obsessed with justin.tv broadcasting

I am trying to find a way to post my live broadcast on Justin.tv somewhere.  Failed on Facebook.  

Trying the blog.

Gadget blogs of everyone gays

Some of our favorite blogs are listed here...

Should we be concerned?

WE HOPE YOU MEANT IT!
This week has seen a rising tide of scepticism about Barack's conviction to deliver on his election promises to the gays.

John Stewart, usually an active Obama supporter, dared to verbalize that private thought that some of us dared to think but suppressed for fear of being labelled unsupportive of the Great 'Black' Hope (or worse, Republican).

Immediately on the heals of this there was a wonderful article in Atlantic by Andrew Sullivan that brought home the consequence of this delay to gay couples who's marriages are not recognised and who, because of HIV discrimination may have to leave the country.

"Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay service members still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options (unlike most non-Americans with HIV who have no options at all)... "

Andrew Sullivan has clearly had some interactions with the Obama team on this topic and concludes:

"...I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away."

Like all Americans we were promised 'change' and 'hope'. On almost ALL other election issues Mr. Obama has acted swiftly and has pushed through sweeping/symbolic actions that demonstrate his commitment to these causes. On gay rights he is being slow and obtuse. He has not pushed through any federal support for gay marriage nor support for gay service men, even when the opportunity afforded itself. I am still optimistic and hopeful that we supported the right man. I want to believe. But, previous regimes have taught us to assess politicians by their actions, not their words and given all the actions President Obama has enacted in his first 100 days he is not looking like a 'Friend of Dorothy'.

RNC Michael Steele claims Gay Marriage is bad for small business

WTF is right
Michael Steele - RNC Chairman - is an idiot
Apparently claiming that gay marriage is bad for small business.
In fact, I think his argument was that all of a sudden an employer has responsibility for a spouse that they didn't have responsibility for before...surely that is an argument against straight marriage too.

Some good data here from Keith Olbermann.

Logo fail

This logo for the Archdiocesan Youth Commission was created in the early 70's and has been doing the rounds on the internet just recently. Truth is, it's not the logo that failed. It's the organization that failed and because in 2009 we have all heard the story of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, it is impossible to look at this image without that story coming to mind. This is the great power of stories. They shape your perceptions.

ITP Spring Show

Any Geek/Gay worth their salt should be at the ITP spring show. Lots of young things with gorgeous gadgets. Some big, some small. Some things to look out for:
Time in six parts
CW Wang: with our friend (of Fagadget, not of Dorothy) Kevin Slavin at Area\Code
Water Canary
Cheap water testing for Africa (since I do work with WaterAid I felt I had to love this one). Also seems to have had something to do with our other friend Clay Shirky of #amazonfail fame. - Again Geek, not Gay.
Nexus
not quite sure what it does but it is another project for Unicef. I'm going to have to recruit some of these young things to work with me at the African Institute of Strategy.

Zoom

Prezi.com is going to sweep Powerpoint away.
Only hope the next conference I go to I don't get sea sick.

pushbutton touch screens

MIT video of touchscreen pushbutton technology.

love the fact that they seem to have used an ipod as one of the shapes.

#Amazonfail a success

At Fagadget we are huge Clay Shirky fans. He is one of the smartest people we have met and he knows a thing or two about how today's communications tools change the world. We cannot recommend his book "Here comes everybody" enough. (We are also happy that Clay has managed to secure strong marketing support from Amazon, not only maintaining his high sales ranking and a very competitive price versus BN.com).

In a loving and supportive way, we have to respectfully disagree with the conclusions that Clay Shirky comes to in his recent post on "The failure of #amazonfail".
Clay, like us, was early to the #amazonfail #amazonrank twitter conversation, likely alerted by the same initial post by @scobleizer (Robert Scoble). Clay describes what many of us felt...the "emotional pleasure" and "intoxication" of the #hashmob (thanks Nicolas Carr).

Having read much of the aftermath there seem to be two conclusions that most people come to in this debate:

a) Amazon was wrong/ stupid/ failed because they had all the wrong checks and balances but were not fundamentally LGBT biased and we all acted like a rampant lynch mob. (my take on Clay's conclusions)

or

b) Amazon's algorithm was created by the company and a built in LGBT bias shows a systemic bias within the organization. Even when alerted by authors and publishers of this fact, their reply was 'gay = adult, so suck it up!' which reinforces the fact that the LGBT bias is systemic within Amazon. (my take on Mary Hodder's take).

I want to offer up an alternative conclusion why we all felt intoxicated and good about this event. This has nothing to do with why the #amazonfail happened but everything to do with what it achieved.

Firstly, the community identified the problem and in #amazonfail saw a way to increase awareness of the problem that would elevate it beyond the lowly person in the customer service who could not see the importance of this issue. Such gatekeepers in hierarchical management systems are increasingly irrelevant as we can speak for ourselves to the people that matter and if unsatisfied with the result can elevate it to a higher authority without their permission or supervisor!

Secondly, what was intoxicating was the shared mission of righting an obvious wrong. The conclusions of most commentators tend to focus on how successful we were in righting the 'wrong' that caused of the problem - LGBT bias within Amazon or a bad algorithm/french programmer. However, the real 'wrong' in this case was not the cause of the problem but the consequence of the problem and we were very successful in overturning that - restoring the representation, profile, livelihood and income of LGBT writers and publishers. I think there is good evidence that this is what mobilized us into action and turned a simple blog post by Mark R Probst into a movement.

Most of the initial blogs that picked up on the story did not focus on why this was happening but simply built up an impressive body of evidence that there was indeed a problem.

Many of the active participants not only joined petitions but identified people who could help e.g. @werner the CTO of Amazon for example, received many supportive emails alerting him to the problem. Authors and publishers reached out to their contacts, not only to make a stink but to bring this to the attention of the leaders of the company as lower down communications systems had obviously failed.

We cannot know all of the motivations of the individuals who joined in #amazonfail, just like we will never know the motivations of Amazon for developing such an algorithm or responding to authors the way they did. What we do know is that with the help of "read/write" technology the community identified the problem fast, verified the existance of the problem, mobilized to let other interested parties know the problem, contacted people who could fix the problem and within a period of 24 hours had the solution in hand and being fixed by the people who owned the problem. That is what felt good. This was not a lynch mob.

#glitchmyass

Update: Amazon's Director of Corporate Communications, Patty Smith (who has probably had one hell of an Easter Sunday) is quoted in Associated press that "there was a glitch in our system". Given that the original blogpost (below) includes a statement from Amazon employee a month ago about "adult" content ruling, this is not going to satisfy anyone. We need a better explanation than that. The Twitterverse is all ready judging that response with the hashtag: #glitchmyass

Amazon hides gay books from their recommendations

There is a rather worrying story going round that Amazon is removing the work of gay authors from their recommendations.
In a blog post by Mark R Probst it seems that Amazon is admitting that they removed a lot of gay literature from their sales ranking. It seems to be a concerted effort to remove many gay best sellers from their lists rather than a disgruntled author, disappointed that his book has been classified as adult.

Amazon is taking the stance that anything with a "gay" or "lesbian" themes is 'adult' and stripping them of their sales rankings which results in not be promoted by them in their best sellers list. This includes many gay classics and even gay romantic novels. Despite this heterosexual literature such as: Playboy centerfolds, Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins remain actively promoted and keep their rankings.

If you read the comments on Mark's blog there are many followers of this story who have investigated fully and it seems to be an active anti-gay bias....to action!

Twitter #hashtags: #amazonfail

Is it Gay?

Geeky but is it gay?
Video on You tube of the first test drive of the Tesla Electric car.
Touch screen dash , 300 mile range, 120 MPH, 1-60 in 5.6 seconds.
Yours for just $49,900 (basic model)

Damp men with great shoulders and thighs

How did I miss that it was the 155th Oxford/Cambridge boat race today. Always a great day for watching some very strong young men, with names like Benjamin Maxamillian Rossenberger or Tim Farquarhson, throw each other in the Thames. Missed the race but enjoying the pix.

Congratulations to Oxford on their 4th win in 5 years.

Summer lights

I spent the entire weekend between twitter, pruning the apple trees, clearing the hedgerow of dead branches and cutting Forsythia. Put me in mind of lighting solutions for the summer. I've seen some wonderful moonlighting effects from lights hung high in trees, above the lower branches, that create a blueish dappled, moonlight effect. Seems this range of solar powered lamps from IKEA could do much the same and a fraction of the price. I only wish you could buy them online, rather than having to go to the goddamn store.

We have the power - Woz DWTS

The geeks keep Woz dancing with the stars
Who would have thought that Woz could stay on DWTS with only 10 points out of a possible 30. Keep voting.

Ada Lovelace day - March 24th 2009

How could we let this day pass without a mention. March 24th is Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized.

Our favorite technology women are as follows:

Meg Whitman - ebay
Charline Li - ex of Forrester, now Altimeter Group
Jaqui Cheng - Ars technica
Pattie Maes - MIT
Kelly Dobson - MIT Robot girl

Please add your unsung heroines of Tech in the comments section below (as above they do not need to be gay!). Thanks Ada.

Twitter tool

www.epenis.nl
It's pretty self explanatory...

FashionGeek FashionShow.

Geek clothing fashion show
Thanks to @bre (Bre Pettis/Brooklyn Hacker Collective) for the behind the scenes coverage of Diana Eng's the fASHIOn GeEK fashion show. (Video). Interesting combination of LED's, DIY and MTV.

All this is to promote the new book that is available on Amazon this week. which describes Eng as someone who...
... "pioneers an emerging generation of tech savvy women crafters (or would-be crafters) who demand stylish yet practical designs that are electronically charged".

If you don't mind going out looking like something from Clay Shirky's ITP student show, this is definitely something for you.

Campy and Geeky

Electrons on Parade
This wonderful RCA promo video that shows how they created vacuum tubes in 1942. Its both campy and geeky. Hansom men, 40's hairstyles and the latest thing in science and technology.

Top 10 Gays and Geeks on Twitter

Did a bit of digging around twitter tools to find the top gays and the top geeks. Now obviously 'gayness' is not necessarily determined by the number of times you mention the word 'gay' nor the number of followers, so a bit of creative license here. I think there may be some overlap between these lists. Anyone willing to raise their hand @fagadget

Top 10 Twitter Gays:
1) @stephenfry (300k + followers)
2)@perezhilton (250k+ followers)
3)@maddow (150k + followers)
4)@andersoncooper (64k followers)
5)@biggaynews (3000+ followers)
6)@postgay (3000+ followers)
7)@nickstarr (3000+ followers)
8)@angryfaggot (2000+ followers)
9)@outgaylife (2000+ followers)
10)@davidbadash (1800+ followers)

Top 10 Twitter Geeks:

1)@kevinrose (300k + followers)
2)@ev (300k + followers)
3)@timoreilly (120k+ followers)
4)@guykawasaki (90k+ followers)
5)@hodgman (50k + followers)
6)@votewoz (48k+ followers)
7)@scobleizer (70k+ followers)
8)@thinkgeek (13k+ followers)
9)@novaspivak (2000+ followers)
10)@geek (just for having the name)