I found this article via Architectures of Control from Adrian Short titled The Stepford Wives of Worcester Park which had a lot of interesting things to say about communities, curfews, and law and order. The real kicker is this paragraph:

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship.

Which basically sums it up. Which then refers to the title of my own blog entry. You can't have a functioning community (a group of businesses and residences) without a community (a group of people working, interacting and living together). At the same time, an online community has similar, but different problems from a property based community. You have people interacting and possibly even working together, but they are so far removed from each other that arguments and misunderstandings run rampant. See the Internet Fuckwad Theory

The piece of social-software that can successfully solve for that would be a killer app.

Twitter upon first glance, is daft. If you were to click on that link right now you would see what appears to be disjoint messages from everyone answering the question "what are you doing right now?". If you are like me, that is probably the most inane thing EVAR, and you'll close that tab and be done with it. My god! It's worse then blogging! That being said, visiting the twitter main page is hardly a reasonable introduction to twitter at all.

In fact, I would say the best way to get introduced to twitter is to ignore the front page and join. Assuming you are one of my friends, add me and then you'll start seeing what it is all about. What everyone is doing is so absolutely unimportant to my own life that I just don't care. However, what my friend are doing can have some really serious impact to inspire, motivate and connect. Here are a few examples:

• mux twitters constantly about the time he spends in the studio, consequently I am sticking to my at-least an hour a week personal promise of studio time (but I've really spent 3 or 4) This is really quite a feat given how little time I have been in the studio before then.
• I've twittered about a track that I am listening to obsessively, which prompted Stormchild to go download and listen, and we've both been tarding over it ever sense.
• It's become a J-Pop support group between people who's identity will be protected.
• General questions can be posted via twitters, and answered in a matter of hours

Essentially Twitter is like broadcast IM. There have been plenty of times that I have wanted to broadcast something to my friends, but didn't feel it is worthwhile to actually bug someone with a message; in this cause I would just twitter it up.

but not only that, it tends to tighten ones social circle. I feel that I am getting tighter with my twitter friends, by virtue of this alternate communication channel.

The important thing about twitter isn't "What are you doing?" but rather, "What do you think is important about what you are doing?" I don't twitter that I am on the bus. I twitter about what I think is important, like The Key to a good morning routine or when discovering/creating A new turn of phrase. I think that is something special, these glimpses into what people feel is important enough in their daily lives.

All this being said, I am very glad that I got into the Status Message thing through twitter (and with the cool twitter group that I have) instead of through Facebook.

On top of it all, Twitter is RESTful. REST is cool.

So first of all, this entry is more of a stream of consciousness entry, rather then some of the more crafted entries that I usually write.

I've been on-and-off following Ze Frank for quite a long time now, I wasn't exactly ground floor, but I was pretty early into it. The thing with Ze, is that as the show--the story even--progressed, he invited more and more contributions. A wiki, an earth sandwich, show intros, power moves... but the culmination is when Ze himself appears to have been affected by a song sung by a Preacher to his daughter, titled "I'm about to whip somebodys ass".

This song spawned countless numbers of remixes. A video was created. Okay .. get this, a video was story boarded by a member of the "audience", then another member (or the same one?) offered portrait skeches to anyone who would help fill in the video. The video was made, and suddenly, this Ray, this unsuspecting hyper-intelligent preacher now finds the trajectory of his life shifted, as he is inundated with countless versions of his song, in audio and even video format.

But people's lives are forever changed because of this song as well. If life, work, or whatever is just stressful...

Hum it to yourself.

You know the words.

Which leads me to say... over and over again: it's just a video blog, right?

Look, there is no denying, judging by the traffic that hits ZeFrank.com/org that his work has changed people, but if you watch the show, you can see how people change his work. An intro, a question in the forum. Creativity and culture just building and building on itself.

This is culture.

This is our culture re-inventing itself. There is no discussion about copyright. Its as if the contributors, Ray, Ze, the Sports Racers are all too busy inventing culture to worry about that shit. I am too, so that is enough of THAT particular hobby horse.

So on todays Ze, he flies to St. Louis to present Ray with a bunch of materials that the Sports Racers--the watchers of the show, more on this a little later too--have built for Ray, as tokens of gratitude. As you watch the show, you learn all kinds of interesting things about Ray. He is an anthropologist, a psychologist, a healer. He has long views. Just go watch the show.

Okay, so everything comes full circle at this point right? Like, Ray changes the sports racers life with his song, they change his life. It actually kinda brings a tear to my eye, total strangers are doing really deeply positive things for eachother. When I think about the kind of world I want Harmony to grow up in, this is the kind of world I think of.

Now the thing about Ze, is that he is almost through. In march, the show is officially over. I don't know if the wiki will still be around, or if the archives will still be around. I am going to guess that they will, so if you joined the game late, well shit, don't worry, just pick a few shows, and dive in. I have a few favorites, go check em out.

The thing is, that what will be around is a bunch of people who are used to, and demand that their media is 2 way. It's not enough to passively sit back and consume a the show, but it is instead about contributing to it. StrongBad emails are funny because of the encouragement to send StrongBad an email, because it's the interaction that really makes it funny and gives it its spark.

It makes people passionate. When you're that involved in the remixes for Ray project, it shows through in what you do and what you create. Ze's passion comes out in his work, and it infects everyone.

And now, he's made a social networking site about awesomeness, projects, and connections.

So a Project like "Remixes for Ray" which is totally awesome can grow feet a little easier, and then take off.

Maybe we can find more Rays. And I think that is important right now.

Like I said. The show is ending. According to the mythology--yes, this show has a mythology--because a giant baby has been born, the apocalypse is coming soon. Not only that, but Ze's internments into the league of awesomeness is coming to a close--again according to the mythology. But heres the thing, the sports racers believe the mythology. They do, they believe in the apocalypse more then 90% of the Christians, Muslims, Atheists, or Buddhists believe in their token world(limiting)view. They know its absurd, and revel in the absurdity of it all and, like I said, use it as a spring board to create, and I mean really, seriously create Culture. It is a Culture I can get behind. And these fanatical Sports Racers, Racing their Sports, with their Power Moves can all get in contact with each-other.

This is powerful stuff I think. I think Ze has unleashed upon the internet an interesting phenomenon that starts to link together people on the internet. Not in the mid 90's computers-are-being-linked kind of way, not in the yet-another-social-networking-service way where it is just a big popularity contest. But in linking together people who create, because all create. He has created a monster, and he is ready to unleash his hordes across the universe.

From Penny Arcade comes this great Fox News report about how child molesters can use a Nintendo DS to rape your children.

Even if you don't own a Nintendo DS, this is worth having a laugh at.

Total Bunk.

2 Excellent friends of mine are blogging, the first is the Pastor of Disaster, your vicar and mine, The Reverend. His personal site is at Anima Corporis, and uses it to publishes some excellent erotic fiction. Along with The Reverend, we have the Auspicious Kitty, talking about Yoga and Buddhism.

The Auspicious Kitty seems to be starting out her blogging experience in more of a journalistic way talking about her journey through yoga, in her blog appropriately titled Progress or non-process. Normally, I am quite hard on journal-style blogs, but this is quite cool. The difference between this and a Live Journal? Simple: there is a clear path being followed, a common thread to tie everything together, and the potential for other people to learn from her experiences. Live Journals are just a Brownian random walk through a teenage wasteland.

The Reverends blog (Observations is its title) on the other hand is more of a random walk about cool and interesting things, somewhat like my own blog. Because he is writing under a pen-name, he gets to be a little more open about things that I used to be open about, which is way cool. Check out his third entry on rights of passage. Tasty goodness.

I am very pleased to provide them with webspace, and hope they continue to blog away.

LightCone is an interesting little dynamic RSS feed that tells you when light from the moment of your birth hits stars from within our local group. Why is this important?

From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone.

On Saturday, my light cone has hit Beta Comae Berenices.

Okay, maybe it isn't important or even useful, but it is interesting.

I'm feelin mighty chuffed. Yesterday, I blogged about a few SXSW podcasts I really enjoyed. And now, Boing-boing has done the same, but look at the dates.

So I pre-boinged instead of post-boinged. Which is to say, I wrote the same blog post as boing-boing before they did, rather then the other way around.