Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

A new Japanese book on blogging is about to come out called "Bloggers! Vol. 1" which you can pre-order on Amazon.co.jp. The action heros on the cover, especially the guy with the poopie thing on his head, are a bit weird, but the authors and the publisher, Shoeisha are reputable in Japan. (I hope the yellow guy with the poopie mark isn't supposed to be me...) I haven't seen the actual book yet, but I'll get a few extra copies to bring to ETech. ;-) There's a dialog between Howard Rheingold and me (I had totally forgotten about this. It was a taped dinner conversation...) , and an interview with "the developers of Movable Type". It looks like there's an article about Blosxom as well.

I just did a search on "Joi Ito" and got this as the first link. In fact, all the links on the page had a redirection component in the result links. Normally, Google gives the link to the website directly. Looks like they may now be starting to track clickthroughs. I repeated the search on a few other keywords, and I didn't find it again, so I guess it is one of those Google experiments.
Hey! Stop that!

Reading the comments on Rajesh's blog, it appears that Google does this regularly. I hope it's not personal, and I hope it doesn't have anything to do with Homeland Security. ;-p

via ejovi. Original is here. It appears to be a real billboard.

Governor Domoto greeting some of my neighbors
Governor Domoto visited our house after her lecture at the new health hall opening in Inba. We told the neighbors that she would be visiting and that they were welcome to come and meet her. Many of the neighbors brought vegetables and other gifts. They seemed genuinely pleased to meet her. We took a group photo and Governor Domoto told them that I was a good friend of hers and asked them to be nice to me. I OWE you Domoto-san. Thank you. ;-)

Domoto-san loved the house. She explored every little bit and said it was perfect. The neighbors explained that they had all contributed their best pine trees to the house and that the house was very important to the community. I promised everyone that we would fix the place up (No one has lived here for over a year and it needs a lot of work.), and I promised to invite Domoto-san back when we have it all done. Pressure... Pressure...

Cory and the EFF have been leading the charge to stop the broadcast flag proposal. Lessig chimes in. The broadcast flag is a bad thing which is anti-end-to-end. Fight for the Stupid Network!

If this entry is cryptic to you, you need to learn more about the broadcast flag and why it is bad. Click on the links.

The piece says he rubs shoulders with Timothy Leary . Ooops. Did I read that correctly? Leary died in 1996 and if he's rubbing shoulders at all it's with the fishes.
Actually, Tim lives on in cyberspace and I rub shoulders with him there. ;-)

UPDATE: Metroactive article about Tim living on in cyberspace. Thanks for the link Bill!

PS: Special thanks to Chris and everyone at leary.com for keeping Tim and his site alive.

Wired just ran an article casting me as "The Tokyo Node". Clay is "The Tech Node" and Linda Stone is "The Valley Node". I'd say that's pretty good company. It says we secretly run the world. It's not true. Really.

A few clarifications... I didn't "head" the "Blueprint for Japan 2020" this year but was just a rather big node in a team and I wouldn't call Creative Commons a "digital archive and copyleft think tank". Also, it was Tony Kobayashi who took me to the Trilateral Commission Annual Meeting to repeat my Davos Japan dinner rant later that year although Idei-san invited me to the Sony Open Forum to rant on.

Anyway... details details... Thanks for the nice write-up Jeff.

UPDATE: I was first mentioned in Wired in an article in Wired 1.03 about MUDs in 1993 by Howard Rheingold.

schwarz4.jpgThe entry on Bopuc's blog about Japander.com reminded me of my blog entry about my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger commercials in Japan for energy drinks. This is also relevant to the entry about Lost in Translation since Bill Murray's role is probably what Arnold had to go through. Anyway, definitely worth a look if you haven't seen these commercials already. They're great.

My original blog entry about Trevor's fiance Beate's treatment when trying to enter the US is starting to sink into my archives, but the dialog continues. Both Beate and Tervor have commented. Trevor's brother Dan has a blog. Dan Gillmor's blog and the British Expats blog also have extensive comments.

Both in my blog and Dan Gillmor's blog, people have made sort of insensitive comments about the couple before the couple commented. Important lesson: People you think about in third person can read blogs and have a voice. "They" are real people. I think it's great that we're able to have such an open dialog about stuff like this with the people who were actually involved. I know many people at the embassies read blogs. What do you folks think? You should chime in. ;-)

Socialtext announced the released version 1.0 of their workspace package. It's groupware thingie for enterprise. I'm using it for a lot of my workgroups. It's basically a wiki with a blog-like feature that sort of looks nice and has login, which makes it not really a wiki, but not a blog... I guess it's a workplace. Anyway, as you know, I love this kind of alchemy.

They also announced Kwikspace based on Kwiki as an open source project.

Disclosure: I'm an investor in Socialtext