Category: Uncategorized

washingtonpost.com:

Millions of people are signing up for these prescriptions because they are convinced they have a chemical imbalance. But there is not one piece of evidence that can back that up,’ said David Oaks, executive director of MindFreedom Support Coalition International, or SCI, an organization of current and former psychiatric patients that organized the strike.

There is no chemical imbalance, people often think there is because they undergo a blood test – this is to check that thatere is NOT an imbalance which should be treated – eg thyroid or diabetes. But perhaps the drugs do have an effect. i work with people who say they have been saved, and with others who say they make it all much worse. The situation is a mess!

RSS – A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers You will see an xml link on the left in my weblog. Let me know what happens with it, I really don’t have much sense of the point of it. But this primer looks good!

NZ Listener

Some magazines are lucky if they define the age; a few actually manage to predict it. Launched in 1993, Wired saw how the future would be shaped by computers, and announced it through the words of Marshall McLuhan: ‘Everything is changing: your education, your family, your neighbourhood, your job. And they’re changing dramatically.’

This is a review of WIRED: A Romance, by Gary Wolf. amazon

Wired 11.09:

Stephenson took the time to tell Wired why, if you’re a hacker, the 17th century was the place to be.

Playing around – seeing how the ads work. Let me know what you think.

It is something to learn about! For all its commercialisation it
should send ads that are of interest. It could even do that so well
that people might like to come here for the ads. I doubt it. But RSS
could do that. I have been thinking that RSS is really a form of I
like this!. (Our old idea from the ninties) So I am going the get it going, if only as a way of
creating TOPICS that I am envious of in Typepad etc.

Notice the thread here in the posts. Email is Dead, Topics, Spam… I
think I was wrong to say that the RSS alternative to email is not
likely to happen.

It happens like this:

1. An XML marked up version is created out of my emails.
2. This puts my emails in a big pile on my machine.
3. Depending on certain tags, most of that pile goes online with
   super-secure protection.
4. Weblogs are created from the pile using certain key words.
5. Access is set up – for each weblog, anything from public, to
   family, to self-only.
6. I allow you to add items to your Weblog using only those items with your
   name in the to line.
7. That Weblog is your inbox and with the tags you can
   create sub-weblogs like folders in an email client.
8. No spam!

Add a rating tag for I like this! we create taste-pools
with our taste-buddies.

The last few posts were all sent by email to the Weblog. I
can add that address as a BCC to a private blog, so none of this
is too far away for me.

Incidentally, it is the
first time I have ever wanted a Decent HTML way of
sending mail. Right now this is coming from Homesite via Agent
to the weblog.

Playing around – seeing how they work. Making money Let me know what you think.

Many-to-Many – a post by Ross Mayfield quoting many other items on the subject, claiming RSS is a better group tool. I doubt it myself as it is just not ubiquitous enough.

BRAIN WAVES: neurons, bits & genes:

Only money can eradicate spam. The Internet is a globally distributed ecosystem complete with evolving organism/organizations that continuously adapt to change. The current spam epidemic is proof. Moreover, no legislative or technical solution (i.e. filters) will be able to stop it. Why? Because spam is fundamentally an economic problem.

Nice item with a great idea from Zack Lynch on the Corante website – which filters news – is a weblog? With various subsections including the Many-to-Many which is good on groupware.