Good news for us: Wikitravel was selected as Featured Commoner for June 2006 by Creative Commons. There's a long interview with me and Maj about the origins of Wikitravel and why we think it's so cool. It may be the best interview I've seen about the project yet; I really recommend it for curious people.
tags: wikitravel cc featured commoner june 2006 interview me wiki maj
Creative Commons plugin for Microsoft Office
I'll say it right now: kudos to both Creative Commons and Microsoft for the new Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office. I'm not a frequent user of Microsoft Office, but I do get lots of .doc and .xls and .ppt documents over the transom, and it's good to know that Creative Commons is doing something to make it possible to Free works in these formats just a little bit.
There's been a bit of controversy on the cc-community list about the move, but I think it's great. It took me a while to warm to it, but I really like Creative Commons's approach to Open Content. It reminds me of harm reduction theories. I think they're not universally loved for this, but I also think it's been a big part of the success of the project.
tags: cc microsoft microsoft office plugin
Sucks-Rules-Votes-o-Meter
I keep forgetting to ask Don about making a microformats-oriented version of the Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. After all, the VoteLinks microformat isn't much more than a semantic-web-formalized SROM, is it?
I figure a plugin for Nutch to look for vote-links would do the trick; and I bet Technorati would be cool about adding an SROM system to Pingerati.
tags: votelinks srom microformats technorati don marti pingerati nutch
100M
We were driving from Culver City to Santa Barbara yesterday, and we stopped in Calabasas for a soda and some breastfeeding. I had on K-RTH 101, the soi disant "soundtrack for Southern California", when on came a commercial for HP laser printers. We were astounded to hear that there have been 100 million HP LaserJet printers shipped since 1984. Yes, one hundred million.
That's one HP laser printer for every 60 human beings on Earth. Do we really need that many laser printers? Why? What the hell are we printing so much? It's pretty obvious that 100 million people haven't bought laser printers; much fewer people have bought more than one laser printer over and over.
HP seems to think this is something to crow about, but I've looked into a lot of laser printers, and they're full of some pretty heavy iron. Those old ones aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Some quick math suggests that that's about one million metric tons of trash generated principally by HP. Probably the majority of HP printers have been smashed to bits, like the one in Office Space.
Whose fault is it that we've gone through 100 million of these poisonous, heavy, clunky metallo-plastic whizzbangers in 20 years? Does the company have a responsibility to make machines out of reusable, recyclable materials? To not make its growth based on planned obsolescence? If you're marketing the machine as a disposable device, shouldn't you have a plan for where they go at their end of life. Why aren't more machines upgradeable in small chunks, so you don't have so much material going into landfills?
One hundred million laser printers, buried under piles of banana peels and diapers, or embedded in the ocean floor, or rusting in basements and warehouses. It doesn't seem like something to celebrate; it seems to me to be pretty depressing.
tags: laser printer hp 100m