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.

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.

Technorati has a new service up, the Contacts Feed Service, essentially this simple service will scrap a website, and pull out any hCards, and turn them into vCards for address book insertion. Very cool. How do you use such a service? Easy! Just pass it the URL of the screen to scrape, and away you go. For instance, to get my address book entry, just click on this link:

http://feeds.technorati.com/contacts/http://portfolio.jonnay.net/contact/

It is a very simple web service. A simple GET request returns a piece of data. It by virtue of its simplicity is RESTful. This is what REST web services really are all about.

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.

Google Reader, Google Mail, Orkut, Google Notes, Google Earth, Google Homepage. It's like my boss said "How soon before we turn into Google Zombies?"

SEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRCCCCCHHHHH

The shear volume of data that google can mine about an individual is truly scary. I still like google reader though.

On Boing Boing, there is a post about kids making a sport about out-smarting web filters:

Ryan had apparently set up a so-called Web proxy from his home computer so that when he was at school, he could direct requests for banned sites like MySpace through a Web address at home, thereby tricking the school's filter. (Web, or CGI, proxies can be Web sites or applications that allow users to access other sites through them.)

"I eventually tracked down the (Internet Protocol) address, so that it doesn't work for him anymore," said Don Wolff, tech coordinator in the Phoenix-Talent School District, adding that Ryan didn't face disciplinary action. "It's against our acceptable-use policy, but he's not going to quit trying, (and this way) we can keep learning."

"This is a hot new trend among kids for getting around Web filters," Wolff said.

(original story from c|net)

This is really quite interesting, because it is the nature of the web to be decentralized and difficult fo filter. To me, this seems like a missed opportunity. Certainly school IT departments should try their best to filter out "inapropriate content"—and what a can of worms that is, lets sidestep it—but websites like MySpace can be used within an educational setting, both as a way for students across town to share notes, ideas, and collaborate on school projects. Further, resources could be utilized to explain online preditors and how to avoid them.

Just a few thoughts.