sj's Longest Now [v.1]

You can bookmark this post as the Final Resource for WebCred
transcripts.  I’ll get .ogg versions of the last few audio files
converted and linked soon, and then final text up.  The difference b/t “unofficial” and “official”
audio is that the former were recorded by people listening to the live
webcast, and the latter was recorded on site with higher
fidelity…  unofficial audio is still fine.  Pro transcripts
have come in; will be linked from here once they are cleaned up.

IRC
transcripts : Friday | Saturday | Post-conference

See also a compressed attendee list, the followup posts and articles after the conference, and another kitchen sink.

There will be an IRC discussion of wikinews and how it can best
integrate with the blogging and online journalism communities.  It will take place in #wikinews on irc.freenode.net (or a channel linked from there) this
coming Saturday, Feb 5, at 22:00 UTC.  I hope those of you interested in news, credibility, and grassroots content creation will join us!

Remember how you felt the first time you realized someone had beaten
all of Quake – All 30+ levels of it – in fifteen minutes?  Well,
it turns out that 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cubes are pretty hard to solve; they
take almost 90 seconds.  A standard 3x3x3 is easy, though.  You could solve it in maybe 30 seconds, even if you were down to one hand.

I was thinking today, that real-time audio transcription is the kind of
effort which clearly benefits from simultaneous editing
of a single file… even more strongly and obviously than, say,
developing a whitepaper or encyclopedia article, or working on a puzzle
hunt.

At the same time, I’ve been looking for translators who can do
real-time interpretation for the Wikimania conference
this summer; it turns out that they tend to interpret in pairs, with
[say] English-German and German-English interpreters sharing a
sound-booth.  What I’d like even more than this, would be a
few
different German-English translators all speaking into the same
sound-stream.  One would do the primary interpretation, and
the
others would be kibbitzing for all to hear :

I want to thank my brothers here ... for 
                      friends or colleagues                            

supporting me through these cruel times and events...
                              vicious                                 
                                 no, oppressive times 

The IRC backchannel chat is now online, all 400Kb of it.
 
Friday | Saturday | Post-conference chats … or get it all in one file.

Archive.org is one of the great organizations around.  They aim to
provide pure services, aren’t afraid of trying out new and daring
projects for improving public access to information, and stand for all
of the right ideals of openness and advancement through sharing.

But they seem to suffer from quirks like any other organization; they
have a confusing and complicated website, which has only grown more
confusing since two years ago, when I recall giving up trying to use it
to find out what I wanted to know about their content archives. 
Today I tried to upload some audio file to the site, and found that
their project nomenclautre was as inconsistent and
confusing [was I uploading “live music”?  No.  But that was
the only link I had to follow for information on uploads], and their
changing color schemes and profusion of navbar-like elements as
distracting, as ever…

Joi tried to explain how easy it is to upload content to archive.org :

Well!  That might be pretty easy compared to downloading and
compiling your own software, but it requires seven+ steps, two logins,
and two pieces of software. And this is a task that one presumes
non-geeks are supposed to be able to do.  From an efficiency
standpoint, this is a disaster… consider that the basic task at hand,
uploading a file from your
machine to a remote machine using a browser, is neatly handled by the
two-step “Browse…” form with which every Windows user and most web
users are familiar.

So I want to know how this could be allowed to happen?  How can
all of the brilliant people who I know both visit archive.org often,
know its developers and supporters, have excellent design sense… how
can these people let the site slouch around in its current state of
confusion?