General

A little inspiration.

Thinking about what we face in our renewed battle against Business as Usual, I recall some of the quotes from Martin Luther King, inscribed in glass at his Yerba Buena Gardens memorial, which stands behind a waterfall beside the grassy roof of Moscone North in San Francisco. Each brings to mind a different leader in our movement:

For Larry: The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

For Dave: Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.

For Richard: There is nothing in all the world greater than freedom. It is worth paying for; it is worth going to jail for. I would rather die in abject poverty with my convictions than live in inordinate riches with lack of self-respect.

For all of us (and especially David): We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Yes, I know they don’t all agree about everything. That doesn’t matter.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Halley: “..transfixed by the picture of Professor Lessig on his blog.” [Scripting News]

Why Britain needs more guns. As gun crime leaps by 35% in a year, plans are afoot for a further crack down on firearms. Yet what we need is more guns, not fewer. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

I’m planning the blogging website for Harvard in my head, and thought of a question I’d like to ask Harvard students and faculty. Would you like to participate in a project to create knowledge? I would have liked that question when I was a student. Of course! Yes yes yes. That’s why I came to college. But there were so few ways for students to participate when I was a student. I wonder if it’s like that at Harvard. I think about the Yahoo guys at Stanford and how inspired they were. What if a university like Harvard, not just a few students, got busy mapping the world of knowledge on the Internet. Each student would take responsibility for some period of time for some aspect of world knowledge. When they graduate they pass it on, or even better, take the responsibility with them, into life. Does any of this make sense? I’m beta testing ideas here as I go. [Scripting News]

Kmart Closes 326 Stores and Eliminates Over 30,000 Jobs. Kmart Corp. will close 326 stores and cut 30,000-35,000 jobs as it works to emerge from bankruptcy by April 30, the retailer said today. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

cs 1.6: hands-on. cs-nation updates [CS-Nation]

Cut off the head and the body dies.

Nobody seems to be missing Steve Case.

Consider this possibility: As much as he may have fucked up the merger with Time Warner, and mismanaged everything since, Steve Case was the only guy who could have saved AOL.

That’s what I thought last Summer, when Steve still had his job. Now he’s gone, and AOL is toast.

Time Warner was, and will remain, a media company. With few exceptions (hell, I can’t think of any, except maybe (and very partially ÷ see half the items below) the New York Times ÷ maybe ya’ll can help me here) media companies don’t get the Net.

[Later…] Lance Knobel names two, both in the UK.

How can you tell if they do?

1. They expose their archives, so search engines can crawl them
   
2. They don’t move around (and 404) their archives
   
3. They don’t refer to their customers as “consumers”
   
4. They do everything they can to make it easy for people to find and use their goods
   
5. They know, instinctively, that doing all the above yields greater value in authority than whatever value in dollars they obtain by selling yesterday’s or last week’s bird-cage liner
   
6. They don’t labor to dumb down technologies, so readers, viewers or listeners are forced to endure unwanted advertising
   
7. They value and work to improve interoperability
   
8. They don’t try to improve on the vacuum-filled end-to-end stupidity of the Net itself
   
9. They embrace and extend the Net’s own infrastructure (which provides that end-to-end stupidity)
   
10. They don’t sit quietly with their thumbs up their asses when powerful entertainment lobbies railroad laws and regulations that limit or eliminate the ability of innovative media enterprises (including themselves) to do business

[The Doc Searls Weblog]