Speaking of killing independent george, inspired by our weblog seminar last month, my father now has a weblog: BruceGarrity.com. He’s new to the medium, and it may take him a while to get the feel for it, but I think it’s a safe bet that he’s the only Charlottetown city councillor with a weblog.
Way to go Dad!
The term is based on an episode of Seinfeld where, to his great dismay, George’s fiancé starts to socialize with his other friends. Hilarity ensues.
Driving into the office today, CBC Radio played Adam Sandler’s Lunchlady Land (live) followed by Leonard Nimoy’s Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. This truly is a great country.
Imagine we eventually have sufficient wireless bandwidth everywhere. What do we do with it?
I heard the idea that everyone’s palm-pilot/pocket-pc would be a web server. This is not unreasonable. Some current handheld PCs are running at 400MHz with 128 MB of RAM or more. I’ve seen PCs with less power run popular websites (with Apache/Linux). By the time the bandwidth catches up, the hardware will be a non-issue (hopefully battery-life will be a non-issue by then as well).
Why would Johnny-business want a web server in his pocket? Well, for some of us, it would store all of our personal and work files and host our own weblogs and websites. Perhaps we will all be hosting our own IM and email servers.
Add web-services into the mix and things get interesting. Need my contact information or access to my calendar? Query my personal info web service. The amount of detail my web services sends back will depend on my relationship to you. If I know you well enough, and I’m in a good mood, I might even let you query my physical location via GPS (with a limited accuracy — so you can’t detect… gyrations).
Why bother carrying this around with you? Couldn’t this work just as well if everyone had equivalent hosted services? Maybe — especially with a lighter client in our pocket that handles anything that needs to be in our pocket (GPS, voice-com, IM, etc.). Still — I wonder if, when battery life and wireless bandwidth are sufficient, will the concept of a “lighter client” become obsolete (because your cellphone/handheld can do it all anyhow).
What other applications can you imagine for a web-service enabled web-server in your pocket?
Tip: When called for a phone survey, tell them that you work for a marketing or advertising firm. This usually renders you an ineligible subject. Often, they’ll explicitly ask you if this is the case, precluding the need to say “no” and hang up.
I was invited to read a piece of fiction on a segment called “The Write Lane” on the CBC Radio PEI show, Mainstreet with host Mitch Courmier.
We spoke a bit about how writing for a weblog differs from tradition creative writing. I chose to read from a work-in-progress short-story (that I secretly hope will turn into a novel) called Deplaning.
For your listening and reading pleasure:
BitPass (currently in beta), appears to be a working Internet micropayment system. This could be really exciting. It seems to work like a prepaid calling card. You buy chunks (smallest is 3USD) of BitPass money, and your micropayments are deducted from that. Spending is anonymous, and the system even deals with access control to the content.
Micropayments seem like a great idea in theory. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I know that I would pay 15 cents every day to read my morning webcomics and news. At the risk of hyping propaganda I don’t fully understand, I think micropayments are great and have the potential to stimulate the flow of original content on the Internet.
I’ll be reading from a short-story on CBC Radio PEI tomorrow. The reading is part of “The Write Lane”, a weekly piece featuring local writers. I should be on around 5:30PM Thursday, July 10.
If I can get my act together, I hope to post both the audio from the interview/reading and the text of the short-story.
A friend of mine has put a new spin on the word “WiFi”. From this day forth, wifi shall be known as “wuffie” (hear it pronounced – WAV). It can rhyme with party, which is convenient.
Also, harkening back to the old classic “gif” vs. “jif” debate, this same friend has started pronouncing the “g” in digital as a hard “g” (hear it pronounced “digital wuffie” WAV).
Spread the word. I’m living in the wellspring of language.
CityFilter Charlottetown is a new site for our city in the style of MetaFilter. It’s a community weblog where anyone can post on the front page, and anyone can reply to the posts.
Thanks to Jevon MacDonald for setting this up. Jevon has been clear that this is not his own project. Rather, it’s for anyone and everyone in and around Charlottetown.