Daemon by Zeraus - complimentary books and friendly marketing

 

I got a package today! The stamp collection on the envelope was truly impressive, death and misery to Posten, and many thanks and lunch or a couple of beers to my friend Henrik of Internet Video Advisory Group who sent me the book!

The deal was that Henrik had received some complimentary copies of Leinad Zeraus' "Daemon" (do read his story, it's an interesting one about friendly marketing). Since I had already several months ago put the book on my wishlist after reading a very positive review by my idol Joi Ito, I pretty much begged Henrik to send one of his copies to me.

Frankly, I don't know too much about the book yet, but if Joi considers it inspiring, it's usually something cool, considering his extraordinary understanding of social media.

In other news, my girlfriend recently returned from her too long trip to the US (yes, I was lonely), and in her handluggage was a bunch of books for me, and a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash, I'm so excited about that one, finally flash pictures which don't look like crap! The books she got me are:

• "The light of other days" by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• "Light - Science & Magic" as suggested by Erik Starck
  
• "Made to stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath as suggested also by Erik and Jonas Hombert

Skyhook - I know where I am

I just went ahead and submitted my home AP to the Skyhook location database. Alt/Option (⌥)-click the Airport icon to see the MAC address. That's the hardware address of your wireless access point, not the address of your Mac :-)

The coverage, especially in Estonia, is very spotty, but this should enable me to use Loki for where I usually am located, so what the heck.

I found this out by the way from a person in the chat room connected to the livestream from the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2008. I found it's incredibly exciting how they have a symposium with extraordinary people like those speakers, and still allow "ordinary" people like myself participate and participate in the chatter of the virtual room connected to the event. Thanks to Joi Ito's twitter for alerting me of the whole thing.



(Update: This totally grabbed the attention of my entire evening, just because the symposium was overflowing with cool things. Anyway to my emberassment I realized that I had not initially realized that I was chatting away about our fascination with the revival of the neighbourhood with Liz Lawley, who seemed to be the one moderating the symposium (and had a very interesting talk as well)! Anyway, she suggested I'd take a look at the works of Keith N. Hampton (and of course, the rest of the channel shouted Putnam and Bourdieu as well), which I definitely will. Finally MoYuMe-Peter sent me a message that Joi will pe speaking at SIME nov 12th-13th and that there were free blogger press passes to apply for until tonight... Phew, what an evening, thanks everyone!)

(Update 2: Of course, Joi posted a set of his usual wonderful photos from the symposium. A lot of very cool people and ideas there)

(Update 3: Don't miss out on the ideary post keeping the info on the progress of this!)

Creative Commons Sunday!

As friends of me may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Joichi Ito since I met him in Tallinn and lately also his Creative Commons friend and collegue Lawrence Lessig. So here goes, a dense series of videos related to CC. Thanks to Hax here and here. Note that I know CC-licensing is not the abolishing of copyright, nor necessarily requiring share-alike to produce a special family of components like the GPL-fanatics like Richard Stallman argue for.

PS. Does anyone know rules regarding performance royalties and amateur recording of a live concert like I encouraged in one of my recent blog posts from the R.E.M. concert? I would like to think that the artist can at least explicitly allow recording and redistribution of a concert, but in Estonia, that seems to be mandatory to go through also the royalty collecting agency and the idea of a song may anyway be tied to the original song writor and composer. I have no idea...