girl eat machine.

The Twitter Round Up, a lazy way to share some good news: we’re all up for a Nobel Peace Prize. (Thanks, Italian geeks!)

• elle_mccann Look out, POTUS: @BBC reports that if the Italian side of @Wired gets its way, we’re all in the running to get a Nobel Peace Prize.
• elle_mccann Er, that is, the Internet is in the running. Get ready to live vicariously: http://bit.ly/axBohO (@Wired ) and http://bit.ly/9ZlmEy (@BBC )
• elle_mccann Wait a sec, does this mean that 4chan also gets a share of this Peace Prize? #dubious
• elle_mccann Then again, 4chan is a great model for…selective…web-community organizing….(Need a refresher on current events? http://bit.ly/7kPlzg )

As @elpocobiadlo nicely pointed out, that Nobel would go pretty nicely with our 2006 TIME Man of the Year…

This morning, I returned to the States (and Internet access) to find a lot of news going down in the good old You Ess of Ehya: Sen. Chris Dodd shoveling out his Financial Reform Bill, everyone worth knowing freaking out about South By Southwest (with a tech presence to rival its musical superiority), a Democratic proposal for health care that actually (like, really truly) will be released…soon. Maybe.

Big stuff.

But there’s plenty going on outside the U.S. border, too. Take, for instance, the fantastic resolution that just passed the EU Parliament: voting against the bill 663 to 13, Parliament has publicly flogged the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and prevented its passage in the European Union.

I can see you blinking: Errr. Right. Let’s step back for a moment:

ACTA, noun: 1. a series of proposed international standards for defining and enforcing forms of global ownership in trade.

Although its provisions do address the sale of counterfeit goods, most of ACTA’s provisions relate to the ownership of intellectual property (and this is why you should give a darn). The extension of ACTA’s reach means an increase in governmental regulations over world trade in generic medicines, in the creation of an international standard for Internet regulation, and the penalization of non-commercial use of copyrighted information, to name a few.

Apparently, most of ACTA’s provisions are based on what the EU Parliament and ACTA critics refer to as “US-style draconian” methods for intellectual property regulation. I say “apparently” because most of ACTA has been drafted in secret. It’s through (a few) leaks of information that we’ve learned just how heavily the US is involved in negotiating this “executive treaty” and pushing its own restrictive approach to copyright law.

Throw in issues over policy laundering, the freedom from Congressional Review enjoyed by ACTA’s status as an “executive treaty”, the proposed creation of yet another international bureaucracy covering intellectual property, the questions about the sovereignty of international law, and the basic policies ACTA includes that we know about and you can (maybe) see why Members of the European Union Parliament should be applauded for their decision.

Or can they? Do you agree with the EU Parliament’s decision?

Before you defend ACTA on the grounds of supporting copyright law, consider: the rejection of ACTA isn’t some leftist rejection of all copyright law or ownership rights. Really, it’s not. The EU Parliament made its decision in defense of the Internet user against major corporations. You can sling the term “anti-corporatist” around all you like, but the Parliament’s decision is fundamentally libertarian — an attempt to restrict the size of governing power and control external influences on the future of international Internet commerce and communication. (I’m looking at you, U.S.A.) ACTA isn’t out to just stymie your attempts at posting Disney mash-ups on YouTube (yes, your attempts – ACTA would ultimately affect the US, too). If passed, this trade agreement would encroach on individual initiatives to create, share, and communicate that non-commercial organizations and independent entrepreneurs rely on. (Have we so quickly forgotten Google’s recent poaching of content on Blogger?)

Think the world spins another way? Then share your opinion, but be sure to read up before you fight for Uncle Sam. Some links to get you started:

• ACTA wiki, because you should have already been reading it by now.
• FAQ on a leaked chapter of ACTA by European Digital Rights Initiative.
• General FAQ from Public Knowledge.
• ACTA’s page on the EU Commission’s* website (*the executive branch of the EU)
  

What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space of much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper. That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar…what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go soaring off the side of a mountain on a snowboard, feeling as if, for one moment, you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could scour Southeast Asia, like the world-wearing twenty-somethings in Alex Garland’s The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You could, for that matter, join a New Age cult and dream of alien abduction, from the occult to raves to riots to extreme sports, it seems that the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.

In the absence of space travel and confined by the laws of gravity, however, most of us take our open space where we can get it, sneaking it like cigarettes, outside hulking enclosures. The streets may be lined with billboards and franchise signs, but kids still make do, throwing up a couple of nets and passing the puck or soccer ball between the cars. There is release, too, at England’s free music festivals, and in conversations of untended private property into collective space: abandoned factories turned into squats by street kids or ramped entrances to office towers transformed into skateboarding courses on Sunday afternoons.

But as privatization slithers into every crevice of public life, even these intervals of freedom and back alleys of unsponsored space are slipping away…How does it feel to have your culture “sold out” now, as you are living it?

Thoughts?

(No Logo, p. 64)

Good g-o-d today was beautiful. Wandering down the street towards the local park, the thaw lept right out at me:

(One day, DC is foot-stamping chilly. The next, it’s no-jacket, honest-to-goodness spring.)

I do believe I could get used to this.

There is a direct trade off between the amount of time one spends in web development and design and the amount of time one spends in web content.

This past week, I invested waaaay too much time in er, pulled together the skeleton of a homepage for…myself:

All this page is good for right now is to send you to my blog (which you’re at already if you’re reading this note?) and my Twitter feed (tweet tweet)….Oh, and I guess you can see what my handwriting looks like sometimes –

– That is to say, what my handwriting can look like…..not that the handwriting ever disappears from the page……Oh, never mind.

There are still plenty of modifications in the works (for instance changing out the blog link, which looks pretty little lame and off-kilter next to its Twittery friend), but, you know:  it’s a start.

This project (which includes the still-in-progress blog before you) is a lot like the first “essay” I ever wrote for Spanish class. Sure, I’d done workbook problems before, the equivalent of using content management systems for HTML, but that first essay was a leap. It was my first chance to show that I could kind of, sort of  think in Spanish — that my brain had accepted the grammar and linguistic logic and was ready to engage with it. So I didn’t write anything revolutionary — I probably just blathered on about myself as the assignment requested, “Hola, me llamo Laurenellen. Yo estoy una alumna a la escuela de Nueva Fairfield…” — but I got to take off my training wheels. (And mix my metaphors!)

HTML is a language. Attempting proficiency (let alone fluency) is an ongoing (cultural?) experiment, but the payoff is enormous. Besides the immediate increase in skillz, learning one programming language opens doors to learning others (or, at the very least it helps you figure out what questions you need to ask). Additional bonus: ability to speak with future computer overlords and/or my programming friends.

Additional, additional bonus: reduction in the potential Techno-Knowledge Gap between myself and future progeny. I guess that means I need to start learning Flash soon, too…

And speaking of “time“… It’s March! Suddenly! Voraciously!

Earlier I asked, “Where are the lions?” When I couldn’t find any (in my apartment?) I made one myself:

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

Errr. What does that even mean? Like, really? I get the weather allusion…but now I’m thinkinnnng about it….and if I keep typing while I’m thinking, this could easily become a whole, long diatribe discussion about colloquialisms…But I’m going to save it for after I go grocery shopping.

While I pre-muse my musing, I’ll ask you, Anonymous, with your ear on the ground: what idioms are developing today that you think will have Generational Stay Power? Or, do you think that the speed of Internet communication overrides the creation of (new) proverbs? Maybe it replaces the “proverb” with the Net meme…

Or is that theory bull? Perhaps the meme means (fun to say…) that the idiom has Evolved….

Or could the power of Internet as Archive indicate a colloquial freeze — a kind of knowledge carbonite, if you will — where the idioms of the past stay with us, cached on message boards and stuck in digital news headlines forever…?

All these questions and more. Think about it. Write about it, if you care to. (Check that link in the upper right corner: “Hungry.” That’s right: Hungry — for your participation.)

And now, I’m out like a lamb (zing!) to run to the market*.

*Note: “Little Piggy” joke = UNINTENTIONAL.