DOC BENWAY HERE ………. NURSE, SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE
OF LAUDANUM ………. RECOLLECT ONCE ME AND CLEM CLONE WAS CHEWIN
JOHIMBE BARK OUT BACK OF JODY’S ALL-NIGHT PET SHOP …….

NOT A FINER MAN IN THIS WHOLE ZONE
THAN OL’ CLEM ‘N JODY CLONE …..

****WHERE WAS WE, YEAH —- USE AUTHORIZED DATA BASE ACCESS
PROTOCOLS ONLY ….. SENSUOUS KEYSTROKES FORBIDDEN ….. DO NOT
STRUM THAT 33 LIKE A HAWAIIAN STEEL GUITAR ….. GRAND CONCLAVE
OF THE PARTIES OF INTERZONE: CHECK YOUR BOX FOR DETAILS…..
PERSONAL ATTENDANCE REQUIRED; SEND NO REPLICA. BENWAY OUT.
TLALCLATLAN ……

community memory

I’ve bookmarked dozens of links to information on a panoply of web publishing tools–weapons, as some would have it, in the war between pixels and print. From social networking to search engine optimization, from the politics of pillage and plunder (from New York and Detroit to South Kivu) to this week’s twentieth anniversary of the death of I.F. Stone–my attention has dissolved in the kaleidoscopic refraction of all things imaginable to write about.

Last winter I was humbled by a brief stint writing posts for peanuts at a start-up blog that was being packaged for resale to some web media company–this in the days before the big web media companies contracted and began to sizzle like salted banana slugs on hot pavement. During that time I had a couple of reminders of my own mortality including a back injury and a heart attack. The heart attack left me somewhat subdued. I simply couldn’t find the energy to write about health care and aging, right wing militias, extremist violence, disparities in justice administration, war crimes tribunals or any of the other topics that get the adrenalin pumping and the blood of righteous indignation flowing in my somewhat obstructed arteries.

At a certain age we understand that there won’t be time for everything and there aren’t a lot of do-overs left for us. Health fails. Death ensues. The question, “How’s all that social networking working out for you?” deserves an answer. I’d like this blog to be my answer. There’s not enough time to waste it on Facebook.

And, as the woman says:

yawn internet yawn i’m building a shed

…only in my case it’s not really a shed, I have sheds-a-plenty. No, in my case it’s a vegetable garden, of which more later.

The flip of a tractor trailer
The writhe of a live power line
The closing of the main road
Has me on this sidestreet
Looking for a way home
A house, woods, trees
Just another cul-de-sac
With no way out
And there in the hollow
Of an oak I see a face
Mumbling the words
‘We must work, work, work’

Which could be my grandfather’s
Just before he fell off the wagon
And died alone on a long binge
Quickly I retreat
But soon I’m back
At another sleepy circle
In front of another house
Looking much like the other
Staring at another face
Whispering in the hollow:
‘I’m in mourning for my life’

Which could be yours from
25 years ago speaking the words
Of some playwright from 50 years before
On some stage I’d long forgotten
(Hope you’re doing fine)
(And whatever role you’ve found
is the one you want)
Or maybe it was the blank stare
Of my grandmother
Who would sit for hours
Watching wrestling on TV
‘Mammaw, you know it’s not real’
‘Oh but it is. I’ve seen the blood.’

And so I get out of there
Only to find another cul-de-sac
Much like the others
And this time it’s the stupor of my father
Stumbling through the front door
His white T drenched with blood
Glass in his hair, but now he looks
Like David Carradine, whispering:
‘Two things we know, Grasshopper.
All living things suffer. And yet
they are programmed to keep going.
Til they just can’t go no more.’

And then there ’s this nirvanic grin
Followed by a gurgling sound
And then nothing
But a curdling darkness
Wrapping about me
Like an old cloak
from an old theater
expecting me to slip in
Or maybe it’s just an ordinary owl
Keeping me from sleep
With his ridiculous truths
From some other century
And all will be forgotten
On the way to work
In a certain slant of morning
Beyond the tinny grace of birds
Teasing in the distance.
— Ray Sweatman

Wave positions Google to smash and mash the worlds of social media and cloud computing, to drive a stake through the heart of traditional email, to sink Sharepoint and other proprietary collaboration tools. Wave is friendfeed on steroids and it is so much more.

“Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today,” according to Lars Rasmussen, co-inventor of the product. After watching the developer preview, I’ve gathered that Wave is:

• “A personal communication and collaboration tool…”
• “A simple communication object…”
• “…an HTML5 app…”
• Open source…
• a shared object hosted on a server somewhere…
• a return of the BBS bulletin board, but now with real time interaction…
• a mash-up of email and IRC chat
• shared screens with events registering real-time on all participants’ browsers, keystroke by keystroke
• embeddable… you can embed a wave on any website
• like a wiki only better — drag and drop file sharing!!

So, there’s a sophisticated threading that happens… you write, I watch what you write and I compose while you’re writing. Instead of the basic asynchronous nature of online chat or email, you doing a [write - wait - read] thing, while I do a [wait - read - write] thing, we become aware of each other in real time like in a real conversation and we compress those asynchronous [wait] intervals out of the interaction. Or, the conversation can, as in email, continue asynchronously if one of us is offline, away from the Wave.

Any time we want, we can pull in another participant, who can come up to speed by doing a “playback” of the entire interaction to that point: an instant replay of all the “he said/ she said/ he said/ he added/ she said…” stuff from the beginning of the conversation to the present. Any subset of participants can spawn their own “wavelet” within a wave to take a private conversation “offline,” hammer out an issue, and then rejoin the public conversation. The private interaction is available via playback to those who participated, but screened off from those who were not included. Playback allows us to track changes and to revert, making it chock full of wiki goodness.

Also wiki-like (but more powerful) is the drag and drop file sharing feature. I can drag a file from my desktop and drop it in the wave, essentially broadcasting it to everyone else who is on that wave. Sharing objects via drag and drop from the desktop to the browser isn’t yet supported by HTML5 so at this point it’s accomplished using Google Gears. The Wave team has put in a feature request to the HTML5 working group.

The Google Wave API supports extensions so applications can be built to interact with the Wave. The extensions are either “robots” or “gadgets” built to extend and enhance the Wave’s functions. A robot is an automated participant in a conversation buried deep under the covers. Robots interact with waves, talk with users and perform simple tasks like pulling up information such as stock quotes from outside sources. Gadgets? A gadget is a Google Wave extension that helps define the look and feel of the wave. A gadget can be the hub for an online game played by Wave participants. The Wave that contains the gadget is the gadget owner, not the user who added the gadget. Gadgets can be written with a text editor and hosted anywhere outside a firewall.

Mashable has a nice “Wave Guide” by Ben Parr that includes all the terminology you need to get comfortable with the Wave.

If you want to learn more Wave-ology, here is a list of links that can get you started:

• twitter @waveappreview
• A couple of YouTube think pieces on conversations
  1. Limits of Conversational Structure
  2. MIT’s Deliberatorium/Collaboratorium
• Wave developer preview
• HTML5 Specification
  
• Dare Obasanjo – Developers on Google Wave
• Google Wave Federation Architecture
• Google Wave Federation Protocol
• Google Wave Extensions – the Wave API
  
• Shannon Clark repackaged at JOHO the Blog

I checked out the bio and resume and then peeked at the portfolio. Holy moley, what a writer!!

(Blame my excessive use of bangs as the typesetters used to call them—although they resemble neither a combed forward hairstyle nor a British sausage so what’s that about anyway?—blame the exclamation points on my real excitement that Jeneane is again getting her freak on, blog-wise. Allied has had about a post a month recently, and I lost track of Jeneane.net entirely. Perhaps I need more RSS and less twitfeed.)

it was the | was the best | the best of | best of times | of times it |
times it was | it was the | was the worst | the worst of | worst of times

Wolfram Alpha opened its doors today. What’s Wolfram Alpha?

…the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…

Go Nuts!

It’s not mandatory to be blown about in the tempestuous seas of irony and synchronicity. We have a choice. It’s not required that we comment on every coincidental circumstance that somehow adds a deeper meaning to the tapestry of our lives. Sometimes it works just to ignore that shit until it goes away. But not always—like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects the Norman Conquest.

Old Braxton was maybe thirty when he died. His passing is a marker on my own journey. I’d known him for twenty years, and I wonder where that time has gone. When we first met, Braxton shared his pasture with goats. There are stories to tell about that mixed herd, but over the years the goats disappeared and Braxton remained, joined by a couple more horses. So he lost that reputation of being a gelding among goats.

The old fellow anchored the south side of our extended biosphere for twenty years or so. He was kind enough not to kick the dogs or step on my feet and he had the softest nuzzly muzzle imaginable when you offered him an apple. These last few years he spent a lot of time in his stall, but you never knew when you’d see him out under the full moon, or up with the sun cropping the dewy grass, or just feeling his oats on a wild run across the pasture.

When the weather was hot or the flies were bad, Braxton enjoyed rolling in the mud. What could be better than that? Braxton, this song’s for you…

“…Tuvan throatsong rendition of “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer,” arranged by Harry Partch. With the puzzling (and not a little disturbing) exception of his duet with Diamanda Galas on “Frosty the Snowman,” the Italian semiologist hardly takes a false aesthetic step. The liner notes also feature Eco’s now-classic essay on the traditional holiday sweater as a locus of commodity resistance, and a gatefold of photographs in which he models some of his own hand-knitted examples. They aren’t all to my own taste, or even wearable on human bodies, but you can tell he means every stitch and you know I can’t resist earnest failures, and brave approaches to the rim of disaster.”

Leaving me wondering whether Harry is related to Virgil.