Fiat Lux

I’ve been following the whole Scoble / Facebook blogstorm today. As one of Scoble’s “Facebook 5000″ I have to say, I’m a little miffed that he felt entitled to scrape all his contacts’ personal data out of Facebook and drop it into Plaxo.

It gets to the nature of our connection and what exactly “friending” means between people who don’t have a pre-existing offline relationship. I wouldn’t care if one of my real-life friends decided to grab my email address out of Facebook and put it into their Outlook address book, for example. So why am I annoyed that Scoble did it? Because 1) he’s not a real life friend and 2) he didn’t ask first.

Seems to me it’s time to remind folks that, just as in the real world:

Don’t take more than you’re given. And if you’re not sure what the line is, ask first.

If you give your next-door neighbor a set of keys to your home, that doesn’t give them the right to walk in unannounced any time they feel like it. They still need to ask your permission. So too in the online world. Just because someone ‘friends’ you online does not give you an unlimited right to do as you like with their contact information. Yes, it’s annoying to have to manually re-friend people if you move from one social application to another, but it’s the polite - and the right - thing to do.

Allen Stern seems to feel the same way. And of course, Loren Feldman’s take on things is blunt and touches on another troubling aspect to this — why was Scoble doing Plaxo’s testing for them?

UPDATE: The inimitable Lisa B over at Bruce Clay did a much better job of getting the point across than I did.

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16-0.

Need I say more?

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I don’t have any new cat photos to share today, so instead I pulled something random out from the archives. This is a shot of some ancient Anasazi rock art carved into the stones near St George, UT.

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Wow, this sounds like it’s going to be fantastic … unfortunately I’m on the wrong side of the country to really enjoy it:

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have been asked to open a major celebration of the life and career of Leonard Bernstein next fall.

The festival, sponsored by the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, will open on Sept. 24 with Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Bernstein concert at Carnegie Hall. The concert not only launches “Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds” but also kicks off Carnegie Hall’s 2008 season.

The gala concert will feature cellist Yo-Yo Ma and singers Dawn Upshaw and Thomas Hampson. The program will include the “Fancy Free” Suite, Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story,” as well as selections from “Mass,” “Songfest,” “A Quiet Place,” “Wonderful Town,” “On the Town” and “Candide.”

The two New York organizations are teaming up to honor Bernstein to commemorate the 90th anniversary of his birth and the 50th anniversary of his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic.

*sigh*

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Apparently, funky news website Fark is applying for a trademark on the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe For Work). Yes, really.

As TechCrunch pointed out, their chances of getting approved are low, so perhaps it’s all a joke. Filing a trademark application through an attorney (as Fark seems to have done) is relatively inexpensive, so maybe they figured “what the hell”. Seems like a funny way to spend your money, but they’re certainly entitled to do so.

But really, what’s the point? Assuming for the moment that they’re not joking about the application, what’s the next stage? If you get a trademark, you need to defend it. Are they seriously going to start suing every website that uses NSFW in a warning next to a link?

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As reported the the NY Times today, two volumes of old “Sesame Street” episodes recently released on DVD come with the following helpful warning label: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

WTF?

There are definitely old cartoons that I would not show to kids today. Some of the early Warner Brothers cartoons, for example, come off as highly racist to today’s eyes. But early-1970’s Sesame Street? How could they possibly offend current sensibilities?

Well, first off, there’s the Cookie Monster. An unrepentant cookie addict:

he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”).

And then there’s Oscar the Grouch, who can’t seem to see the bright side of anything:

On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic.

And worst of all, the setting: a somewhat run-down city street:

The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating.

[snip]

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.

Nope, definitely can’t have kids seeing that.

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That’s One Big Seagull

It’s been a very food-centric weekend, and I leave for NYC Tuesday morning. So instead of some technology ruminations, here’s a shot of a seagull I took behind the Ferry Building yesterday.

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Barack Obama is getting support for a lot of reasons, but his new set of proposals for integrating technology into government is another good reason for folks in this neck of the woods to pay attention to his candidacy.

VentureBeat has a rundown on Obama’s “technology platform”. Here’s a few takeaways:

• Obama wants to open more of the governmental process. For example, the public should able to comment on the White House website before legislation is signed.
• He calls more aggressive government support of broadband access.
• He supports network neutrality.
• He want to open the wireless spectrum so that winners of the 700 MHz band auction don’t just camp the spectrum in a bid to lock out competition.

Slightly less praiseworthy is his proposal to raise sanctions against companies offering “indecent” content. Fining networks $250,000 for dropping an f-bomb on TV is not going to make a more child-friendly society. Still, on balance, it’s a solid plan.

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Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.
Seven and a half cents
Doesn’t buy a thing.
But give it to me every hour,
Forty hours every week,
And that’s enough for me to be
Living like a king.

– The Pajama Game

Well, the issue today is 4 cents versus 8 cents, but the lyrics are close enough.

I’ll miss The Daily Show, but good luck to the Writer’s Guild.

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Jason Perlow, the guy who helped me found the NYC Palm User’s Group, is also a food blogger, and his Off The Broiler has been nominated for the 2007 Weblog Awards in the “Best Food Blog” category.

If you haven’t checked out his blog and/or voted for him, here’s the link to the voting page.

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