] While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something
] that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me,
] anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to
] fora) represents the democratization of the mediated
] persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several.
] I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the
] printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and
] this website is maintained by a publishing company that
] belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by
] shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest
] of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own
] personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case.
] Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.

William Gibson - SOMEONE WONDERS... - Media perception and blogs

] Blogs are novelists' notebooks (too)
] Today in Gibson's blog, a rumination on what it feels
] like to be a novelist between novels:

Gibson:
] LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST
]
] That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described
] how it feels to be a novelist between books. No place to
] take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating
] his own condition, he said, by writing a horror sorry
] about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg,
] Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is* scary).
]
] No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and
] bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for
] instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge,
] something no magpie would ever be satisfied with doing.

Doctorow:
] I've been using this blog to keep track of stuff that
] needs to work its way into my novels for years now.
] Rucker's blog is nothing but notes on his books. Sterling
] says you can extrapolate his next book from this links on
] his blog. I betcha that's true of Warren Ellis, too.
] Blogs are the new novelist's commonplace book. I've been
] saying this for a while, but I thought I might be the
] only one.

Links contained within..

Boing Boing: Blogs and novelists

] I'm calling in from the highly-guarded border of Iran and
] Kurdistan. A truck is waiting for us to transport CNN
] staff, our personal belongings, and our television gear
] into kurd-controlled northern Iraq. We're crossing into
] this region to cover the northern front of a potential
] war with Iraq, in an area dense with oil-rich fields
] along the northern no-fly-zone.

Kevin Sites Blog

Don Johnson, Mr. Miami Vice, stopped in germany with a suitcase containing bonds, stocks, and credit notes worth 8 Billion .. yes BILLION dollars.

This is insane. Don Johnson, while I'm sure loaded, is _not_ worth $8b. Something fishy is going on here.

The Miami Herald | 03/13/2003 | 'Vice' or price? TV star Don Johnson car-shopping with $8 billion to spend

] PORTLAND, Maine - Music buyers who applied for a share of
] a price-fixing settlement involving major U.S. record
] distributors and retailers will receive about $12.60
] apiece if a judge signs off on the deal.

Looking forward to my check.

Yahoo! News - Consumers in CD Settlement May Get Money

] China is equipping its courts with mobile execution vans
] as it shifts away from the communist system's traditional
] bullet in the head, towards a more "civilised" use of
] lethal injection.
]
] Intermediate Courts of the southern province of Yunnan
] were issued with 18 new execution vans on February 28 and
] a court official said some have already been used.
]
] "We cannot tell you how many executions so far, otherwise
] you could work out from the daily rate how many we carry
] out," the official said.
]
] Chinese authorities keep execution numbers a secret, but
] Western human rights monitors believe it is about 15,000
] a year, more than the rest of the world's judicial
] executions combined.
]
] The death penalty can apply for serious crimes against
] the person, armed robbery, drug trafficking, major cases
] of corruption and political violence.
]
] Many public executions have been held in football
] stadiums so traditional execution methods are no secret.
] The condemned criminal is taken by open truck to the
] execution ground and made to kneel with hands cuffed and
] head bowed, before being shot in the head. Families who
] want to reclaim the body are charged for the bullet.

Chinese try mobile death vans - theage.com.au

Elonka wrote:
] Sorry, but can we please avoid headlines that include
] profanity on Memestreams? I'm trying to get certain friends
] and family members to join the discussions here, but if they
] come in and see swear words, it's going to be an instant
] deal-breaker. I'm not saying that we should be
] Disney-qualified, but I would like to maintain a minimum level
] of civility.
]
] Or do other Memestreams members disagree? I'm willing to go
] with the will of the community on this, so if most of
] Memestreams feels that profanity is okay in headlines under an
] "we're all adults here, deal with it", then I'll switch my own
] course accordingly, in terms of what types of people that I
] try to invite into the community.

I don't know what to tell you. I can't stop people from cursing, I don't think its likely a culture that dosen't accept cursing will form, and I can't think of a reasonable way to code filtering abilities into MemeStreams that will not totally throw off our development roadmap. I don't know how to approach this problem.

In the future, we will likely provide the ability to apply filters to what content you see, giving you the ability to censor what you take in. Any filters would be determined by you, for you, and only apply to you. This is not currently on our roadmap. There are many things we have to do before we start working on features like that.

I refuse to type a single line of code that amounts to the implementation of censorship, but I have no problem doing things that allow people to censor what they see. As long as you are making those decisions for youself, and someone else is not making them for you, its fine. You get to decide how you want to raise your kids, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. If you want to censor what they see, fine. You want to censor what you see, fine. Its your right.

I just don't know how to approach this problem right now. Any way I can think of to enforce some type of "proper conduct code" goes against every belief I have in the way open communication systems should work. A technical approach could work, but we are not in a position at this time to implement one. I wouldn't know where to start. When the site internals are more mature, it will likely be a different story.

I don't expect the community to police itsself, in terms of its language, and nor should it. This is a free place. You can express whatever you want to express, however you want to express it, and you will be judged based upon it in the same way as in the real world. If someone curses all the time, and you don't like that, don't recommend their links or click thru them. They will not show up in the agent for you. As far as the main page goes, anything that makes it up there is, in theory, a reflection of the community. We have no way to directly influence the behavior of the community, nor should ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Same Shit Different Asshole

After a couple months of this, Bershadsky had had enough; she wanted to do something about the jobs she was seeing. So she went to a domain-name registration service and bought a URL for a new site she thought would, if not exactly make a difference in the world, at least make her feel better. The URL Bershadsky registered was fuckthatjob.com. "It was exactly what I was feeling," she says. "It felt right. I couldn't think of anything else to call it."

Funny, yet not so funny story.

Take this tech job and shove it

] Officials at Millstone declared an "unusual event," the
] least serious emergency classification at nuclear
] facilities. They said that while radioactive gases were
] released into the environment, the incident posed no
] threat to people in surrounding communities.

NRC Looking Into Shutdown At Millstone

I wonder how he feels about Courvoisier.. Kim Jong-il.. the Ladies Man.

quoted:
===
The little that is known about Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader, conjures up a caricature of a diminutive playboy, a comic picture at odds with his brutal regime.

Diplomats and escaped dissidents talk of a vain, paranoid, cognac- guzzling hypochondriac.

He is said to wear platform shoes and favour a bouffant hairstyle in order to appear taller than his 5 feet 3 inches.

...

Mr Kim also has a reputation as a drinker. He was seen draining 10 glasses of wine during his 2000 summit with the South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and is known to have a taste for Hennessy VSOP cognac.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Profile: Kim Jong-il