Open source democracy?

Rushkoff talking to Dave in the ICA after the talk about being a trickster

Me, Dave and Lucas got our butts to the talk quite late yesterday. And were hit by the instant heatwave in the ICA's Nash room. Goodness me, has no one ever heard of opening a window or a door before?

Anyway the talk was around douglas rushkoff's book he wrote for Demos. I had never heard of Demos before, but sure have heard of Douglas Rushkoff from the days of Rave.Anyway here's a few things I wrote down while listening to the talk.

  • The internet shook off miltary, government and now business constraints over its time.
  • All developments of the internet have been done for non profit in a gift economy.
  • Our reality relies on software more than hardware – clever, as in software is man made.
  • We can write the words that we live. Rather than listen to the ones we have been told.
  • We have been taught to deal with narratives in the same way, start – middle – end. Revolutions are circluar.
  • recruitiing people to narratives, is pointless
  • Technophobia = People scared of there own power
  • The media aims to exclude and divide, a lonely person is more likely to buy jeans if there told there acceptable with them.
  • 92% of kids don’t want to re-program lego mindstorms
  • A movement is a bad idea, easy target for the media to vilianfy
  • Media can’t brand a mixture a non-movement.
  • Emergence accepts the possibility that were nothing and that we may change that
  • Effort should be spent on development rather than creating a movement
  • Changing direction causes confusion and keeps businesses and the media guessing
  • Courage in the moment, small steps and tweaks have profound effects
  • Do rather than respond
  • The dot.com era was a pyramid scheme – never thought of it like that, but makes sense
  • Is google god?
  • Finland is the most trustworthy nation in the world
  • Governments need to get a grip on the digital divide
  • Once you have access to the tools your relationship with the narrative changes

Anyway I've started reading the book which rushkoff wrote and its a good read so far. Also started looking at the Demos site and Rushkoff's own. Some good content on there which I know I'll be reading back and forth between college and home for the next month or so.

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Blogging students

What’s my plan of action? Hummm i'm faced with 3 different choices.

Ideally there would be a blogging server in college which students could use without too much help. So I could try and convince miles that this would be a good idea and that this would be a test run for next year maybe?
Problems I foresee, is the college libal for anything put on the blog? According to the blog layer I met a while back the answer is no but its not been proven in court yet.

2nd option is to set them up on my own server at home. This would be trival to do, but should I is more the question? hey would I be liable? Would I have to guarantee some level of quality. See what would happen if my line goes down or server needs restarting? Would they expect 24/7 service?
Plus would 12 students blogs effect my bandwidth?

Last option, would be to use a 3rd party blogging service like blogger.com, livejournal, etc. Which would all be down to the students to maintain and administrate.
I would need to reckonmend one or more of the services to make sure I could aggergate the content into a class news feed. Maybe flock or cocoon for logic.
Anyway this 3rd option does make things a lot easier but I would need to also read the end user policy/agreement to make sure everythings clean.

This year the group is very diverse and a blog is a sure starting point for all of them. It will be interesting if it will bring them together as they all seem very disjointed with one another at the moment, which is good as there seems to be very few deers.

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Bluetooth Smart Car

Saw this a while back, Orange, Smart Launch Bluetooth car. Orange and Smart have added Bluetooth to the new range of smart cars. Nothing amazing, just interesting that customers will get a 6month contract to Orange free with a T610.
If I had the choice in a car, I would get a smart car not because of this but there the best for fuel and space generally. The extra bonus is just that.

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Orange’s SPV2

Orange SPV E200

Ok its coming up to a few months since my contract ended for my mobile phone. My Ericsson T68 is doing odd things when it comes to Bluetooth and GPRS. I want to change but I would like a phone with a built in camera, as I'm using it more and more for shots.

So I saw Orange are finally bring out the SPV2. Its the first Microsoft smartphone which has built in Bluetooth and a camera, all packed into the same size package as a SPV, which makes me very happy.

I always liked the orginal SPV, but the lack of Bluetooth wrote it off for me. There have been a few other Microsoft Smartphone's which are good but none of them have had bluetooth to date. I'm also hoping Orange will do what they did with the Orginal SPV, sell it very cheap on a new contract. I remember when it was released it sold for about 139 pounds then was quickly dropped to 99 pounds then 79 pounds. I think just before Christmas when I go on holiday I will get a SPV2 at a decent enough price.

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