the tweney review

A comment from Scot reminds me that you all might be interested to hear how last week’s World Poetry Day event on tinywords went. The short answer: Amazingly well! More than 60 poets from around the world (India, Ireland, Trinidad, Australia, the U.S., Mexico, and more) submitted their haiku online, and I read them all aloud at Yerba Buena, thanks to a solid WiFi connection from someone (not, curiously, the TMobile hotspot in the Starbucks adjacent, but some other, free signal — emanating from the Moscone Center beneath my feet, perhaps?)

Here are pictures and a writeup, and here’s the whole collection of World Poetry Day haiku. You can even buy T-shirts commemorating the event.

California debuted a nice shiny new portal a couple of years ago, which I wrote about at the time. One of the people responsible building the site was Arun Baheti. When I interviewed him in 2001, he boasted that he’d built the entire site in under 110 days with a budget of $2 million. Now it turns out that the site cost quite a bit more than that. “The state paid one vendor $3.2 million and another $8.4 million without comparing prices or analyzing other factors, as called for in state guidelines,” writes John Hill in today’s Sacramento Bee story.

Damn, I hate it when they lie to me.

The other site I run is tinywords.com, which publishes one haiku per weekday on the web and via email, SMS, and pager. Tomorrow, which is the first day of spring and also World Poetry Day, tinywords will be hosting the first ever world-wide, WiFi, ad-hoc, open-mike haiku reading. People around the world will be contributing their haiku to tinywords using the site’s new comments feature (which I created earlier this month, modeling it after MovableType’s comments utility, as seen on tweney.com). As the haiku show up on the site, they will simultaneously be broadcast to a special World Poetry Day mailing list, so people can receive them by email or by pager or cell phone. And at the same time, we’ll be reading them aloud in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens, thanks to a WiFi connection at the Starbuck’s there. It’s high-tech haiku!

If you’re in San Francisco, stop by Yerba Buena at lunchtime. If you can’t be there in person, participate online by posting your haiku on the tinywords site, and/or by signing up for the World Poetry Day mailing list on tinywords. Details are here. I hope to see you tomorrow!

I’ve got not one, but two articles in the April issue of PC World. For a feature story on Internet security, I wrote six how-to sidebars detailing important security patches for Windows, various applications, email programs, and browsers. It’s a veritable compendium of tips on how to fortify your system’s security. Naturally, information like this ages fast — Microsoft alone releases dozens, if not hundreds, of patches per year -=- so read it and act on it soon.

I also wrote a new story about the music industry’s increasingly heavy-handed tactics in protecting their copyrights. The big story now: the RIAA’s attempts to get Verizon to turn over the name of a user suspected of downloading more than 600 copyrighted songs. (I never could get the RIAA to explain how they knew which songs were being stolen — I guess we have to take their word on it for now.) That action is still tied up in the courts. But this story gives a taste of what’s to come.