I have always feared that Community & Personal Empowerment were mutually exclusive.
There's Obama and Hillary making Nice with each other... hope they keep it up. As far as I'm concerned, Obama gives me some hope for the future of the US of A.
Ramping up for the Wii Fit at home.
There were two recent articles online which set me off collecting this batch of info;
The first, Rands in Repose, led me to recall recent & older experience with tribe.net. Years ago when they first started I was very hopeful, but when I started at that time there were almost no tribes and certainly none of interest to an over educated farmboy like me.
Now however there is much more on tribe.net. Not too much for blurry visioned old retirees like me, but there is SOME... and that's a big improvement. Lots of stuff on cats. So now it's workth looking at again. That's been in the last 4 months or so & I was therefore greatly interested in the Rands article. One of many great quotes from Rands:
The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don't know.
That's after he's been talking about Twitter & how he came to depend on it, even though it's crappy software. I have found that I too am using twitter to follow, not really to post; and that's how I've been following...The second. Dave Winer on Scripting News, is about trusting your users by letting them keep their own data. Empowering people by letting them take control of things for themselves. To paraphrase: "If you love them let them go".
The comments on Dave's article (yes I know these are posts, but they're so intense I'd rather call them articles) led me to think about last.fm. I too have found that I use last.fm because it integrates well into apps I use: iTunes & songbird.
And music led me to my Ramping Up in anticipation of the Wii Fit. The Wii Fit is a Mother's Day gift for my wife, Judy. And I am way interested in it myself so we both will benefit.
We just got the Wii a couple weeks ago & curiously enough it has wifi built into it & it found our Airport network automatically! I never found anywhere in the advertising that wifi was built in! The network is always there, but if you want a web browser you have to buy it (for all of $5). It's an adaptation of the Opera browser & works very well.
So I went on a quest to see if I could get my iTunes library to play through the Wii. Short answer is "yes". Long answer is "it's a battle". The upside is that there is a big Wii hacking community.
In looking for web-based music players for the Wii, I found Orb and I found http://finetune.com.
Nothing specific to last.fm, but I haven't given up on it (see google search below).
As for orb.com, It would do the iTunes streaming, but requires a Windows PC, so count that out (We have them here, but I don't want to fool with THAT when macs are handy).
However, finetune has a Wii player. And much to my pleasure it allows you to build playlists to your own liking from the artists they have available, and they have a LOT. Almost everything contemporary that I like. What a surprise. Actually anything that serves up a javascript based media player will work with the Wii, but there are not a lot of them.
Also... not music, but.... there is me.dium (I keep thinking rhymes with Te.dium). Another place where there is the idea of people experiencing the web in parallel and sharing. But truly this tends to be a young person's thing... they're young and romance the idea and ignore the warts all over it. I need to keep my energies focused in productive area and not go off on wild chases.
And here's a community idea: http://carrotmob.org a way for people to bring positive change through collective action. I hope. I can thank http://zefrank.com for that.
So there's still not my idea of community but the bits and pieces are coming about.
Next project is the HDTV & see what we can do with that. I've been using Dave Winer's FlickrFan screen saver on my bigger mac & if that could be tied into twitter & the hdtv that would be great fun both locally at home and in whatever community may arise on the web.
ideas referenced:
digging for last.fm: http://www.google.com/search?q=playlists+on+last.fm
A not-random last.fm user: http://www.last.fm/user/MagicDrum/
My music on the Wii: http://www.finetune.com/listen/playlist/2220591
FlickrFan screen saver: http:/flickrfan.org
The Carrot Mob for positive change: http://carrotmob.org
and of course....
A not-random last.fm user: http://www.last.fm/user/MagicDrum/
My music on the Wii: http://www.finetune.com/listen/playlist/2220591
FlickrFan screen saver: http:/flickrfan.org
The Carrot Mob for positive change: http://carrotmob.org
and of course....
