to, related to, arguing against. Hmm, we’re talking Semantic Web stuff here. ( w3c sw, w3c design sematicweb, rdfweb)
• Diffs: Versioning is a type of relation. As with all the relations, it contains it’s own rules for rendering. Ideally, in a system that stores versions, you’d like an easy interface to be able to have multiple views of the versioned data (say, as it is, as it was at any time, with strikethroughs [diffed], etc.)
• Trust metrics/Collaborative Filtering/Ratings: this can be separated into two sets of problems, one for evaluating content, and one for evaluating users. Since I’m not a deontological type of fellow, my tendency is towards creating a system that tries to find relative worth based on each node or user. Still thinking on this one…

Register: Benchmarks demolish Apple speed boasts. Thank you, come again.

Speaking of P2PJ, Henry Jenkins has written an article: Online diarists rule an Internet strewn with failed dot-coms (blogdex).

Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard.