Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Digital film in Iraq

The Voice points out militaryvideos.net, a site which hosts short digital films shot by US soldiers in Iraq.  It's another sign of the growing popular use of the short digital movie form. 

Ourmedia launches

An ambitious project to support multimedia sharing and publication, Ourmedia, launched this week.  The service hosts media content (video, audio, text, images) from any user, for free.  Hosting is guaranteed for the future, thanks to the generous support of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive.
The opportunities for collaboration, shared creativity, social networking, and artistic discovery are immense.  In addition, Ourmedia offers a way out of the copyright impasse, by helping people share their intellectual property.  Go explore!

JD Lasica is one of the leaders of this project. Full disclosure: I'm on the advisory board.

New Making Fiends episode

Making Fiends has a new episode.  Behold, followers new and old. Smile and sing along:

Radical anarchist copyright thinking: the world of fashion

The New Republic reports on a wild-eyed copyright experiment, where piracy is rampant, copies and mixes the rule, and yet the whole thing has gone on for more than a century.  It's fashion, of course.

(thanks to Jesse)

Folksonomy, delicious, semantic web: Jon Udell navigates

Jon Udell offers a good video screencast of using del.icio.us.  It features a sample case of using that web service to hone metadata, find more information, and think about folksonomies and the semantic web's possibilities.  Udell lets the video demonstrate how this stuff works in practice.  He's also careful to show criticism, while remaining generally optimistic.

Two problems occur to me, upon review this screencast.  First, the question of scaling.  We see Jon work on a few tags, react to a small group of people, make a couple of contacts, and reexamine his swarm of links.  Given that this is a very tiny piece of cyberculture, how does it scale up?  Propagating the correction of tags seems likely to generate large swathes of people with different tagschemes, unlikely to change their tagging for reasons of comfort and habit.  Will such segmentation persist?
A second problem is the old metadata one of energy.  There is some ludic delight in tagging, finding other people, seeing new items bubble up on the delicious main page, and watching some others grow in citation. But will this persist for individual users, or grow in social networks? Will people continue to refine their tagging when it isn't fun any longer? If not, will the tag schemes ossify or grow stale?

These two related problems seem as significant as the death by spam issue.

(thanks to Hugh Blackmer)

Google news customization

Google News, still in beta, has just offered a customization feature.  This lets you move sections around, cut or add predefined sections, and make some of your own.  Here's my first pass:

Information and internet struggles in Kyrgyzia?

Information warfare developing in Central Asia: Nettime forwards an OpenNet story on struggles over internet presence in Kyrgyzstan.  A hacker, "Shadow Team," managed to threaten some news sites into shutting down.  A worm has been prowling Kyrgyz servers.  Some opposition politicians are asking the sites to stay up (I can't reach any of the listed ones today).  This occurs against a backdrop of election-related political instability.

The post also has this reflection, which I'd recommend to David Pogue:

The seriousness with which the ISPs, the government and the opposition are treating this matter suggests that the Internet is an increasingly important new battleground. An estimated 300,000 out of a total population of around 5 million in this post-Soviet republic have access to the Internet, and information obtained from the Internet is circulated widely to those without direct access. The rising concern among the government, ISPs and the opposition suggests that everyone has a stake in keeping the Internet open, while deflecting blame to "third parties" for circumstances leading to its closure.

We've blogged central Asian information warfare previously.

More polar music

The MLA listserv offers still more polar music goodness.  One post mentions Inuit Games, from Patrick Carrebre.  Another notes a book, Winter Music, by John Luther Adams (previously mentioned by wise commentators on this blog).  Amazon also led me to another Adams work, White Silence.  More for ever-growing the wiki!

Vampire sf story from Ken Macleod

Scots sf author Ken Macleod has published a vampirism short story in Nature.  "Undead Again" offers a neat riff on an old sf theme, mixed in with vampires.

(thanks to Jesse)

Ensemble Polaris: more polar music

Still following the polar music meme: I've learned about Ensemble Polaris, "Canada's premiere Arctic Fusion Band", through the good work of a fine music librarian at Haverford.  It's excellent music, exploring a variety of musical boundaries (nordic, western medieval, folk, Scots?). In they go to the polar music wiki!

(E. Polaris also have a delightful title for their second album: Not Much is Worse Than a Troll.)