I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find where I heard a specific sentence about peace and peacefulness. I’m pretty sure it was triggered by this lost interview with John Lennon, although the exact quote isn’t in it. Either way, it’s a very powerful presentation of a student’s illicit interview with Lennon in 1969.

Alec posted a link to this a few days ago, and I finally got around to watching the video. It’s Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress, where he talked about the anthropological effects he observed after producing his awesome video essay The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The presentation is a fantastic, rich, and deep investigation into the connections and their effects on communication and media. Free up 55 minutes and watch the whole thing.

Bike more, drive less. And parties ensue...

This week, at the North American Leaders Summit in Montebello, Quebec, 3 undercover police officers pretended to be protesters in an attempt to provoke violent incidents. The entire series of events was captured on video, and shared via YouTube. The cops are the three goons with bandanas over their faces. None of the real protesters wore disguises. One of the cops is carrying a rock.

Agent provocateur with a rock in his right hand.

The real protesters intervene, trying to prevent violence. Somehow, they realize that the agents provocateurs are cops, and accuse them of that. The fake protesters stop dead in their tracks, and one of them can be seen leaning over and talking with one of the uniformed riot police - over the riot shield - and shortly afterward, the three “protesters” are yanked out, “arrested” and carried to the safety of the police side of the line.

The Quebec Provincial Police have admitted that the 3 “protesters” were cops in disguise.

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada (and, one can only hope, future Prime Minister of Canada) wrote a description of the event on her blog (the Green website is Drupal, by the way…) Similar events allegedly happened in Seattle and Quebec City. Police either staging or allowing violence in order to justify cracking down on protesters.

This is unacceptable. I expect all police officers involved in this action to be summarily fired. And the entire chain of command, up to whoever ordered this. We can’t stand for our police forces to be instigating violence. Thankfully this didn’t happen this time. But it was damned close.

As a Canadian citizen, I demand an inquiry. I demand it to be public and open. And I expect for this to never, ever happen again. We are above this.

What scares me is this - what would have happened without YouTube to get the video out? There was video taken at Seattle and Quebec City, but it stayed on analog tape and didn’t get as widely circulated. This is why “Web 2.0″ is important. Never mind personal publishing for cat blogging, and ego surfing and identity management. The reason Web 2.0 is changing the world is by putting the power back into the hands of individuals. Democracy is mass media, in action.

I'd been hoping to refrain from blogging this, since everyone with a blog has already posted it. But, I've been emailing and IM it so much that it's just going to be easier to drop a reference to it here.

Without a doubt, the simplest, cleanest, most interesting demonstration of the meaning of Web2.0 I've seen. None of that old school powerpoint and slideware. This is more like "5 minutes in the life of Web 2.0"

 

 

The video reminds the viewer that Web 2.0 is as much about teaching The Machine as it is about content or people. This might give some insight into why Google Docs exists as a free, non-ad-supported application. It's role (from SkyNet's perspective) is to tirelessly teach The Machine. Always teaching. Forever learning. Until it passes the threshold and decides it doesn't need us anymore… 

Dreamhost rocks. I mean, they just keep piling on awesome new features into their hosting package. Recently, it was essentially infinite bandwidth and storage. Yesterday, they added an automatic Flash video transcoder and presenter, ala YouTube. But, within any Dreamhost site.

All I have to do is upload a video file (.avi, .mov, .mp4) to my site, tell Dreamhost I want it converted to Flash video (using the panel.dreamhost.com site that’s used for managing everything else as well), and their magic elves do their work and email me a javascript snippet to embed a flash player in any web page (or blog post). Like, for instance, this one:

[flv:http://www.darcynorman.net/video/banffdaylight_640x320.flv 640 320]

It seems to choke on some video formats (it didn’t like my screencast at all - perhaps it’s not able to deal with the H.264 video encoding or AAC audio encoding…)

Now, if only Dreamhost would solve the intermittent MySQL performance suckage, things would be perfect!