Sometimes it pays off to IM that random person on your buddy list whom you haven’t talked to in a while… out of the blue I IMed fractalpanes today, and she mentioned in passing a couple of articles that involve me, one somewhat indirectly.

First, there’s a good story at Campus Progress, which unfortunately suffers from truly horrid alliteration in its subtitle, two teenage digital Davids down Diebold, and gets our name wrong in its title, “Swarthmore Free Culture” (the correct name being Free Culture Swarthmore). Of course, I can’t really blame the reporter for confusing the name… many of the other FreeCulture.org chapters named themselves the other way around, like Emory Free Culture.

The second article, Clear-Cutting the Future: We’ll Hear More About This in 2005, mentions the Alternet story on FreeCulture.org in passing, and I get quoted! Except that it’s misattributed to Desirina! Man, I was *that close* to being famous… easy come, easy go. I do like the TV-B-Gone gadget that the author mentions, and I think he’s got 2005’s trends down pretty well. But he really should have read the article that he was quoting a little more carefully.

In conclusion, when you poke your buddies, sometimes they reveal useful information! It’s like an RPG where you have to talk to everyone to complete the level. Or maybe it’s not, really…