March 2005

Meg Smith at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center sent out an email about a conference they are co-hosting on Friday, April 8th called “Signal or Noise 2k5: Creative Revolution?”

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Journal of Law &
Technology, and the Committee for Sports & Entertainment Law, all of
Harvard Law School, are hosting Signal or Noise 2k5: Creative
Revolution? on April 8, 2005, on the Harvard campus in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The conference website can be found at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn.

The conference offers an exciting mix of performances, demonstrations and discussions examining how digital technologies are enabling new forms of creativity by a broader group of people. Cultural, business, legal and ethical implications of new genres and new forms of authorship will all be covered along with an artist’s interests and rights in downstream uses of original creations.

Scheduled conference participants include New York Times bestselling author Matthew Pearl, copyright scholar Terry Fisher, fanfic author Naomi Novik, David Dixon of Beatallica, innovative musician Dan the Automator, Paul Marino of machinima.org, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, and Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Signal or Noise 2k5 is open to the public but pre-registration is
needed: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/register. For more information about the conference’s location, schedule and participants, please visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/schedule. To view a map of the area: http://map.harvard.edu/level2.cfm?mapname=camb_allston.

Please pass this along to anyone who might be interested. We hope to have as engaged and diverse an audience as the group of participants!

By nature I am a helpful person. That’s not an ego statement: it’s just the way it is. I’ve noticed that I’ve developed a pet peeve. Someone will swoop into my inbox or instant messenger application and ask me if I know so and so. If I say “no” then they say “thanks” and wander off.

How about engaging me (or whoever your connector of choice is) in at least a small conversation before and/or after asking me for information or a favor? One of my personal goals for 2005 has been to lose some of the pessimism I’ve picked up since relocating to Boston from Nebraska all those years ago. Apparently it’s a work in progress.

Poking around Craig’s List I came across this ad from a company called Niner Niner looking for Boston webloggers who want to write on specific topics and get paid. They seem seem to be setting up something that resembles the Gawker Media and Weblogsinc networks. I have no idea who Nine Niner is. Anybody know anything about them?

I just checked the whois record for their domain name and it appears the company is based in St. Louis and they’ve been around since September 2004.

Jess Barron sent me an invite yesterday to join the Yahoo! 360 network/community/blog thingy. It’s been a while since I’ve logged into Friendster, Orkut and Ryze. It’ll be interesting to see if I frequent Yahoo!’s project more consistently. Here’s my profile if you’d like to add me as a contact at 360 Degrees.

This is an updated “About Sooz” entry. I need to submit a bio for a panel I’m on next month. So, I thought I’d put up a new “About Sooz” page here at sooz.com that will help me figure out what to say in that bio. I’m not really fond of talking about myself; but I suppose it might help to give some context to who I am and what I am up to.

[click to continue...]

I’m curating a new mininetwork in the Blogads network for arts and entertainment related weblogs in New England. Henry Copeland of Blogads wrote about the new tool a couple weeks ago including the first mininetwork that Amy Langfield is curating for New York City.

I decided to focus on arts and entertainment related weblogs and not just a general purpose New England network because I think it will help us reach advertisers who better match our blogs. Currently the following sites are in the mininetwork: This Modern World, Hacking Netflix, Exploit Boston!, Boston Sports Media Watch, pc4media and WestPortNow.com. If you’re interested in possibly being selected for the mininetwork, sign up with Blogads.

I haven’t mentioned in a few weeks how much I love flickr. It will be interesting to see how their sale to Yahoo! affects them: hopefully in good ways. I’ve been wanting to do more with the display of photos on websites other than my flickr account/pages but I’m not really techie enough to figure out how to tinker with the API. It appears that Pete Caputa is also curious about what can be done.

I’d really like to talk to someone that has (or is interested in) building off of the flickr API, so that photos stored on flickr, can be shown in an album on another website. Anyone?

Personally, I’d like to be able to have photos from the Exploit Boston! photo pool appear over on my Exploit Boston! website in random order in one spot, similar to the bit of code that flickr provides me (used over on the right side of this page) to do that sort of thing with photos I’ve added to my flickr account.

Anybody know how to do this or have an example of someone doing this on another website?

Pete Caputa and Duncan Arsenault have been hosting a networking mixer in Worcester for the entertainment, advertising and media industries for several months. With 100+ people showing up each month they’re now branching out into other cities including Boston on March 29th at the Boston Billiard Club 8-11PM. Anyone working in the entertainment, advertising and media industries is invited to attend:

• bands, entertainers
• bar, restaurant, lounge and club managers and owners
• DJs
• radio station personalities
• emcees
• designers
• photographers
• music, media, advertising, promotions and marketing personnel and professionals

I’ll be there. Visit the Eastern MA Entertainment, Advertising & Media Networking Mixer event page to learn more and register.

Seth Godin wants to know why so many WiFi networks are closed. His rant was inspired by a recent (not very clueful) article in the New York Times. Seth wrote a followup entry to some criticism he received.

There were no razor blades in apples on Halloween when we were growing up. Did you know that? Really. They made it up. Someone should tell the Times and its readers that if you want to be anonymous on the Net, you can go to Kinko’s or go to Bryant Park or the library. It’s certainly not necessary to scare the nation into closing their wifi hot spots.

One of the things that bugs me that seems to have come about with the pervasiveness of weblogs is the notion that everything is bloggable or shareable. A lot of conversations I have with people require a disclaimer that our conversations are or are not bloggable. I joked with Pete Caputa that it might just be easier if I made a shirt that says “I am not blogging this.” Transparency and openness are both awesome things but sometimes, every word we speak is not intended to be transcribed, shared or documented.