Youtube brings down violent cop

So Fox News (or rather BoingBoing where I read it first) is reporting that the New York cop who was videoed shoving a Critical Mass cyclist to the ground has been indicted and stripped of his badge and gun and banished to desk duty after the Youtube video got > 1.6 million views. Welcome to the future of user-generated media + the network effect. If you have a camera and a compelling story, you too can metaphorically shove a violent thug to the ground.

Here's Mark Pesce talking about social media (Twitter especially) being used in similar ways.


You better believe the cops (and any other group or individual with anything to hide) will be trying to confiscate or legislate against cameras in the hands of individuals in the future. My advice is to invest in cameras that can be concealed, and cameras that can stream video live to the internet, so that even if it is confiscated they won't get the bits before they're out in the wild.
Sites like ustream.tv and justin.tv are making it a lot easier to stream video from a computer and the unfortunately named brainchild of wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann, glogger.mobi is doing the same for smartphones. There's still the old standby of snapping a pic on your phone and emailing it to flickr or your blog.


A quote from Accelerando, by Charles Stross (free online)

"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it's going to be."

Also, Mr Lee has a Catcam

eee 901 book mod

Stick-on velcro ftw.

meanwhile...

Word density of the 3,500 responses to the request for questions on change.gov

able affecting afford america american auto bail bailout banks believe better billion business buy car card care change companies consumer corporations cost country create credit crisis current debt dollars economic economy education energy enough etc everyone family federal feel financial food free funds future getting give going government hard health help home hope house idea income industry insurance interest investment jobs keep live loans making market money month mortgage needs obama pay payments people person plan point prices problem products program public real really school services something spend start state student support system tax things think work workers world years

created at TagCrowd.com

Am I being filtered?

Huh? I just clicked a link in google reader leading to a /. article discussing whether it's time to reassess the US's war on drugs and Firefox threw up a 'this connection was reset' error.. and now it works. Is Orcon testing Deep Packet Inspection, aka Australia's recently doomed 'Clean Feed'? They are owned by a state-owned company, which would make them a prime contender for a testing ISP.

The Link in question

Which social media, when

"If you want fixed content that people comment on, you should use a blog. If you want a dynamic, back-and-forth conversation, you should use a forum. If you want to create an authoritative single document [created by many people], you should use a wiki."
Someone from pbwiki in a comment on Wikis Still Slow to Catch on Internally, Externally

It would seem to be the growing consensus that collaborative editing and knowledge creation is the coming awesomeness. Mediawiki and similar seem able to provide all of the above modes of operation - the collaborative editing of the wiki; commenting on wiki pages, like a blog; and talk pages to provide a dedicated area for discussion. So why isn't a wiki being brought forward as a means to accomplish all the above?

I think what the first comment is saying (especially in the context of its parent article) is that wiki usage is still on the borders of most/many peoples experiences interacting with text n stuff on the internet. I think we're all very famitiar now with commenting, or to put it a bit more bluntly, adding some text to some existing text by typing into a textbox at the bottom of the page. But, Wikis are a bit different looking - the text we are given, or expected to write is leavened with [[funny looking symbols]]. Suggesting perhaps that we need some more wysiwyg editors, or time for the geeky education to make its way through our bridging capital rich friends.

I think another restricting factor at work (almost exclusively for the nuubs) is the fear that they'll mess it up somehow and not be able to fix it, and everyone will know. And call them wikitard behind their back or something. This fear is too damn common and the solution is in everyones grasp.
Its called Undo, or sometimes Revert. I know it's there, but it can't be prominent enough, in either the user interface of these tools, or in the training. The fact that one of the most powerful aspects of a wiki (ie. Wikipedia doesn't disintegrate under the weight of vandalism because it's easier to click Undo than it is to commit vandalism) is not used to combat one of the most common fears slowing adoption of this critical technology seems stupid and easily correctable.

I'd like to see Undo functionality displayed more prominently, and people being taught that it's ok - you can't break the computer. It's ok, you can't lose anything, because it saves everything automatically, And here's a private sandbox where you can play and not be criticised; and here's a page of comments you can use to experiment with writing in public, but it's ok because it's not the front page or anything, and besides it's just a comment, like a post-it note or something.
And here's the Undo button for this more important seeming stuff, and here's all the authors - y'see? it's not like they're professionals or anything.
And here's the first edit of the page. Yes, thats all. It's like polishing a stone, or improving a shared cake recipe. It doesn't have to be perfect at the start, it just gets better with time, like wine or something.

Maybe all wikis should start off with a cake recipe.

Musings on Clay Shirkys 'Here Comes Everybody'

riffing on p92

Fame is an imbalance of attention - previously it's been due to technology (you can shout at the TV all you want, they can't hear you), now it's because we've run up against the limits of possible human attention (if my blog is read by millions, I can't interact with all of them).
If attention is a currency, famous people are rich.

This imbalance necessitates grouping your 'friends' on social networks into subgroups, classes of relative intimacy, or perhaps just of relative attention.
Twitter should run up against this need soon, it's got lots of famous people on it (read: poor sods that can never read all the tweets that their audience^W legions of followers spam out). They should really add that functionality sometime soon, or the writers of Twitter clients will do it for them - and then we'd all be stuck with either the-one-client-to-rule-them-all, or a mess of competing grouping systems, and no way (until someone hacks up a web api anyway) to migrate cleanly between clients.

Grouping api:
For famous people with a need for the power that a large audience of followers brings and the desire for a Twitter client that doesn't accidentally hide your best friends coffee invitation among '@brownbanana, you were SO shitfaced last night!'

Right now, either the famous don't friend you and the relationship stays one-sided (which would be running at odds with the great wish for the democratising power of the internet, and is not what I'm seeing), or they friend and get swamped. That must be interesting - post a comment and then skim through a bunch of replies.
Either way, they must be relying on the @reply, or the more intimate DM. Perhaps they reserve the DM for bestest friends..hm
The use of @replies may be self, or rather socially limiting - the need to conciously address a message to a famous person is somewhat stressful for most people (unless they're terminally friendly) and may be limiting the frequency of communication. We attribute greater social standing to the famous, and that means we value their opinion more than any random fool - perhaps because we talk to them so little (i.e. have so little of their attention) that we are aware they may gain a negative impression of us if we mess it up.

api must link between Twitter and the client they are most likely to use - I'm guessing that would be an iPhone one

#prediction, #business plan