NYT Review of Coat-Pocket-Size MiniDV Camcorders

If you're looking for a new digital camcorder for videoblogging or just home movies, you might want to read this New York Times article [no password needed]. (I'd also recommend looking at the video recording capabilities of similarly-priced digital cameras, but if you want a true camcorder these mini MiniDV camcorders sure sound nice.)

Reason: Bloggers Beware: Threats to the status quo are always ripe for "reform"

Reason: Bloggers Beware: Threats to the status quo are always ripe for "reform":

Bloggers were one of the big political successes of the 2004 election. This motley group of opinionated writers used their cyber soapboxes to attack and defend the presidential campaigns and the two major parties. Their websites offered a fresh look at politics and implicitly undermined the Establishment media that so many Americans have come to distrust. In other words, bloggers used freedom of speech to improve American democracy. Naturally the federal government is about to come down hard on bloggers.

[via Instapundit]

Toward A Literacy of Cooperation

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, will be giving a talk called Toward a Literacy of Cooperation in Palo Alto the evening of Thursday, March 17th. [via Renee Blodgett].

I hope to be able to be there.

I've long been interested in spontaneous order theory and have read many books by Friedrich Hayek. The Evolution of Cooperation is another interesting book on this subject. These themes continue to repeat themselves in various human endeavors. Eric Raymond's essay/book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, illustrates how evolutionary cooperation underlies the Open Source software movement.

Renee mentions Charles Darwin in her blog entry, and I commented that Darwin read an intellectual biography of Adam Smith after his return from the Galapagos islands (but I wasn't able to use hyperlinks on her blog.) Hayek was influenced by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment who were perhaps 250 years ahead of their time.

The Internet is fertile ground for spontaneous order and things like Wikipedia, blogs, and open source software have surprised almost everyone with how they can bring order out of seeming chaos.

Downtown Santa Cruz Street Musician

This, and all the other low-res movies were taken with my Nokia 3650 cell phone, by the way. I was talking to Yancy on the phone the other day, and he said "Dude, your recent movies look really look fuzzy. What's the deal?". (These weren't his exact words, Yancy doesn't really talk like that.) Yancy thought they were from my digital camcorder and that I had just been sloppy with my encoding.
So, the low res movies you see on my site are from my cell phone, and the high-res ones are from my camcorder.