On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!

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I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English.

But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically wrong, and some where a few minor technical modifications to the rules might be helpful.

In fact, those of us who work in the computer industry might be able to exert some subtle positive influence on English grammar to make it clearer and more logical. You see, I suspect that many people who program computers have a unique grasp of grammatical logic. Not just HTML/CSS developers who are intimately familiar with structuring text in semantically-logical ways, but computer programmers of all types who work with logical structures whose meaning must be airtight.

[Note that I’m not saying that we need to “clean up” English a la some kind of Orwellian newspeak. I’m just offering some minor shifts of thinking to reflect our current technological competencies.] MORE…

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Stills from Nuovi Comizi d’Amore (New Love Meetings) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.

Two Italian filmmakers, Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi, have completed a feature-length movie shot entirely with a mobile phone. It’s an interview-centered documentary, which seems the ideal form for a mobile phone movie. Here’s what they have to say about the work:

Project’s philosophy: this project arises from one of our main belief: today who does not make a film It is because he has nothing to say. The new technologies (mltiDV and HO camcorders) give back to everybody the chance to regain their creativity to communicate trough images. We have chosen the easiest and less intrusive mean: the mobile phone. We privileged natural light and only in rare cases we illuminated with a made in china flashlight. The two of us made the entjre shooting and editing. The sound was taken by the same mobile phone without any additional microphone and later optimized in postproduction.

What a fantastic and liberating idea. I particularly love the (bolded) confrontational and manifesto-like accusation that because technology has put filmmaking in every westerner’s pocket, those of us who aren’t making movies are pretty much worthless. It’s Futurism without the fascism.

I imagine such micro-filmmakers would carry around some minimal additional equipment like extra batteries and a flashlight in order to make the production just a tiny little bit more professional without losing the spontaneous quality of the final result.

Using a mobile phone would seem at first to be a cheap novelty: why not simply bring a very small video camera? Even most digital still cameras can shoot video, and almost certainly at a better quality than a phone can. But I think the mobile phone aspect is important, since the informality of it defuses the gravity, such as it is, that people feel when they are “on camera”.

With web-based distribution (such as YouTube or Google Video, or even the iTunes Store) being the best-case scenario for most filmmakers these days, a low-resolution, highly-compressed image quality isn’t a signficant drawback to watchability, either. It’s only when the filmmaker aspires to wider distribution either via television or cinematic release that higher-quality footage becomes a concern.

The thing most amateur videographers mess up, however, is the sound: if the sound is bad — either because it is too low or drowned out by other ambient sounds, then the footage is often rendered useless. The sounds from a small mobile-phone microphone are pretty terrible. Do they make mobile phones with plug-ins for microphones that work with the video recorder, that is do any phones have jacks that can accommodate high quality mics?

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TV snow, soon to join the record-needle scratch and the dial tone in technology oblivion.

It’s well-known that the entertainment industry has its own distinct and secret language. Variety magazine’s slanguage is infamous, in which “mitting” is applause, a “skein” is a TV series, an “oater” is a western, and, most confusing of all for a veteran Internet developer like me, the major TV networks are called “webs.”

I was in a meeting last week with some hard-core video people. No, they weren’t pornographers, rather they were video technology people who live and breathe video tech in all its myriad forms: broadcast, satellite feeds, microwaves, video tape, DVD, high-def, cable, streaming over the Internet, you name it.

They had their own jargon as well, beyond Varietyese. There were the countless technology acronyms and obscure formats, but there was also a hefty dose of outright code words for everyday familiar terms. They used the word “linear” to mean plain old “cable TV”, for example.

Most confusing of all was they way they used the term “broadband” whenever they were listing all of the different channels by which video can be delivered (as in “We can provide you with a feed via linear, [list of incomprehensible acronyms], broadband, you name it.”)

What did that mean? Is there some kind of broadband delivery channel that is distinct from dial-up channels?
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What if Sergei Brin and Larry Page were actually evil? What if they were in reality sinister villains planning to take over the world, like Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom? If so, they’re certainly going about it with great efficiency, controlling all of the instruments we use to function in the information age: web search, desktop search, mapping, news, everybody’s desktops, every book ever written. And nobody suspects a thing!

Sure, many will say they already are evil — censoring pages in China, bundling the Google Toolbar with other apps, enabling countless spam and crime opportunities).

But others see only benevolence. And investors just adore them.

This would make a great action movie plot: A thinly-veiled Google-like company, started by two clever but immensely bitter and increasingly megalomaniacal college students, seeks to control the entire information economy, and thus rule the world!!!

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Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page

In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking.

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his peeps. He writes of himself and of them seamlessly, “I am large, I contain multitudes” … Whitman sees his identity as part of many collective identities, defined by its connections and its connectedness.

On the other end of the spectrum sits Emily Dickinson, the quintessential recluse, who wrote:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Dickinson, too, equates identity with publicness, with connections to other people. Of course, she explicitly sought to avoid such connections throughout her life — perhaps this poem reveals that she was seeking to minimize the existence of her self.

When we are online, when we post information about ourselves, our identities are cybernetically extended; they overlap — and in a way include — other people’s identities via our various kinds of social networks. Our social networks overlap in the same organic-ish way that computer networks overlap. We are always plugged into multiple systems, to multiple networks both social and functional.

The beat poet Frank O’Hara conceived of something called “Personism”, in which our thoughts and ideas are defined best when they are addressed to another person (instead of to oneself or to an imagined ideal). O’Hara’s Personism Manifesto is a bracing, albeit somewhat obscure, rumination on this concept. In it he argues that when we think of new ideas we think of them as being regarded and considered by others, sometimes by particular individuals. If this isn’t the essence of creating online personas, I don’t know what is.

I’m not aware of any blogs, of course, which exist for no-one to see. Where is the Emily Dickinson of blogging? We may never know.

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Six Apart, maker of MoveableType and TypePad, has apparently been recalibrating their product development away from targeting professional web developers like me and towards the massive “teen/tween” market. TypePad was the first step in this direction, but now they’ve been working on a new social networking app called Vox which is obviously designed to enter the MySpace arena.

Khoi has been test driving Vox over at Subtraction, where Jeff Croft expressed a very interesting concern about the crowded social networking marketplace:

Does MySpace’s early lead mean it’s the final winner?

I fear so. One of the interesting things about social software from a business perspective is the “accidental lock-in” that occurs with it (perhaps it’s not actually an accident anymore, but it certainly was at one time). What I mean is this: I’m locked into AIM, even though I don’t believe AIM tried to lock me in. They’re not keeping me from getting my data out, they’re not penalizing me for switching — they’re not holding me back at all. The reason I’m locked in is that all of my friends are on AIM. I could switch to Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger, but then I’d have no one to talk to. Same thing goes for Flickr. Is a better photo sharing site came along, I’d still have to stick with Flickr, because that’s where all my friend’s photos are. Social software becomes exponentially more valuable if you’re friends are on it, which makes switching away from what you’re on very hard.

While I have in the past shared Jeff’s concerns about “lock-in” (I have, for example, been reluctant to invest much time tagging my bookmarks in del.icio.us), I’m not sure I agree that this lock-in effect is really a problem at all. I don’t think it’s a problem for most consumers who want to try new social networks, and I don’t think it’s a problem for entrepreneurs who want to get into the social networking business. MORE…

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A slight change of focus…

(also check out Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3)

You may recall that a nefarious global spying program called “Total Information Awareness”, spearheaded by convicted Iran-Contra criminal Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, was exposed in 2002 by the New York Times.

After this program was made public, there was a great outcry by Senators, Congressmen, and pundits both from the left and the right. The consensus at the time was that the program, as conceived, was illegal and would require new legislation in order to become legal.

The Republican-led Congress decided they did not want to change our existing civil liberties legislation (except for what they passed in the Patriot Act), so in 2003 they banned the TIA program and Poindexter was let go. In fact, Congress even banned programs like TIA, specifying that they would not fund…

“…the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or any other Department or element of the Federal Government…”

Much of the new NSA program resembles Total Information Awareness, and many suspect they simply moved the program from the Defense department to the NSA, where Congress wouldn’t know about it.

It looks like the Bush Administration learned a valuable lesson: If you want something that Congress or existing laws won’t let you have, then just do it on your own and don’t tell anyone about it. MORE…

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