Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing

Wisdom 2.0 Summit Mt. View, CA April 30 - May1st -- Where the Wise Guys (and Gals) of Silcon Valley Gather

Link for this Post: Wisdom 2.0 Summit, Mt. View, CA

We knew that search engine advertising and Social Software sales could make you rich. But until now, we did not know that those revenues could equal wisdom.

After all the name Google is pretty close to God in the English Lexicon and you can play the Zen Enlightenment game on Facebook  . . . but I thought that was a scam. Until I got an email from Mallika Chopra telling me about Wisdom 2.0 to be held in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum April 30 to May 1st.

Who is Maillika Chopra? Deepak Chopra’s daughter it turns out. We know what an enlightened guy he is, after all he is on the Larry King Show at least once a month. She is also a friend of the late Michael Jackson, someone who was practically synonymous with wisdom.

Memes for Making A New Culture -- A Work in Progress Part 1

In my post in November about my mother’s passing Remembering My Mother, I related about how a dream at age four provided as way of thinking about those early years of my life, the ones that hardly anyone remembers anything about.

I am going to be 62 in February and so I have gone through a lot of my life, much of which seemed like endless mid-life crises and reached maturity. In terms of The 12 Stages of Life by Bruce Carnahan, I have arrived at Stage 9 called which he calls Reflection.

I was at a New Years party last night put by my DJ friend EROCx1. He’s 34 and most of his friends are in their mid-thirties. Shortly after the clock hit 12, I talked one one of those friend who I had met a another of Eric’s parties exactly a year before, “That year sure went by fast. “ He replied, “yeah they seem to go by faster and faster every year.”

This is the secret that all of those of us who have reached “maturity” share. We experience each day we live now as somehow feeling the equivalent of an hour when we were in our mid-twenties. The days fall off the calendar the way that they do in a film montage that shows the days and years passing by ever faster.

New Timothy Leary Documentary on VH! Channel August 13 -- Part of Lords of Revolution Series

Link for this Post: New Timothy Leary Documentary on VH! Channel August 13 I

first heard about this documentary a year or so ago when one of the makers of the Leary documentary emailed me to ask persmission to use some pictures I put up on Flickr account which you can see here.

I'm "XRanked" on Live.Com Search -- Link broken

Broken Link: X-Rank is based on a search algorithm of change in the volume of searches for various persons, ideas, places and things of interest to the public. I'm listed among 567 most-searched for bloggers on Live Search (and we all know how good Live Search is).

Actually I'm happy to have made the cut. Its probably only natural that I would be "XRanked" since I wrote the first book on "X" which is what we used to call Ecstasy when it was legal (way back when).

What Type Is My Blog? Find Out With Typealyzer!

Links for this Post:

Typealyzer Blog Personality Analysis

'What Am I Like?' personality test

Are you a regular Vision Thing reader and have been wondering about what I am really like? With Typealyzer you can find out almost instantly.

Typealyzer is an online application that can analyzer any weblog based on its content and assign a personality type to the blog. The personality type is based on the sixteen type model of Carl Jung which was popularized by several personality tests including the Myers-Briggs.

As you can see by the image at the top of this post, it turns out that Vision Thing is an INTP blog. Since the blog has only one author (that I know of), the personality of the blog probably reflects to a large extent the personality of the blogger who does the blog) 

The analysis is fairly accurate as I usually test out on Myers-Briggs as INTP.  It is interesting to speculate whether a blog done by several people would be classified as multiple personality disorder.

So if you want to find out your personality type, you have several choices. Among them is doing a blog (which is a lot of work) and then using the Typealyzer to find out.. Or you could take the BBC "What Am I Like Test" (link at the top of the post) which is a lot easier.

Note: Myers-Briggs Personality Type diagram by way of this site.

Gaia - The future of politics -- YouTube Video

Gaia - The future of politics (embedded below)

I've been digging through my email bin trying to reach the bottom. It is getting closer or so I believe.

I found a video sent to me late last year via this email:

Dear Bruce, we just published a new video on the Future of Politics: how communication, knowledge and organization are changing through the Internet and what this means for the politics we know today.  (subtitles in English and Spanish) I'd love to have a comment from you on it.

 Best, Davide Casaleggio (video follows:)

The New Timothy Leary Archives Website -- Plus YouTube Video Interview with Webmaster of Leary.Com

Link for this Post: The New Timothy Leary Archives Website

My long-time friend Dennis Berry along with an assemblage of Timothy Leary's friends including Joi Ito,  Ken Gofmann (RU Sirius), Joey Cavella and Chris Graves  (the later two featured in the video below)  has launched a new Timothy Leary site which promises to replace the void left when Leary.Com went off-line a in the late Nineties.

Denis Berry is a woman who Timothy Leary entrusted to be the excectuor of his estate. She set up the Futuiqe Foundation to overlook Leary's heritage. The new website is their first public gesture but they have been networking privately for a while now.

The new site has the outlines of a living Timothy Leary site with sections on media, video archives, people and events with a blog as the front end. The latest feature on the blog is an interview with Joe Cavella and Chris Graves, Leary's creative team. I posted the Youtube video of the first portion of the interview below.

Future Internet: Duncan Campbell examines the technology that will one day bring about the “thinking Web”.

Link for this Post: Future Internet - Internet - NetGuide

I liked the picture that is featured at the top of this article by Duncan Cambell on the future of the Internet so I republished it at the top of this post. It shows an artists conception of what our computer interface will look like in the year 2018.

Freud said a century ago that humans have an unconscious instinctual desire to return to  womb. As a psychologist trained a long time ago in old school psychology, I would have to say that the woman in the picture looks like she has done exactly that.  Her fetal position is also similar to that imagined for the "enslaved" humans in the movie, the Matrix immersed in their virtual reality pods. Except that the woman looks alert and working rather than vegetative.

She looks extremely comfortable. The only thing that looks like it might not be needed is her fingers at the keyboard. Hopefully by 2018 that speech recognition or even brainwave recognition  will have advanced far enough to the need for repeated pressing of fingers.

Here is a snip from the post that I thought was particularly interesting:

Up in the clouds: “Web 3.0 will not just be using the data in innovative ways, it will be abstracting away things formally done on individual computers,” suggested a forum posting at Resourceful Idiot. “Cloud computing will become more common and you will see the Internet become a much more mature medium.”

Cloud computing is fundamentally about the location of storage, services, operating systems and information. All this data has to go somewhere and if the future Internet is going to be intuitively interactive, it’ll have to be readily accessible. Plus, individual users may not wish to have large (and expensive) storage systems in their home.

Online storage systems are already widely available; a Web-based email system is a simple example. The system provider allocates you storage space with your email address so you can save material for future reference (some email services no longer put limits on storage space). As more and more data is created, computing facilities whose physical location is irrelevant will be the points of access.

“You don’t necessarily know where services are coming from; you don’t even care as long as you get a certain quality of service,” says Nick Jones.

Virtualisation comes into play here; cloud systems will contain virtual networks of computers that don’t require hardware because they’re actually data stored on larger computers (known as servers). For a fee, you can store all your information in these networks with password-controlled access. It frees you from the expense of upgrading your computer hardware periodically to add storage space, and also means you can access your information from any computer with a Net connection.

You can read the entire article at the link at the top of this post.

Create Instant Mindmaps From Wikipedia with WikiMindMap

Links for this Post:

Bruce Eisner Wikipedia WikiMindMap

WikiMindMap home page (make your own WikiMindMaps)

The Dream Machine Online

Link for this Post: The Dream Machine Online  Note; Be sure to close your eyes when you view the dream machine.

Three years ago, I wrote Remembering Brion Gysin Among Gysin's works was the concept of the Dream Machine.

The main link at the top of this post is to a website the attempts to render the Dream Machine concept as an online web application.

A Dream Machine according to Wikipedia:

The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain.

In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing.

A dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain's electrical oscillations. The "viewer" experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the "viewer" feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state. This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes.

A dreamachine may be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other nervous disorders. It is thought that one out of 10,000 adults will experience a seizure while viewing the device; about twice as many children will have a similar ill effect.

Who is Brion Gyson?

Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a multimedia artist and mystic most famous in his lifetime for inventing a system called The Cut Ups, often credited to his best friend and soul mate the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Traversing many nationalities, Gysin was a Sufi initiate, Secret knowledge. Dream Machine 1960 at the Beat Hotel after experiencing flicker near Marseilles tried everything to market and sell his ticket.

This description of him comes the makers of a  2008 feature documentary 'FLicKeR' by Nik Sheehan. about Brion Gysin and the dream machine  . This is the Flicker website and here is some more info about the film (and an image I used).

Below and completely unrelated is The Dream Machine film on YouTube which says that it is, "based on Dave Arnold's design copy of artist and alchemist Brion Gysin's DREAMACHINE developed in the 1950s from an original design of the 'Flicker Machine' invented by the mathematician Ian Sommerville, a close friend of William Burroughs."

Note: Image at top from painting by Paul O'Donovan on the Interzone Site, Western Lands. Title: "The rebirth of Ra-Atum-Khepri, occurring during an Interzone Coffee-break T.V. commercial, causing a partial eclipse over the Westernlands"

The Hivemind Aesthetic, Instopix and Other Art

Links for this Post

The Hivemind Aesthetic.

Luke Stanley on Stumble Upon

Luke Stanley's Blog

Instapix

I stumbled upon a young fellow from England a couple of years ago, who is working on a semantically sensitive software program that adds into Microsoft Live Messenger called Instopix.

The program creates a stream of pictures and idea associations based on the words it detects in your chats  that float on your screen as you chat. Luke calls the technology behind Instopix the Thoughtrail Semantic File System.

Luke also likes to play with words and images in his art and poetry. The poem at the top is an example of a poem with image and there are some more examples there as

Awakening the Divine Within -- Enthogen TV on YouTube

Link for this Post: Awakening the Divine Within  -- embedded YouTube video below

Here is the YouTube description of this video:

Terence McKenna, Alex Grey, and Stanislov Grof are among the people that speak here in this inspiring piece put together by Entheogen.TV. The question remains, will we climb out of barbarism and into some form of legitimate civilization or will we die and take Earth with us?

Info for this video comes via Juxtaposeur on Memes.org

Got Wis.dm? New Online Community Has All the Answers

Link for this Post: Visit Wis.dm through this link!

Wis.dm  is the latest online community  -- an interesting mashup of  Yahoo! Answers, MySpace and Digg.

Community members become resident experts to answer the steady onslaught of questions from new members/seekers. The community thus resembles ancient Greece with wise philosophers roaming the marketplace surrounded by their students.

 

Are Psychedelics Google’s Biggest Trade Secret?

Link for this Post: Reality Sandwich  Google and the Myceliation of Consciousness.

I'm not sure if this article is irrefutable proof of the idea that psychedelics are Google’s biggest trade secret but the author RoseRose has a gift for blarney second only to her hero Terrence McKenna. Here is a lengthy but only partial snip from this Reality Sandwich serving.

Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition -- Business Week

Link for this Post: Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition Seizing on Orkut's momentum in Asia and Latin America, Google moves to revamp its social networking site and take aim at Facebook and MySpace by Olga Kharif

When Google first offered Orcut back i in 2005, I developed an online persona there as did many people I know from the cybculture days of the Nineties.

Those were the days after Friendster had inspired a series of clones including Tribe.net,and then MySpace, the 800 Pound Gorilla of social networks until recently.

Joi Ito's Web: "My Timothy Leary"

Link: Joi Ito's Web: My Timothy Leary.

The picture to the left is from Joi Ito's website. For thos who don't know who Joi Ito is, his Wikipedia entry is instructive.

I met Joi in the early Nineties at Timothy Leary's home in Beverly Hills. Timothy had just returned from one of several trips to Japan and raved about his new friend Joi Ito.

In this post, Joi discusses Timothy in a variety of contexts. One thing that is certain is that these are far more "conservative" times than those optimistic days of the late last century after the Berlin Wall had fell.

Getting Dug and Stumbled Upon

Links for this Post

Stumbled Upon Why We Get High

Why We Get High by Bruce Eisner on Bruce Eisner's Writings blog

We We Get High on Digg

Most of you know Digg and Stumbled Upon -- two social network communities that  share content with other members. Posts on Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing have been stumbled upon or dugg a number of time.  But a bit more than month ago, August 12th to be exact, I had an usual experience with Stumbled Upon and Digg. Usually if a post of mine is stumbled upon, the traffic goes up a few hundred visitors a day.

But on August 22, a reprint of an article originally published in the Island Views newsletter (circulation 2000) way back in 1994 got both Stumbled Upon and Durgg. The article has been there since 2004 and was written ten years ago.  Bruce Eisner's Writings is an occasionally updated archive for post writings and usually only gets about 100 page views a day. On August 22,  it the stats showed that there had been 5947 unique visitors.

URTH.TV Consciousness Movement Social Network

Link for this post: URTH.TV Consciousness Movement Social Network.

I discovered Urth.TV  last week and joined immediately. I used to speak at the Whole Life Expo in the 1980s, both myself and with Timothy Leary. I'm already a member of at least a dozen social networks and usually pass on new memberships but URT.TV is interesting and worth a look. Here is an excerpt from URT.TV's history and mission:

In early 2006, a group of conscious entrepreneurs led by Ayman Sawaf , Rowan Gabrielle and Joey Shepp bought the assets of the Wholelife expos and conferences with plans to take the Wholelife experience online-24/7 to the global market -thus the birth of Urth.tv

The Shock Doctrine A Short Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein -- YouTube Video

Links for this Post:

The Shock Doctrine A Short Film  by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein -- YouTube Video Ebbed in this post below

The Shock Doctrine Book and Film Home Page

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover Book) By Naomi Klein on Amazon

A friend sent me a link to the video embedded below. It is a short film as shocking as its title. Hopefully it will shock us awake rather than into compliance.

Top 10 Video Search Engines

Link: Top 10 Video Search Engines on Read/WriteWeb

A lot of people think that Google is the only way to search for video because it is so good at searching for websites. What people do not know is that Google only searches Google Video and YouTube with its video search. That leaves out a lot of video!

Read/WriteWeb has republished a list of
Top 10 Alternative Video Search Engines first published on on AltSearchEngines. Here is an excerpt from the post:.

Last week Read/WriteWeb focused on Online Music, and we

Updated: NewsVine Launches ElectionVine: Widget Based Election Polling -- Vote NOW!

Link to this Post: NewsVine Launches ElectionVine: Widget Based Election Polling Duncan Riley on TechCrunch

Update: I updated this post to remind you about what the black rectangle on the column of Vision Thing is for . . . and to suggest that you vote for the candidate of your choice. You can click through after you finish voting and see the tabulation of votes until now on Electionvine website.

As you may have notice, the Presidential Election started a bit earlier this election cycle than in the past. The earlier primary dates may be part of the reason but I suspect that more of it has to do with the "Bush Factor:"

The Bush Factor

What's the Bush Factor? In plain English, its the fact that most people wish that Bush was not President anymore. Its not that they want to impeach him, they just want to forget him. This unusual state-of-affairs has lead Newsweek pollsters to ask: "At this point in time, do you personally wish that George W. Bush's presidency was over, or don't you feel this way?"

Fifty-eight percent asked this question answered "Yes, I wish it was over."  Only 37% did not. And the poll was taken in January 2007 when Bush's popularity was still over 30%. Its down around 26% in the latest polls.

The Electrovine Widget

So with the idea of a new President a welcome idea. the folks at  Newsvine have created an alternative way of taking voter sentiment, the Electrovine Widget. I have placed one of their widgets on my right-sidebar and will keep it there through the Presidential elctiion in November 2008. Here is how Techcrunch describes Newsvines new widget voting sytem:

ElectionVine is a new service being launched today by NewsVine that allows users to embed a US Presidential candidate poll on their sites.

NewsVine sees ElectionVine as their answer to mainstream media’s traditional polling methods, turning the tradition polling model on its head by delivering a distributed polling system that can be used by blog/site owners across the United States. Anyone can hold their own election on their own site and even go as far as endorsing a candidate. The site-specific results show what percentage of each sites readers are Democrats, Republicans, or backers of a certain candidate.

The strength of the application comes with an aggregate view of how the election is shaping up in the eyes of the distributed blogosphere. With several months to go before the primaries, NewsVine expects to have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of these independent polling places throughout the web.

If you want to get started, I have also embedded near the top of this post:

Andy Warhols TV -- FREE Vidio Via Alterati.net Torrent

Link for this Post: Alterati.net: Torrent Details for: Andy Warhols TV.

This video torrent comes by way way of a post on GPod and so I am publishing great background they wrote for the video:

At the start of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. Warhol also published “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again).” Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.

The artist began the 1980s with the publication of “POPism: The Warhol ‘60s” and with exhibitions of Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century and the Retrospectives and Reversal series. He also created two cable television shows, “Andy Warhol’s TV” in 1982 and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes” for MTV in 1986. His paintings from the 1980s include The Last Suppers, Rorschachs and, in a return to his first great theme of Pop, a series called Ads. Warhol also engaged in a series of collaborations with younger artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Keith Haring.

With the torrent link at the top of ths post and a good bittorent client, you can soon be enjoying these videos.

Podtropolis - The iPod Tracker Is Back Up

Link for this Post: Podtropolis - The iPod Tracker.

Podtropolis is a torrent tracking and search site dedicated to downloadable movies and other content for the iPod. according to Digg where I found the site, " The popular torrent site (featuring iPod torrents) is back up after a long hiatus"

Give Net Neutrality a Chance on Business Week Online

Link for this Post: Give Net Neutrality a Chance by S. Derek Turner in Business Week Online

Here is an excerpt from this excellent article:

Eliminating net neutrality would turn the open system of the Internet on its head. With net neutrality, you can start a business selling widgets online and be assured that consumers can reach your Web site just as easily as Wal-Mart's (NYSE:WMT - News). But under the tiered system proposed by the phone and cable companies, the level playing field is gone. Wal-Mart will be able to buy a spot in the fast lane on the information superhighway. The little guy will be stuck on dirt roads.

The phone and cable companies say they need to discriminate to generate a new revenue stream -- which they claim will be used to improve infrastructure. It's unclear whether these new tolls would actually generate substantial income. But eliminating net neutrality would allow these companies to use the power of discrimination to favor their own content -- that is, they would use their domination of the broadband access market to exert power over the content and applications market.

I found this article by way of Howard Reingold on Smart Mobs.

Miss Live Earth? Watch the Videos on MSN -- Concerts For A Climate In Crisis

Link for this Post : Live Earth on MSN: The Concerts For A Climate In Crisis.

If you missed watching Live Earth live, then you can do the next best thing -- watch it on video at MSN. According to the Conscious Earth blog which I got this info from:

Following the record setting event that drew 10 million online viewers, MSN is offering highlight clips from every major venues through their concert. You can scroll through the available footage and assemble your personal favorites in a customized video playlist.

You can watch the concert using the link at the top of this post.

Powerset’s search technology scoop, may scare Google -- Venture Beat and ZDNet

Updated Links for this Post:

Powerset: The natural language search mashup platform by Dan Farber -- ZDNet

Powerset’s search technology scoop, may scare Google By Matt Marshall on VentureBeat

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the Venture Beat piece

Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, will announce Friday it has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google.

The technology, developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, seeks to understand the meanings between words, akin to the way humans understand language — and is thus called “natural language.” It has been thirty years in the works.

The buzz around Powerset is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google. The giant search engine has said it wants to implement language-understanding technology one day. However, tests of linguistic approaches haven’t made any difference in Google’s results so far, it says  . . .

Apparently this news has been the subject of a lot of controversy including a critique of the Powerset article refer to at the top of this article in a piece

Update: I just found another article with new information about Powerquest on ZDNet.

Imagine a mashup between Facebook, Digg and Google Apps, but you get to participate in the building of the products that sit on top of our platform. You log into a social network, like you would Facebook, and you get certified to be a Powerlabber. Once certified you can join different interest groups, such as travel, and participate in idea and mashup competitions. QA is embedded and its all bloggable.”

“Instead of being stealth mode, we are being more open than any other company has been in the launch process. If we screw up and it’s not going well, we will take the hit, and if it goes well we take that. It’s a wisdom of the crowd idea of competitions. We will build the winners and widgets for Facebook, blogs, and others,” said Newcomb.

“We want as many people in Powerlabs to help us build and test the product. Powerlabs tells us when we are ready to go. We could have 50,000 people QAing our product,” he added. So far Powerset has 10,000 Powerlabs users. “Imagine how many widgets that could sit inside of Facebook, MySpace and even Second Life. It gives us the ability to launch with an extremely passionate set of people,” Newcomb said.

In addition, Newcomb suggested that the traditional search box could be replaced. “Imagine an instant messenger interface or voice interface instead of the search box to interact with a search engine,” Newcomb said.

A lot of people have put a lot of money into seeing if they could get the upperhand on Google. It will be interesting to see if the folks at Powequest can.

Incarcerex the Cure for Political Impotency YouTube Video

Link for this post Embedded Youtube Video Incarcerex: It's Time for a New Bottom Line by the Drug Policy Foundation

This video came my way via the Entheogenic Reformation blog

Is The Internet is a Denial of Service Attack on Your Brain?

Links for this Post:

"The Internet is a Denial of Service Attack on Your Brain": Stupid Human Programming Blog

Internet Addiction Test

Hello, my name is Bruce and I'm an Internet addict.

I read the story about the Internet being a denial-of-service attack on your brain and then I took the test. Its true, I'm addicted to dopamine, to new information. I'm on the web almost all the time.

What about you?

Note: Graphic from Lebanonesia

Prometeus - The Media Revolution on YouTube

Link for this post: YouTube Inbed: Prometheus - The Media Revolution This video is a bit like Epic 215 about Googlezon but takes things a bit further and introduces "the prosumer." That's you hopefully.

WordPress vs. Movable Type: Open Source Blogging Software Showdown on Publishing 2.0

Link:for this Post: WordPress vs. Movable Type: Open Source Blogging Software Showdown.

I use Typepad so the launch of an open source version of Movable Type, the software that powers us Typepad blogs is exciting. Scott Karp says that with with Version 4.0 of Movable Type:

Movable Type is now trying to leapfrog past WordPress by introducing community features that give blog readers the ability to create social network profiles and post content. It’s interesting to note that this feature is competitive in some respects to Pluck’s SiteLife, KickApps, and a number of other community feature platforms, although it seems to me that the potential value is limited to sites that work entirely on Movable Type, i.e. not apparently useful for sites that use other content management systems, as almost all large media and corporate sites do.

I had a lot of fun with this post. I have been looking for a community solution for my website Island Web and so have checked out a number of solutions. I had already tried KickApps with my other website Mind Media, but do not like having someone run ads on my website. The Pluck SiteSafe used Better Homes and Gerdens as their featured client. I am not impressed with that site and so did not inquire as to the cost of that solution.

The article also mentions Drupal which avid readers of this blong will know is the solution I am currently trying to use on Island Web,. Sean Kearney commented on my post and also posted his comment to his own blog as How Many Open Source Devotees Does It Take to Screw a Newbie?, Indeed while I have learned a lot about Drupal since I wrote my original post about it, the Island Web has not become the community I hoped. Some of this I am sure is due to my inadequate understanding of configuring Drupal but some of it is due to how difficult Drupal is to figure out.

My current plans are to move the site over to a Windows server. I already tried with Community Server but had problems with their "hosted solution." My latest idea before about Movable Type going open source is an open source windows soluttion called DotNetNuke. If I end up on Windows it will be a strange twist since Island Web had beeen on a Microsoft Server from 2001 until last year when I moved it to an Apache server so I could use open source.

So I am interested in the new features of Movable Type 4.0 as open source. I tried to install the beta version on the Mind Media server but so far I've had some problems with my server configuration which I waiting word from tech support.

Updated with News Video: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Make Historic Joint Appearance At the Fifth Annual 'D: All Things Digital' Conference

Link for this Post: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Make Historic Joint Appearance At the Fifth Annual 'D: All Things Digital Conference.

I first saw Steve Jobs speak at a conference in Santa Cruz back in the early 1980s, right after the launch of the Mac.

The 9rules Web Community Where Quality Loves Company

Links for this Post:

9rules - Quality Loves Company..

To Some, Growing Means Dying Wisedump Blog by 9Rules CEO

"So what is the 9 Rules" you ask?

Well for starters the description on the website's metatags reads:

9rules is the world's largest bog community, comprised of hundreds of authors from around the globe, writing on dozens of interesting topics.

Giganews Premium Usenet Launches Giganews Accelerator Beta -- FREE Windows Software Download!

Links for this Post:

Giganews Premium Usenet Newsgroup Service 3 Day FREE Trial

Giganews Accelerator Beta Free Windows Software Download

The Usenet is one of the last and vast largely untamed frontiers of the Internet. Google was one of the first Internet players to realize the importance of the Usenet with its 2001 acquisition of Deja News which had developed an archive of the Usenet going back to 1981.

Pew Research: 'Web 2.0' Crowd A Small Minority

Links for this Post:

Pew Research: 'Web 2.0' Crowd A Small Minority: by Greg Sterling, .Search Engine Land

America: The Growing Digital Divide by Duncan Riley- TechCrunch

A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users (the original report)  by John Horrigan, The Pew Internet & American Life Project

Pandora's Box Closing

Links for this Post

Pandora To Shut Out Non-U.S. Users Thursday Evening by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch

Closing Pandora’s Box: The End of Internet Radio? - 10 Zen Monkies Webzine -- RU Sirius Interview with Tim Westergen from SaveNetRadio.org

Back in November of last year, I posted Pandora by the Music Genome Project Creates Custom "Radio Stations" Based on Choice of Artist.

Who's Really Participating in Web 2.0 TIME

Link for this Post: Who's Really Participating in Web 2.0  By Bill Tancer in  TIME.

TIME Magazine made "YOU" -- i.e.  the content creators who put write blogs, post pictures and videos on the web -- Person of the Year in 2006. The "YOU" is not "all of YOU," it is the "some of YOU" who do the web development and posting.

  Bill Tencer asks the question how many people are the "some of YOU. The short answer: not very many.

Here is an excerpt from the article with his concluding thoughts:

Web 2.0 has been successful in significantly broadening the amount material available to us, but reviewing the latest data reveals that we're still in the very early stages. Watching videos of Charlie the Unicorn or the latest interpretation of Star Wars Cantina music feels as though we're in the awkward and uncomfortable position of being one of the first guests to arrive at what promises to be a very cool party.

Read the full article here.

Looking Through My Squidoo Lenses

Updated: The Bruce Eisner Vision Thing Group on Squidoo

Links for this Psst: My Lenses on Squidoo

Psychedelic Mind-Changers

Everything About Ecstasy

Squidoo (on Wikipedia) is a social website whose focus (no pun intended) is making lenses. Its taken some hits from social software critics -- TechCrunch called it a "Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross." I had signed up for the site some time ago but as these things go, I just got around to using it a bit.

Spinning a New Island Web

Link for this Post: The New Island Web: A Work in Progress

As regular readers know, I'm a writer by trade rather than a web design or coder. However since I have had several sites that have been on the web since its early days., I have slowly learned to become semi-self relent in developing my websites. This includes a bit of design and even installation as well as attempts at customization of server-side software.

Get a First Life

Link for this post:: Get a First Life

Have you been spending too much time in virtual commerece at Second Life.  I know more that one of you fits that descGet a First Life has a message for you.

Site by Lazy Mof

Link Via The Golden Sparrow Awards

 

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us -- YouTube Video

Links for this post:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us  YouTube Video below

InfoWorld: "Tech tops the pop charts" by By David L. Margulius

I first heard about this video in the InfoWorld article "Tech tops the pop charts" Here is an excerpt from the magazine piece:

This video should be rated X -- for lots of XML. Instead of showing sex, it shows lots of raw, naked, pulsating code! And while it seems at first to be a video describing the transition from HTML to XML, and the fast evolution of Web 2.0 technologies, it ends up being a larger commentary on technology and where humans are headed (“we are teaching the machine”).

When I learned the video was created by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, I had to call him. Michael Wesch answered his phone directly. Forty days after releasing it, he seems to be in a state of shock that his little video traveled so powerfully around the world.

“I was ecstatic,” Wesch told me, “when I realized that 100 people had watched it. Now that almost 2 million people have seen it, it’s all just surreal. I’m geeky, so I’m into this stuff. I thought there couldn’t be that many other people” who would be into it, too.

But there are. Apparently, Wesch’s video topped even the Super Bowl ad videos and Britney Spears’ shaved head ...  It is dangerous and anonymous. People blog, people like to share, people get hacked, not corporations.

Read the rest of this article at the link at the top of this post ... and be sure to watch the video!

Get Paid for Posting on New Online Social Network Helium

Link for this Post: Get Paid for Posting on New Online Social Network Helium

According to the folks at the newest social software network on the block Helium, they can best be described  as "About, Yahoo Answers. Wikipedia all rolled into one, Helium is better than search: real advice, from real people."

Time Magazine made the geek at a keyboard their person of the year and perhaps with good reason. Most of the successful players on the web leverage the content generating power of their users to produce high levels of traffic, search engine ranking and advertising revenue. Examples abound from the hallowed halls of Wikipedia to the manic news machine that is Digg to the code-spammed wall of Rupert Murdock's Myspace.

Well for the most part, content generators are happy to add to the increasing   published words.  According to recent statistics, the total amount of words posted to the various sections of the web including the Usenet, forums and blogs on the web doubles every 18 months (and that does not include email). With all those words being produced largely at no cost, no wonder that the savvy website learns to profit by them.

Well the cool thing about Helium -- aside from their name --is that they have decided to show us the money. Here is how they put it:

This is the best part. Sure, Helium is an outlet for the writer in all of us, but it is also a place where you can earn not only the adoration of your peers, but money, too! We want you to be part of the success here. Helium shares a portion of revenue with you. Every article you write is an asset which can earn you revenue---into perpetuity. The better you write, the higher you rank, the more your reward.

New entries into the user-generated content production arena have begun to realize that they need to pay their writers. According to the story "digg users are getting paid--just not by digg"  According to the story, "A PR/marketing firm confirmed [with the author of the story] that they had a number of the top 50 users on digg now on the payroll."

Another story: Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.")

The wise old web words, "Content is King" appears to be coming true. If you want to fill your mental balloon with Helium, you can visit them at this link.

Robert Anton Wilson Memorial Video on YouTube

I posted "A Poem in Memory of Robert Anton Wilson -- Hail Eris! The Muse Passes" about the noted author and counterculture spokesman Robert Anton Wilson's passing in January.

More recently, I have posted about a Robert Anton Wilson memorial held in Santa Cruz here and here.

Nick Herbert who wrote the poem in memory of RAW just emailed me to tell me that the video of the RAW memorial is now on YouTube. You can watch it below:

Sony Builds a First Class Virtual World with PlayStation Home - Engadget

Link: PlayStation Home revealed - Engadget.

Accoring to this article in today's Engadet:

. . . the "service" seems to be a new-gen Second Life killer, with public hangouts, personal apartments (to show off those fancy prizes you've been racking up in recent frag fests) and voice chat. The seeming-MMO even includes casual games such as pool, bowling and arcade machines embedded into the world, but at any time you can invite a fellow resident to join in on any PlayStation Network-capable game. As for user-generated content, PS Home allows you to hang your own pictures on your apartment walls and share videos with friends

I try and stay away from hanging out at virtual worlds these days, tying to keep my Internet addication under some control. I have avoided Second Life -- but the following video from the Gadget post makes checkin PlayStation Home out tempting.

Visionary and Psychedelic Video Interviews by Amsterdam Broadcaster Luc Sala on YouTube

Link for this Post:  Visionary and Psychedelic Video Interviews by Amsterdamn Broadcaster Luc Sala on YouTube

Note: Photo to the left -- Luc Sala

Back in the 1980s when I was hanging out with Timothy Leary, he introduced me to Amsterdam entrepreneur and TV broadcaster Luc Sala.  Luc just emailed me to tell me he was making a series to ten minute samples from his extensive psychedelic and spiritual video interview collection available on YouTube: Here is part of the email he sent:

"I am making many of my spiritual - psychedelics interviews and programs with Hofmann, Leary, Ram Dass, Shulgin, McKenna, UG Krishnamurti, Bowen, Houston Smith, etc. etc. available via YouTube, as 10 minute samples. There is much more material on my video distribution site, Mindlift.TV actually hundreds of video's available on DVDs."

The link for the collection on YouTube is at the top of this post. I am imbedding videos I from the selection as a sample of what is there.

Timothy Leary

Robert Anton Wilson

Albert Hofmann

Terence McKenna

Find The Best Mind Expanding News, Articles, Media And People -- MindSearch on Second Attention'

Link for this Post: MindSearch on Second Attention.

The tech behind the site is mainly Google but it is fun to search the assortments of websites, blogs, social networks and social bookmark sites including a couple of niche assortments that may be of interest to Vision Thing Readers.

The "mind-expanding" website assortment:Disinformation, Levity, Nirvikalpa, Fusion Anomaly, Erowid, Kurzweilai, Mind Hacks, Dedroidification, Second Attention, What is Enlightenment?, Deep Planet, Reasoned Spirituality, Deoxy, Principia Discordia, Smart-Kit Meta-Religion, Dreamviews, Wikibooks - Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Crosroads, DreamGate, The Lucidity Institute, Prismagems-Castaneda, Experience Festival, New World View,

RU Sirius's New Book, True Mutations Features Interviews with Leading Cyberculture Idea Makers

Links for this Post:

Available on Amazon: True Mutations (Paperback) by R.U. Sirius (Author), Ken Coffman (Editor), Ryder Carroll (Illustrator)

Boing Boing: R.U. Sirius True Mutations book

I got an email yesterday from Ken Coffman, aka R.U. Sirius that his newest book,  True Mutations has been released. He also sent over this one paragraph synopsis:

True Mutations: Interviews on the Edge of Science, Technology, and Consciousness looks at the wild changes that may be coming to the human species during the 21st Century. In a series of interviews, author/host RU Sirius explores a series of (r)evolutions in disciplines ranging from the evolution of clean energy to the possibilities of endless neurological ecstasy; from open-source free access to nearly everything under the sun to self-directed biotechnological evolution; from psychedelic culture mash-ups to the possibilities of a technological singularity that alters not only humanity but the entire universe.??In 2007, True Mutations takes up where his earlier book (with Rudy Rucker) Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge left off. I hope these playful, informative, occasionally skeptical, frequently trippy, and sometimes funny conversations turn you on to new ways of thinking about these sometimes scary and definitely wiggy times and inspire new forms of creative work and play among those who read it.

That is one long paragraph and most likely foreshadows a book packed with ideas.I've known Ken for a long time but this is the first time he has actually appeared in a book in both of his personas -- with his RU Sirius reserved for author and Ken Coffman left to do the editing.

RU (or Ken() depending on what day you get him on is a remarkable journalist and the people he interviews and topics he covers are much in alignment with my own studies and interests.

I have not read the book but plan to. I'm including the table of contents in the extension to this post:

Grab a Vision Thing Widget

If you have been wanting a Bruce Eisner Widget of your very own, I made one for you tonight. This by way of my hosts Typepad and the WidgetBox. Thanks to both!

What the the widgets good for? You can add them to Myspace and a lot of other places. Grab one by clcking the button on the bottom left of the widget and check it out.

Widgetbox says about itself: Widgetbox is a directory and syndication platform for web widgets for blogs and other web pages. Their widgets work with TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace as well as most other blogs, sidebars or websites. No plug-ins are needed, and they're free!

Changing the World Starts with You at Change.org

Link for this Post: Change.org.Activist Social Network Software

I discovered change.org a couple of days ago and have spent some time there. I am a long time activist in the psychedelic community. 17 years ago, I started Island Group. In 1997 the group became Island Foundation (see Island Web) with became a 501 c (3) Non Profit in 1997. The group was names for Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island.

Google & Cisco Planning Digital Billboards & Subliminal Advertising

Links for this Post: 

LiveScience.com - "The Next Really Big Thing: Digital Billboards" By Bill Christensen.

technovelgy.com: Subliminal Billboards

technovelgy.com: Digital Billboards Worth Billions

According to these stories, the old fashioned American billboards we are used to may be replaced by new "digital billboards."

Mobilized Online, Thousands Gather to Hear Barack Obama - washingtonpost.com + YouTube Video

Linka for this Post:

Mobilized Online, Thousands Gather to Hear Obama - in the Washington Post by Zachary A. Goldfarb.

YouTube Video: OBAMA: Calls on Students to "Bend the Arc of History"

This Washington Post story is about the first campaign appearance by Sen.  since the