RasterWeb!

I’m a fan of the “just works” concept (I mean, I use Mac OS X instead of Windows, right?) but A warning for the bazaar nails it.

I’m seeing it from a different perspective though, one of a media creator. Just yesterday I had to deal with the fact that people don’t care about their rights or freedoms, as long as it will work. We’ve had this discussion in the videoblogging community, where most are advocates of creators rights. What does this mean? It means we encourage people to put their video (audio, text, etc.) online where they can maintain their rights over it as the creator. Some people just don’t care about that. They just want what they create to get online in the quickest and simplest fashion possible. YouTube and MySpace are often the conduits for this “I want it now and I want it to work” mentaility. Neither give enough control over the content to those who created it.

It’s also been noted that often times the attitude of “I want it now and I want it to work” is taken by younger people, the under 30 crowd, who haven’t yet got a long term view, or a sense of history with the things they create. This may be true, I see it in other things as well, and I often am not sure how much of my view is shaped by the length of time I’ve been involved in the things I care about, versus just my strong opinions on certain subjects.

It’s been at least a week since I rambled on about BarCampMilwaukee, so it’s time for an update.

The BarCampMilwaukee.com site is growing, but honestly I think it’s getting a bit confusing. Hopefully it makes sense to people not familiar with BarCamps and/or wikis, but if we need to refactor, then we will…

We had a planning meeting last week, and got a tour of Bucketworks. It became clear that Bucketworks will be an awesome venue for BarCampMilwaukee. We certainly are not limited by space constraints. Our biggest concern about Bucketworks is the bandwidth. We still don’t have a definite solution, but we will consider asking people that are not leading a session to refrain from using excessive bandwidth if possible. (Meaning, don’t download Linux ISO’s Saturday afternoon!)

The next planning meeting is Sunday, August 27th, 2006. Stop by if you can and help us out. (Also listed at Upcoming.org) Share your ideas, and get a look at Bucketworks.

There is no doubt in the minds of the people planning it that this will be an amazing event, and probably Milwaukee’s first “un-conference” as well. Please spread the word about it, and make plans now to be there!

A long time ago (in a state far, far away…) Ekwipment was released by our pals at Friday Morning:

Ekwipment is a lightweight PHP/MySQL engine for adding job listings to a website.

And that is what it does… I was asked to test it out, and if you actually read the docs, the install is pretty easy. I did a bit of testing and it worked pretty well. Of course I am not putting job listings on my site, but if you are, take a look at it, and bug them to add the features you want or need…

The folks at Plazes finally launched Plazes for Mobile Phones, so life is good… (See: Plazes goes mobile)

Now us geeks that do not travel around with laptops using wifi on a daily basis, but do have a decent mobile phone can join in on the fun.

I’ve only been running it for a day now, so I can’t give much of a review yet, but it’s a fairly simple (and well done) Series 60 application. Installing and running it is easy as heck. (You don’t even need to install Python.)

Now if they can just make their badge available in valid XHTML, I might use it. :)