It feels like a great month or two coming up on Metanomics, which of course I reserve the right to shamelessly promote and plug.
I’m definitely marking down Reuben, who I’m hoping will hand out free celebrity bling or maybe some Britney prim hair or something, M Linden (get your questions in now!), and partly because it’s the correct thing to say but mostly because I really do believe it’s one of the incredible stories of SL…the show on People with Disabilities and virtual worlds.
Oh - and Tom. But then I’m a totally admitted fanboy, there, I said it.
OK - so look, the above events are subject to change, whims, new titles, swaps, errors, glitches, and I can’t even promise I’ll keep the calendar thing working. We’re revamping some stuff so this is a bit of an interim measure, and you’re stuck with me as the person to update it and I, um, had something else that’s really important to do, if I could only remember where I left the sticky note with that really important thing jotted down.
(P.S. If I forgot your birthday it’s only because I care so much and wanted to wish you well in person.)
Other Calendar Info
You can add this to your RSS feed at the following:
http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/dusan.writer%40gmail.com/public/basic
I had to squish the above, so the titles are a bit truncated but click “more details” and you can see the whole thing.
I reserve the right to stop updating this later when I get more organized and have a different system in place.
Finally, thanks to the folks who came to the community forum yesterday - feedback was amazing, and this was my incredible awesome response to someone who said they’d like a Google Calendar thingy.
I find Beth Noveck’s concepts very disturbing and I’ve been a long-time critic of this heavily-educated and aggressive “thought leader”.
She briefly flashed in SL for a time a few years ago when she opened a much-ballyhooed “Democracy Island” that had a few overrated events and then suffered 0-20 traffic ever after, despite hosting the Creative Commons licenser (sigh, another bad idea, that), the notary public (made by a resident-turned-Linden who never stayed in the community to make his invention really work meaningfully), and Hiro Pendragon’s devices to meet in the sky.
I find it hugely troubling that she has slipped into the meme stream of the Obama team.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/12/obamas-fake-second-life-advisors.html
She, Clay Shirky, and others of the “personal democracy” gang represent a school of thought that is very much about privileging the Internet-made group over the individual, and essentially engineering an end-run around elected representatives and democratic institutions in the name of “transparency”. It puts the unaccountable coders and social media gurus in charge and makes government accessible to those…with a DSL line and a high-traffic blog.
Go to the definitive article she has done about her theories here:
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/190
Then read my horrified critique — I wish I had more company on this:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2005/11/horrible_group_.html
The horror comes from glib cybertechno pronouncements like this one:
“Avatars are “public” characters, personalities designed to function in a public and social capacity. Avatars think and act as members of a community, rather than as private individuals. Having to construct an avatar in a virtual world not only allows me to see myself but it demands that I design a personage for interaction with others”.
Um, no. I will fight this tooth and nail — so will others.