Subject:  Viridian Note 00013:  Link Criticism

Key concepts:  Web links, link criticism, automoderating 
groupware

Attention Conservation Notice:  Although it is rather 
long, this Note may save some of your attention if you 
were bravely preparing to examine the long list of links 
in yesterday's Note 00012. 

Links:  http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/
http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch/V-Notes/ViridianIndex.html
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/links.html
http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/cultures/18

Entries in the "Big Mike" Viridian Design Contest:
http://www.pinknoiz.com/graphics/bigmike.gif


From: steffen@eskimo.com^* (Alex Steffen)
Re: Viridian Note 00012

Bruce--

        I took a quick stroll through the links you sent, 
and while many of them are of potential interest, I would 
personally find it much more useful if links were used to 
provide material to fuel conversations directly.  For 
instance:  "Check out this OECD site.  They're doing 
amazing things with taxes and resource pricing.  Is there 
a way in which Viridian design could influence the way 
people think about taxes (on the principle of  'Make the 
Invisible Visible')?"

   Then I could know better how (or if) I wanted to absorb 
this link into my info flow, which is already eating away 
at the thin levees of organization I've built to contain 
it.

     "No Info-Dumping" should be a Viridian principle. 
Let's have less information, elegant information, useful 
information, passionate information... not just more of 
it. I'd rather get a haiku than a dissertation any day.

(((bruces remarks:  I couldn't agree with you more, Alex, 
but who exactly is supposed to be "mining the haikus" out 
of all those info-dumps?  Meaning and passion are not 
invisible goods.  Your info-levees  merely export your
flood of data downstream to the rest of us.)))

From: SeJ@aol.com^^* (Stefan Jones)

It might be of benefit to give links various Viridian 
ratings:

Import (5 - Astounding, of immense interest; 0 - Not 
worthless, but certainly not a priority).

For instance, a RealTime archive of Rush Limbaugh, shaken 
by news of Honduran disaster, losing it and turning into a 
Green on-air, would rate a 5.  Technical reports on a fuel 
cell, when other more accessible articles have already 
been listed, might rate a 1 or 0.

Timeliness (5 - Ephemeral, read IMMEDIATELY, 0 - Will be 
there forever)

For instance, 
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/global/global.h
tml
is a series of daily entries about the Buenos Aires global 
warming conference.  It's rated a 4 because it will be 
around only a week or so.

Aproposity (5 - Dead-on related to Viridian interests, 2 - 
Tangentially related, 0 - No direct relation to 
Viridianism)

For instance
http://slashdot.org
rates a 0; it's a great site, but not apropos. On the 
other hand, if slashdot.org ran an article on mailing list 
"automoderating groupware," you might mention it in a 
Viridian post.

Commercial intent (5 - It's an unabashed plug, and perhaps 
suspect; 4 - It's got a good description of the product, 
plus a way to buy it; 0 - It's a fair and unbiased 
review.)

Realgood.org might rate 4; old-time Whole Earth Reviews a 
2.

(((bruces remarks:  this puts a cheering facade of 
mathematical rigor onto our problem, but we still require 
invisible munchkins to do our critical assessment work and 
supply us with passion and meaning.  Viridians can expect 
to hear a great deal more in future about the concept of 
"automoderating groupware."  If "automoderating groupware" 
worked, the Pope-Emperor could put his feet up and save 
the world by remote control.)))


From:  jon@lasser.org^^^** (J Lasser)

Re Note 00012:   "Someday it may be useful and 
constructive to have a list of official Viridian-approved 
links.  Or will it?"

Of course it won't.  Rather than Viridian-approved links, 
we  need an annotated Viridian bibliography. 

Consider my friend Ed's site.

http://homepage.usr.com/c/critconst/

"The Critical Constant" is a weekly  net-based science 
publication different from most others.  While most of its 
articles are summaries from _Science_News_ and _Science_, 
they're written for an intelligent audience which 
understands scientific concepts and methods, but has no 
time for the inner workings of the scientific community.  
Short, well-written, and with humorous headlines, "The 
Critical Constant" tells readers what they should know 
about the world of science.

A sample, from issue 12 (archived at
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/4942/i
ssue12.html):

"Scars on the sky may burn us alive!

"Jet airplanes leave contrails, those fluffy mini-clouds 
of unspeakable smoke and oxidized filth.  These hang in 
the sky, either until they unite with water droplets and 
fall, or until they spark the formation of cirrus clouds. 
Cirrus clouds, for their part, warm the Earth.  A 
preliminary estimate suggests that 0.1C to 0.3C of the 
last 30-odd years' warming might be due to these cirrus 
excesses."

To turn to an assessment from your list in Note 00012:

http://www.slashdot.com/

Slashdot is about as far from a Viridian website as is 
possible. Youth-oriented and focused almost exclusively on 
the near-term, Slashdot thinks not of the environment, nor 
of the ultimate consequences of technology run amok.  
Despite this, it's a model example of virtual community's 
effectiveness as an organizing tool. (This despite the 
Slashdot community's notorious all-talk no-code nature.)


From: whiz@ricochet.net^* (Michael Treece)

Review of www.carfree.com

Your Pope-Emperorship:

I found the Carfree Times at www.carfree.com to be well-
researched and well-thought-out.  It deals with the 
problems of transportation and city living from both a 
macro (urban planning, use of space) and a micro level 
(bus scheduling, whether or not to fence in backyards).  
It uses European cities as its inspiration, in the main; a 
bit too much Venice here, though.  Long on solutions, and 
very light on blame for the current US situation (i.e., it 
does not take Firestone, General Motors, et al. to task 
for the takeover and destruction of mass transit in the 
1940s).  Many "solutions" do depend on the building of new 
cities, though adaptation of existing cities is addressed.

   Website graphics are clean, spare, and adequate; 
nothing moves, and no cool effects are noted.  Arrangement 
facilitates rapid utilization of the site, as the reader 
is quickly moved from one page to the next.

    The bulk of the site, with its attendant information 
load, can be viewed in under one hour.


From:  rsewell@cix.compulink.co.uk^^^** (Richard Sewell) 

I agree with your comment in Note 00012 - a link serves a 
useful purpose only if backed up with some substantial 
content. I see no value in a mere list of links 
(especially after wading though this lot). 

In random order, then:

> http://www.va.com.au/photobots/PhotoBots.htm

Freeware artificial-life app. Neat, but I see no Viridian 
connection.


>http://environment.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa110198.h
tm

Fairly detailed overview of the COP-4 climate-change talks 
in Buenos Aires, November 1988, with plenty of links to 
official sites.


> http://www.sirius.com/~schizo/demo/start.htm

Art and  art theory, including some sculpture made of 
salvage and some theorising about electricity. If the 
Futurists were Viridian, this guy is too, but not so much, 
and he's not as interesting.


> http://www.loe.org/html/headlines/coffins.html

News report about biodegradable coffins. Aren't they all 
made from wood anyhow? Perhaps this illustrates the 
banality of environmental bandwagoning.


> www.realgoods.com

Online catalogue of stuff in the New Age/Save The Planet 
camp - hemp scarves, water filters, worm farms, personal 
sundials. Gimmicky, might contain some worthwhile stuff.


> http://www.scientificsales.com/balloons.htm

Meteorological balloons for sale.


> http://www.fooledya.com/balloon/

An introduction to the large and complex world of 
decorative balloons and balloon-twisting.


http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad26oct98_1.ht
m

NASA news story about experimental aerogel manufacture on 
the US Space Shuttle.  Apparently, aerogels made under 
gravity are not completely transparent, whereas aerogels 
made in free fall can be. If transparent aerogels could be 
made on Earth, they could be used to make insulating 
windows. Viridian?  Well, it's a neat tech which could be 
used for energy-saving ends, but it looks like a bit of a 
boondoggle to me. The world already has Scandinavian 
triple-glazing, and mostly doesn't bother to use it.


> http://www.ad.ic.ac.uk/estates/projects/chp/descrip.htm

Imperial College in Britain is installing a multi-megawatt 
CHP (Combined Heat and Power) system.  Some technical 
detail.


> www.carfree.com

At last, some relevance. This is an organisation 
campaigning for, and planning for, cities without cars. 
Seems like thoughtful and sensible stuff. If we don't get 
fusion and electric cars, we'll need something like this 
on CO2 grounds alone, and we may well need it just to 
escape gridlock anyhow.

(((bruces remarks:  the heroic intellectual labor of
rsewell@cix.compulink.co.uk^^^** speaks for itself!)))