plus nine. neo now.

New Website Address

peterb — 2006-05-03T00:14:00Z

Please join us at our new address: www.thewavingcat.com

We're moving

peterb — 2006-05-01T11:53:00Z

Hi there. We're moving.

Well, actually, we're just moving plus nine from this host to our own server. As of now, please check out www.thewavingcat.com. This will be our new home, and our new name.

Nothing much changes, but twoday's recent down-times and some other technical limitations just make it a better choice for us to move on. During the next couple of days, there may be some loose odds and ends - please don't let them put you off. In a few days, the site will be all new and shiny. :)

This site will stay online for awhile. (Partly due to some export/import issues, partly because we've grown fond of it.) But there won't be any new content on this server, as all the new stuff goes directly to our new site: www.thewavingcat.com. (Apropos stickyness of messages, huh?)

Sorry for any inconveniences. You know how it is. We hope to see you soon on the new site!

(I am excited! Yeah!)

A Brief History Of Remixing The World

peterb — 2006-04-29T16:59:00Z

Just re-found an old text from etcon2005 by Cory Doctorow: Rules for Remixing. Sample:

Remix your network:

* Apple untethered the laptop

* Commodity hardware made it cheap

* WiFi hackers untethered everything else: cons, hotel rooms, coffee
shops, corners

* Hotspots spring up like dandelions

* Intel brands WiFi

* Apple Airport Express untethers the base-station: just plug it in
and wait for the light to turn green

[Rules for Remixing the Web, your Music, your TV, your network, your movies, your data, your text, syndication, your bookshelf, it, the browser &brick and mortar,]

ValleySchwag

peterb — 2006-04-29T16:52:00Z

Online is not enough: Get your schwag today.

(What is schwag? Here's the deal.)

[valleyschwag.com]

Del.icio.us turns more social

peterb — 2006-04-29T00:37:00Z

As of today, there's more "us" in del.icio.us:

Today, Del.icio.us beefed up their social networking features. I now have a Network page that shows all of the links from other Del.icio.us users that I have decided to track and I can easily share links as I am posting to people within my network. I can add any user to my network with a single-click. ...
By making it easier to build a network on the site ... Del.icio.us will get more data on who is tracking whom. There's a lot that can be done with this information. Some things that come to mind include: your network's most popular links/tags (kind of your own private Hotlinks), users who should be in your network (based on your network's opinion), and most influential user in a tag space.
O'Reilly Radar del.icio.us' new features.

And here's what the official del.icio.us blog says:

Today the inbox feature lets you subscribe to other users bookmarks, but most people dont know about it and its not terribly easy to use in your everyday life.

To make sharing easier, weve just released a new feature called your network. You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

Saints

peterb — 2006-04-28T13:31:00Z

AnomalousNYC: Saints of the Lower East Side

Urban Microscapes

peterb — 2006-04-28T13:12:00Z

Wet Concrete I by OsloInTheSummer

Flickr Pool: Urban Microscapes.

Weblog-Software

peterb — 2006-04-28T12:42:00Z

Danke an Unblogbar: 31 Weblogs im direkten Vergleich anhand von 35 Kategorien. Kann b2evolution Trackbacks? Beherrscht WordPress Multiple Tags? Wie sieht es mit Spamschutz bei BLOG:CMS aus?

Wer überlegt, die Weblog-Software zu wechseln, dem sei der Unblogbar Weblogvergleich ans Herz gelegt. Two thumbs up!

[Thanks, Plasma!]

Tag that URL

peterb — 2006-04-28T12:27:00Z

It's really blurry (taken from the subway). But what the huge graffiti tag says isn't some message. Nope, it's a URL! Like "Hey guys, I have something to tell you, but I'm not sure I'll get it right the first time, and it's such a long message. So why don't you just check it out on my homepage?" Odd.

ps. This had better not be an attempt to start a viral campaign. The URL doesn't even seem to work. Oh boy.

Kill Your Gender

peterb — 2006-04-28T12:13:00Z

Street Art, Berlin 2006.

This is a pirate, this is not.

peterb — 2006-04-27T08:20:00Z

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) attacks the record label industry for their attempt to outlaw recording of digital radio (space and time shifting, as the RIAA calls it).

This could be a first sign of a new, if loose alliance between consumers and electronics producers:

The electronics producers, because they wanna sell their products with all the features they developed, that is: to make a cool product. (Keep in mind that iPods and other mp3players, for example, would be nearly completely useless if the RIAA got their way.)

And we consumers because we want to listen to the music we bought where we want to. (Can you imagine buying a book you're only to read at home, on your desk, while sitting on the same chair you were sitting on when you bought the book? "What do you mean, you'd like to read in in the subway - did you pay extra for that?")

The most powerful thing the CEA could do is if their members stop manufacturing tech that controls their customers (as DRM measures do) and instead enables them to use the data in every possible way.

[via Boing Boing]

Damn that phone!

peterb — 2006-04-27T08:13:00Z

Dire pronouncements about new forms of entertainment are old hat. It goes like this: Young people embrace an activity. Adults condemn it. The kids grow up, no better or worse than their elders, and the moral panic subsides. Then the whole cycle starts over.

On Wired, Tom Standage shows great examples of how new developments and technologies are bashed by the establishment. Video games are one of these condemned technologies, as are movies and rock'n'roll music. But there are other dangerous developments, too, endangering our youth's innocence. Well, historically, that is. Like, novels the waltz, and the telephone! But read for yourself:

Novels
"The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?"
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790

The Telephone
"Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does [it] break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?"
- Survey conducted by the Knights of Columbus Adult Education Committee, San Francisco Bay Area, 1926

The Waltz
"The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."
- The Times of London, 1816

[Wired > Tom Standage > The Culture War]

Maybe we can learn from this, if only a little bit? (Link)

[via Boing Boing]

War of the Worlds (on a budget)

peterb — 2006-04-27T07:53:00Z

Larry Knox was commissioned to produce a cover for a reprint of HG Wells's War of the Worlds, on the cheap.

"The squid was purchased one dreary March Saturday morning in a seafood market located in the Chinatown district of Philadelphia", reads the description.

Larry put the whole photo sequence on his website. (Also, there's a beautiful step-by-step on how to turn yourself into Frankenstein.) There should definitively be more websites like that! Thanks, Larry!

[via Boing Boing]

live from your desktop

peterb — 2006-04-26T23:50:00Z

Live video broadcasting & conferencing from your own web page. Sounds absurd? Looks like it ain't anymore: Stickam promises to offer web-based video conferences for up to five users at a time. (Plus some music and video playing feats.)

Differently from other Flash-based tools which allow you to embed rich-media content like photos, audio or video clips onto your web pages with custom widgets that contain one such clip or track, Stickam integrates these abilities into one customizable player which can carry within itself all of your selected music tracks, digital images and video clips that you want to share through your web site...

Stickam is completely free to use and can be used with any type of computer as it is completely web-based.
Stickam's still in beta, and according to Robin Good it also needs to improve on usability, but hey, watch out for this.

what is a blog?

peterb — 2006-04-26T23:45:00Z

What is a weblog?

It's great, I mean...
The Weblog Project - an open-source movie documentary about blogs and bloggers. Go mash-up your own from the mini movies on the site!