There are now more than 200 people registered for PodCamp Boston. Cool! There are some great folks on there - opml.org's own Lisa Williams, Andrew and Joanne from Rocketboom and Kevin Marks (whose "bootleg conference webcasts" from BloggerCon I really enjoyed). Oh, and Critt Jarvis wants to meet me. This is going to be great fun. 
It looks like this month has been the second best month so far for this blog. May had the most page views, and this month had the second most. It looks like, hit-wise at least, I'm coming back out of the summer slump. Next month, we've got BarCamp in London (this weekend) and PodCamp in Boston (the weekend after). I'm going to be blogging from both. Of course, pageviews are obsolete, apparently.
I just found tourb.us, a gig guide - with RSS. Just what I've been searching for. Perfect for a little mashup I'm building (that I'm hoping to launch on Saturday, at BarCamp). tourb.us currently covers Boston, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, LA, NY and the SF Bay Area. Any London folks want to help them build London support?
Really stupid idea. Victoria Beckham doing an American reality show. Thoroughly dumb.
I think the new Human Tissue Act 2006 is great. Knowing the record of this government, it's refreshing to see individuals seen as important - the current 1961 Act makes it so that your family can object to transplants on pseudo-ethical grounds (like they think that God will get all pissy if your organs are used to save another human being), and you'd think that with all this neuvo-communitarian crap about "communities" and the importance of "faith", that rubbish would still be in there. I'm extremely refreshed that the government have followed science, reason and individual self-ownership after death in writing this new law.
William Drenttel from designobserver has the story of the town of Half.com (aka. Halfway), Oregon, which, at the height of the Bubble 1.0, was sponsored by Half.com. Town sponsorship is actually not an exclusively Web 1.0 thing. I've seen numerous railway stations in Britain that are sponsored by companies (though not many web startups, primarily because we don't really have them) - East Croydon station is sponsored by Nestlé, Bedford Midland station is sponsored by Eagle IPA and a few other stations and sponsored similarly (one of the stations on the Waterloo-Wimbledon route is, but I can't remember which). Fortunately, it's only on the signs and not the announcements. Can you imagine how annoying "Good morning, this is the Kellogg's South-East Express service from Hastings Burger King station to London BT Station". That said, watching large multi-nationals battle it out to own Staines station or the line to Bognor Regis would be extremely humourous.
Library Stuff has found a new site called Suggestica, a book recommendation service from experts. The only problem? All the experts are really cheesy - marketing and business "gurus", self-help folks and Deepak Chopra. I'm not saying that these guys don't do what they do well (Chopra excepted - he seems like a total con artist), but it doesn't interest me. Get some experts in real academic subjects and I'll listen.
The Sixties Generation to the Nineties Generation: "Don't do drugs. They're bad. But you can listen to Hendrix and Dylan and the Beatles and Eminem and James Brown. These guys rule! But don't do drugs. Drugs are bad." That's my reaction to this story.
I'm trying to find details about the recently passed anti-violent-porn act (made slightly more difficult by the fact that I can't search for it, since I might then find violent porn and be convicted of looking at violent porn). I typed in "violent porn" in to the Public Whip.org.uk search engine. It didn't find anything, but it did say that Linda Perham, the Labour MP for Ilford North has a name that sounds like "violent porn". Lovely.
My response to the "extreme" porn ban 
I have just sent the following letter to my MP (a Conservative - that is why the references to the Conservative Party are in there):
I am writing to you today to ask you (a) whether you supported the recent introduction of a ban on violent or so-called "extreme" pornography, and (b) whether the Conservative party have any intention in defending the freedom of speech of pornographers?
The law was promoted by the efforts of the mother of Ms. Jane Longhurst, a woman who was murdered by someone who the courts have found to have been addicted to violent and hardcore pornography.
But it seems to defy common sense by making an idol of the pornography of which it seems to want to ban. According to Hansard, Frans van der Hulst, the owner of the Dutch website which Longhurst's killer used, rightly said: "I've read all the criticism but I'm doing nothing illegal. I don't feel responsible for what happened to Jane Longhurst. The only person responsible is Graham Coutts."
What Parliament have done is introduce yet another 'thought crime'. There are already numerous laws on the books which, if enforced, would lead to an equitable situation. If the pornography produced infringes on the legal rights of a person - eg. it contains images of young children who cannot give consent to sexual acts or it contains depictions of an actual act of violence against a person (so called rape porn or snuff movies), then it is perfectly right to push to have the producer of the pornography tried for the reality of his production, not the depiction. Much modern pornography contains depictions of woman dressed as schoolgirls. We prosecute the production if they are schoolgirls, not simply if they pretend to be. Reality is what matters, not fantasy - although that law is obviously not applicable in Westminster.
To ban pornography that contains consensual acts between adults, however extreme or distasteful the general moral appetite may find them, is an infringement on the moral rights to free speech and free conscience (I do not know whether it infringes the flimsy free speech rights in the European Convention - it certainly does infringe on any meaningful conception of freedom of speech).
I am writing to you to represent the views of the people who cannot speak because of the attitudes of modern society. I frequently write material for comedic websites, generally under pseudonyms, that makes fun of the various fetishists and slightly off-the-wall creeps that lurk around on the Internet. Their idea of sexual fun runs the gamut, from folks who enjoy wearing Disneyland-style animal costumes through to people with "humiliation" fetishes - even people who fantasise about being cooked and eaten by their partner. I find all of this stuff harmless, consensual fun. The people who do it are ordinary people - they work at ordinary jobs, attended ordinary schools and universities, watch ordinary television shows and drink ordinary tea. They may have extreme tastes in the bedroom, but they are not bad people. They may have odd kinks and off-the-wall fantasies, but mostly they remain just that - fantasies. When they become reality, the moral and legal sphere have every right to consider them, but just as the State doesn't demand lists of books that one has borrowed from the library, it shouldn't demand censure of the fantasies inside one's mind - or the pornographic constructions that represent those fantasies. We should have laws against acts and not ideas. Pornography and sex is a world of ideas, which is why it is such a rich source of humour - while the brutal reality of rape and abuse are very rarely, if ever, funny.
Mr. Coutts' has had his come-uppance. He has, presumably, been convicted of murder and gone to prison for it - I would hope that he does not come out for a very, very long time. But, this new law will not stop future Graham Coutts. If someone is in such a psychological state - whether induced by extreme pornography or not - that they would kill their girlfriend in a brutal sexual act, no laws against it are going to stop them. Instead, it's simply satiated a "moral panic" while ignoring the actual reality - that passing a law will not change anything except our liberties.
The United States under the current Bush administration's justice department, has already gone down the road of a supposedly moral censorship regime. Owners of adult websites - commercial and otherwise - are already facing federal government "shakedowns", and are having to implement impractical and expensive systems because of the redefinition of the word "amateur". Despite the fact that more and more soldiers are coming back in coffins or without limbs, it's the Internet fetishists that are the problem. You would think that the War on Terror - now the War on Moist Objects at Airports - may interest the FBI more than a few electronic fetishists, but apparently not.
It seems strangely acceptable in this 'postmodern' climate though, that even as soldiers in the Coalition in Iraq are killing innocent people and raping fourteen year old Iraqi girls, the mere "depiction" is seen as the problem and not the actual reality.
Why has the humble Opposition not made any noise of protest to the ideas behind Vernon Coaker's statement? "The vast majority of people find these forms of violent and extreme pornography deeply abhorrent". It does not matter whether 1% of 99% of people believe it to be abhorrent, that is not reason enough to take away the free speech rights of even the tiniest minority.
Since the Conservatives have been toying with the idea of switching to the image of a tree as their new party logo, perhaps both you and your fellow Opposition politicians may wish to think of the meaning behind Jefferson's words: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The Internet has been, for the last decade and a half, the only tree of liberty left in an increasingly authoritarian world. Clean it of it's blood and gore and you clean it of it's liberty.
