Cable TV seems to have become the home of any programming with the least hint of political controversy. Meanwhile, the networks grow increasingly brave about broadcasting shows featuring lingerie models parading in the latest fashions, and ordinary people competing for cash by eating live insects.

Comments from Jeremy:

At this time of year, we can be thankful that "free" television is so aggressively engaged in its own creative destruction. Would that other outmoded industries shared this apparent zest for death.

The ineffectiveness of much-maligned "banner" advertising is not a failure of the Internet in general or the Web in particular. Rather, it is a sign of the times.

In the industrial era, the typical middle class laborer suffered through day after day filled with tedious, repetitive tasks. Many workers found themselves performing one simple task, over and over, for hours on end. Television was an escape and a diversion that delivered variety, in rapid fire segments, interspersed with messages from sponsors promising to satiate the public's new and growing desire for consumer products. At a time when much of the public was still employed in jobs that involved manual labor, an evening on the couch in front of the television was a well-earned respite after a hard day's work. The intangibility of television was a welcome contrast to the hard products of the assembly line, and the intentional inanity of the sitcom was simple escapism.

In today's world, sedentary "knowledge workers" spend their days at a desk, in front of a computer and a telephone, struggling to juggle a multitude of ill-defined tasks. In many cases, workers can no longer point to a pallet full of products, neatly packaged for shipment, as evidence of eight hours' effort well spent. Instead, they are left to measure their productivity by tallying up the number of emails sent and the PowerPoint slides generated. At the end of a day like that, broadcast television is far less attractive than it was in the previous era. When friends can reach each other by telephone, immediately, at any time of day or night, regardless of their location, without any prior coordination among them, and when even a "normal" family rarely gets everyone together for evening dinner, it hardly seems appropriate to demand that the entire nation sit down together for an episode of "The Bachelor." As the world of work becomes increasingly unreal, television adapts to the change, foil-like, to offer viewers the real, but it overcorrects, and thus ends up creating the surreal.

TiVo is the cellular telephone of television. TiVo does to time what mobile telephony does to space. To argue against the inevitability of TiVo is to deny the proven successes of Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and the rest. The broadcast flag is but a finger against the dam that is the Internet.

In this environment, the road less traveled by is the product less advertised, or not at all, and this will make all the difference. This apparent contradiction of Metcalfe's Law is in fact the very engine of growth in a network society, because it keeps the world forever in transition.

CBS Cancels 'The Reagans'

] If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to
] neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and
] passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a
] hard time coming up with a better tool than
] Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give
] them a culture in which alpha status requires
] months of focus and resource-consumptive
] preparation, provide them with metric tons of
] psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore
] them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be
] out registering voters, or doing anything that
] might actually threaten electoral change, when
] they have an art car to build.

Barlow on Burning Man and Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Another amazing dispatch from Barlow. As usual, I find myself either agreeing with everything he says, or at the very least find some great insight in it.

[BarlowFriendz] 9.8: Spectacles in the Desert

] Search-engine giant Google recently made a $30 million
] offer to buy Friendster, the hot Sunnyvale online dating
] site that lets users meet and date friends of their
] friends.
]
] Friendster spurned the proposal, choosing instead to
] accept $13 million in fresh investments from venture
] capital firms, according to two VC insiders familiar with
] the events.

Mercury News | 10/31/2003 | Friendster spurns Google

] Sources inform Globes that Israeli start-up
] Huminity has raised $2-4 million, at a company value of
] $10 million, after money, in its first financing round.
] Sources close to the company said a leading Israeli
] venture capital fund, a US fund, and the CEO of one of
] the world's largest Internet companies participated in
] the round, which is close to completion. Huminity
] cofounders Oren Rossen and Nir Ben-Halevy declined to
] disclose details about the round.

I still have yet to receive any feedback from _anyone_ about Huminity.. Is anyone out there still using MS? Anyone?

Someone install this damn thing and tell me about its networking protocol..

] Huminity, which develops Internet-based software tools
] to manage personal and professional networks, launched
] its first financing round when it had a working product with
] 400,000 customers worldwide. In recent months, the two
] entrepreneurs made progress on developing the software,
] which uses extremely low-cost open code. Rossen said they
] had personally invested $30,000 by the time they launched
] the first version. He added that the company's cash burn rate
] was $3,500 a month.

The "extremely low-cost open code" they speak of appears to be something called Inxight Star Tree Studio.. Something else that I can't run right now.

Globes - Social networking software co Huminity raises $2-4m

] The FCC will begin a yearlong inquiry into the
] "appropriate regulatory environment for these services"
] on Dec. 1, the commission said in an announcement.
]
] "The FCC has been studying VoIP issues for several years,
] but things have greatly accelerated over the past year,
] and, thus, so have the FCC's actions to address the
] complex issues that arise,"
]
] FCC Chairman Michael Powell wrote in an accompanying
] letter to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who is sponsoring an
] Internet tax ban that could affect voice over Internet
] Protocol services.

Great, the FCC is really on a roll now.. No good can possibly come of this.

FCC to begin VoIP inquiry | CNET News.com

] Huminity is a free social networking software that allows
] you to chat with anyone, navigate animated maps of
] connections and view the links of friends between you and
] anyone else - introducing - Huminity 6-degree
] chat!

Just got word of this via Jacob Levy via Dana Boyd.

This looks very cool. However, I cannot run it right now because everything I have around is some variant of unix.. I'll find myself in front of a windows machine at some point soon, but in the meantime I'd love to hear some people's thoughts on this.

In particular, some detail about the protocols its using.. Is this something I can export data to in FOAF? I am _really_ interested in chat and client end stuff.. We are in the process of making massive changes to the MemeStreams backend that's going to allow us to push out all kinds of data to stuff like this. This looks exactly like the type of application we envision this system being able to work in concert with.

From the "About Us" page:
] We are two guys, 30+. We believe that people will achieve
] more by helping each other and that it is time that the
] Internet evolves for people as much as it has evolved for
] corporates.

That sounds familiar...

UPDATE:

via #joiito:
[21:38] [adamhill] M: Huminity is incorporated in Antigua and does not allow trademarked nicks

Hmm..

Huminity social networking & chat software. 6-degree chat!

] Prime Minister Jean Chretien on Wednesday protested the
] U.S. treatment of a Canadian citizen who was detained in
] New York and deported to Syria last year on suspicion of
] having links to terrorists.

I've only tuned into one or two of the articles about what happened to this guy.. Its pretty over the top. This isn't right. I want the full story here.

Chretien Protests Deportation of Canadian (washingtonpost.com)

] Cryptome received a visit today from FBI Special Agents.
]
] SA Renner said that a person had reported Cryptome as a
] source of information that could be used to harm the United
] States. He said Cryptome website had been examined and
] nothing on the site was illegal but information there might be
] used for harmful purposes.

FBI Visits Cryptome

] Ensembl presents up-to-date sequence data and the best
] possible annotation for metazoan genomes. Available now
] are human, mouse, rat, fugu, zebrafish, mosquito,
] Drosophila, C. elegans, and C. briggsae, Others will be
] added soon.

Surf the human genome!

Ensembl Genome Browser

] An anonymous reader writes "The BitKeeper to CVS gateway
] was apparently hacked in an attempt to add a root exploit
] back door to the Linux kernel, according to the
] linux-kernel archive. The change was in the file
] kernel/exit.c and changed the user ID of a process to
] root under the guise of checking the validity of some
] flags. The core Linux BitKeeper kernel repository was not
] at risk, and in fact it was the BitKeeper CVS export
] scripts that detected the unauthorized modifications to
] CVS. The changes were falsely attributed in CVS to
] long-time Linux developer davem (David Miller). Users of
] the BKCVS repository should resync their trees to remove
] the offending code if they had replicated it since
] yesterday."

Slashdot | Linux Kernel Back-Door Hack Attempt Discovered