Meta

Gmail, "Server Error"

"The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds."

It's the Error message on Gmail page. I've tried over 30 times. Seems it's a severe server problem with Gamil today.

More mobile phones than people

Sweden now has a mobile phone penetration rate of 100.1%. In other words, there are more mobile phone accounts than people in the country, largely because many subscribers have both home and business mobile numbers. And Sweden are nearly twice... ---[via Werblog]

I don't think China will reach such high rate, however, it's changing our life as the same way.

The Free Culture Chinese Translation Project: A New and Innovative Form of Organization

Andrea summarized the innovative model of Free Culture translation project in Chinese community. The project is almost done, or never done(it's always open to edit). As we review the short history of this project, we can find many sparkles within it. Tian even piointed that it's a revolutionary structure to Chinese people. From diversity-orderly structure to grouping structure. (Fei Xiaotong, 1947)

The summary is valuable as the project is a showcase to grassroots movement and CoP collaboration. And more importantly, it harnessed the power of Social Software, a new genre of enabler to future grassroots superpower. Thanks, Andrea.

Gmail as a disucssion list and meta ideas collector

I'm finding that Gmail is becoming more useful to me in these days. The well organized email hierachy can help me to initiate a disucssion with many guys(especially those also has gmail accounts). It's easy to compose and reply, thus more like a discussion list or BBS. I guess it'll be more helpful in the future. Gmail does a good job on HCI.

The same feature is also employed by me to write some memes down from my desktop outlook or other email clients. I won't worry about the space limitation now. I just write to gmail and collect all those memes and ideas at night, to see if there are any valuable thoughts today.

Does the gmail team think ever think of such possibilities before? Maybe, :)

E-commerce sales reached $15.7 bln in the United States during Q2 2004, a 23% increase YTY. E-commerce made up approximately 1.7% of the nation's $919 bln in total retail sales, which rose nearly 8% from a year ago. QTQ e-commerce sales increased nearly 1%, from $15.5 bln in Q1 2004. More on this topic at ITFacts.biz.

via AlwaysOn Network

Steal wireless connection?

AKMA writes a must-read post about the police preventing him from using the public library's free wifi while sitting outside the library:

I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. "I did notice several other open signals in the area - am I allowed to connect to them?"

"Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it's a new law, sir; `theft of signal.' It would be like if you stole someone's cable TV connection."

I responded, "But this is a radio signal thing - it's not like a cable connection, it's like someone has a porch light on and I'm sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I'm not stealing their light."

via Joho the blog

In China, many children know well about the story of Afanti, who was a legend hero that helps poors. He ever hoaxed one richman who wantd to charge a poor sitting outside his restaurant to smell. Afanti shaked his money bag to the richman, "Did you hear the sound of coins?", "Yes", "Then paid", haha.

Chinese people read less

This news makes me very sad. Via CNN:

Last year, 51.7 percent of literate Chinese read books, a drop of 8.7 percentage points from 1998, Xinhua said quoting a survey by the China Publishing Sciences Institute. More than 90 percent of Chinese are literate, official figures show.

It's a day that Chinese, especially the Communist Party, celebrate the century of Deng Xiaoping. Deng designed a new "open" strategy when he led the party, thus was also thought as the saver of China from old close system. Most urban people gets benefits from this policy since it supports free market and free choice of lifestyle. However, Deng did also leave the democratic and political issues to new leaders of Communist Party. They are facing many dilemas today, the globalization of diversified society v.s. controlled voice and behavior, a fast growing economy v.s. more wide income gap between rural and urban areas, etc.

The book figure above shows many meanings to current China society.

Anger as US judge fails to ban internet pirates
Telegraph.co.uk, "Attempts by the music and movie industries to clamp down on internet piracy suffered a major blow after a US court ruled that file-sharing networks are not breaking the law."

Wired: "Peer-to-peer file-sharing services Morpheus and Grokster are legal, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday."

S.Korea's Ruling Party Head Resigns on Father's Past

SEOUL (Reuters) - "The chairman of South Korea's ruling Uri Party resigned Thursday, an unexpected first casualty of President Roh Moo-hyun's call for an inquiry into who benefited from working with Korea's Japanese colonial rulers. "

The shadow of Japan's invasion Asian countries is still there.

51% of Americans use broadband

Nielsen/NetRatings announced that, for the first time in its surveys, home broadband usage soared from 38% in July 2003 to 51% of the American online population in July 2004. Nielsen found that 63 mln Americans used broadband compared with 61.3 mln Americans who used dial-up (narrowband) in July 2004. Those numbers represent a 47% year-over-year growth rate for broadband and a 13% decline for narrowband.... [AlwaysOn]

In China, the figure of Broadband is about about 15M broadband users(Q1, 2004, Source: CCID), nearly 1/5 of the totoal net population. Also very exiting number.

They the Media: Florida Hurricane Bloggers

Dan Gillmor mentioned some bloggers witnessed Florida's Hurricane. Does anyone know if there are blogs on the China's typhoon?

Emotional moments in Athens

All enjoyable moments in Olympic Game 2004, Athens. By MSNBC, and Ofoto

Emergent dividen in China society

There are two unrelated news in China's cyberspace that may affect China's politics environment. One is basket player Yao Ming who plays in NBA got angry with his team mates, now may affect other players to launch NBA in the future. Before that, all game players should pay atttention to their remarks and activities to keep unity on the whole image of the team, then of the whole nation.

Another one is a new case of anti-corruption. A local party leader took bulletproof cloth for 6 years to investigate some corruption cases. Eventually, he can't stand the situation and call for support from mass media. The incident cause a new round of media control in China's media because the propoganda bureau don't want such case to be disclosed to degrade the "image" of party, or becomes a sample to other local administratives.

Actually, today's internet users can get more news other than traditional mass media . They can know more facts other than "one voice". On the way to diversified society(can anyone stop it?), those savvy users will soon find that how "one voice" is unlogical. Of course, they can't express more in the controlled media network. They've found internet, before BBS, now Blog. They also express their thoughts with jokes.

The mind of China is dividen into two camps, more and more obviously. The balance is changing.

DEFINING "COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE"

I often use CI to explain meme, grassroots power and human brain evolution, as well social learning process. However, it's time to make a definition to "Collective Intelligence". I noticed Tom Atlee's effort on CI blog, "Collective intelligence" is a richly diverse domain of study and practice. Having an inclusive definition may help diverse practitioners work and explore together. One such definition might be simply: Collective intelligence is the INTELLIGENCE of a COLLECTIVE, which arises from one or more SOURCES.

In my definition, CI is a meme connection to form a schma or a visible work. It exists in one's mind, as well in a social community. No connection, no CI.

Backing up del.icio.us

Following up Jonathan's good piece on how to "Backing up del.icio.us", I successfully backup all my bookmarks there. However, I found there is another simpler way to download. Simply put, just input the url, "http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000", in IE address bar, then it will return the full XML list of all my bookmarks. The graceful design of del.icio.us shows power.

At least I've learnt from this practise on two new tools, cURL and tcpflow, cool and simple enough. They must be very useful in the future.

We the Media TTS version

From "We the Media" blog, the book even has a TTS version now in Internet Archive site. So interesting that many creative ideas emerge when a book under free publishing manner. I won't be surprised if there is an pure-female-reading version, haha.

Comparing to "Free Culture", another free publishing book under Creative Commons license by Lawrence Lessig, "We the Media" attract less attention, but with more formats than ever before. I can't imagine how many creations will be generated every day if there are thousands of this kind of digital works in our world.

Joshua: it's doing something reasonable now...

The del.icio.us problem I was talking with Joshua days ago just be resolved to the track. Along with Joshua's email, now I can access bookmarks in one specific date with the url like http://del.icio.us/imao/2004-04-23. However, will this cause cofliction with a tag name "2004-04-23" since Joshua has simplified tag access to http://del.icio.us/imao/tagname format.

VSM - - Vialble System Model

I'm re-enterring Staffold Beers' Viable System Model since yufen asked me to review her paper on China's Higher Vocational educational system. She is trying to apply cybernetic method evaluate current system and find some feasible solutions.

Actually, VSM is a kind of management theory other than micro-cybernetics with detail analysis. It's a good method to articulate complex social problems especially to current China. Yufen is a very smart thinker. She can ever carefully check my rough ideas from other fields and apply to new problems.

To me, it's also a good opportunity to implement "Learning on demand" or "Learning by doing", reviewing works is not just commenting, so I have to learn again on VSM. It's a happy venture. Just in case, just in time.

Wittgenstein --- a handcraft work episode from Wikipedia
[There] was an invitation from his sister Margaret ("Gretl") Stoneborough to work on the design and construction of her new house. He worked with the architect, Paul Engelmann (who became a close friend of Wittgenstein's during the war), and the two designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos (whom they both greatly admired). Wittgenstein found the work intellectually absorbing, and exhausting -- he poured himself into the design in painstaking detail, including even small aspects such as doorknobs and radiators (which had to be exactly positioned to maintain the symmetry of the rooms). As a work of modernist architecture the house evoked some high praise; G. H. von Wright said that it possessed the same "static beauty" as the Tractatus.


via Tian's Langton Close

Pity there is no such piece in Chinese edition.

Joshua's reponse to my last post content:

The date-based URLs were very complicated to navigate for most users andeliminated the ability to scroll backwards and forwards through time.Most users found that the time element became less useful the further theywere away from the current time.The dates are still there in the post, however they are no longer thecentral pivot of the interface.

I'm not sure how using URI-part instead of parameter part to specifyparameters became "REST-like" anyway.I'll try adding the date link for backward compatability, however, I donot think the date navigation will be coming back, as many userscomplained about it.

Cheers,
Joshua

I don't like del.icio.us new interface

The new interface has been online this morning. However, It's not as clear as the old one. Now I can't even distinguish the bookmarks in which day. Also, it' s not accessible to a specific day's bookmarks with http://del.icio.us/yyyy-mm-dd REST-like URL. I'm still not sure it's an upgrading or a system failure, anyway, it should provide back-compatibility, shouldn't it?

Bookmarks is ultimately a kind of blog with similar chronological format. So I'd suggest del.icio.us team to reconider the change.

Steve Jobs suffered cancer in pancreas

He promised his employees that he will return to workspace the next month after removing the tumor by surgery. Wish all best to you, Steve. Dave found a short clips of video in your 80s, is that a gift to you?


via CNet News.com

Babyking: The depressiveness of Chinese bloggers

Babyking quoted Hedong's blog:

"In a meeting days ago, our supervisors asked all units to ehance the work of keeping secret. One of the rules is to register (personal) informaiton publishing service......"

Hedong expressed his conern that his blog could be ordered to shut down with this rule by his company(seems a state-owned unit). Babyking said "to almost all Chinese grassroots bloggers, they have to face the presssure from 'up-level' ..."