Is the Web different? Is the Web just the next medium in our history of media, or is it a spiritual transformation, the great hope, blah-di-blah-di-blah?

The question "Is the Web different?" is actually not so much a question as a shibboleth in the original sense: The answer determines which tribe you're in.

The Web utopians point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities.

The Web dystopians agree that the Web is having a major effect on our lives. They, however, think that effect is detrimental.

The Web realists say the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium.

Each of these is a political position...

Fairness and scarcity: In a world of abundance, fairness is so 1990s.

 Time-Warner Cable (TWC) recently acknowledged that it's going to test a billing system that will move Internet access closer to the  cellphone model: Those in the test will subscribe to a tier of service that buys them a certain number of bytes (like buying a package that gives you 500 minutes of cellphone time), and if they go over their allotment, they'll pay per byte.

This certainly seems fair. And it's better than other, threatened ways of limiting the amount of network traffic. But, in my opinion, it's ultimately a bad way to go. Being fair is not enough. In fact, sometimes what's fair is wrong precisely because it's fair.

Oooh! A seeming paradox! One of the top three rhetorical forms for essays!...

The next future of HTML:  The draft of the next version of HTML manages a surprisingly fine balance between the needs of humans and the needs of our computer overlords.

Remember back before HTML, when SGML was battling to be the way software expressed a document and its structure? SGML was precise and kept every hair in place, while HTML was ok with some ambiguity and hadn't showered in a couple of days. With the release of a draft of HTML 5, we see that the battle is not over. Far from it.

SGML lets you specify all the parts of a document and how they go together...

Bogus Contest: Tech clichés

The future of book nostalgia: Anthony Grafton's New Yorker article on why libraries will always be with us shows the power of book nostalgia.

Anthony Grafton's article in the November 5 New Yorker, Future Reading, intends to challenge the "infotopian" hyper-enthusiasm about online libraries. While Grafton acknowledges that "it's hard to exaggerate what is already becoming possible month by month and what will become possible in the next few years," he argues that the future will be continuous with the present as "the narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books." 

What we owe: As parents we need to fight to let the Internet we love be a settled part of our children's lives.

There's been a lively discussion internal to the Harvard Berkman Center (where I've had a fellowship for the past few years) about the terms "digital native" and "digital immigrant," occasioned by a book two members of the community -- John Palfrey and Urs Gasser -- are writing called Born Digital. Since not everyone born since, say, 1985 uses the Web, who exactly counts as a digital native? And the term "immigrant" lumps together people who have been using the Web since the Mosaic browser with people who fell onto the cabbage truck last week. Further, there are some people active in native rights issues who think it inappropriate to appropriate that term. So, the field's terminology is a mess.

Delamination Now! To achieve Net Neutrality, we're going to need a policy with such strong teeth that it can rip the industry apart, and finally give us business models that work with, rather than against, the Net's real value.

Can tags be wrong?: You tag it potato. I tag it tomato. Shall we just call the whole thing off?

Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing.com, asked me an excellent question: Can tags be wrong? What if everyone in a room is an idiot and tags Moby-Dick as "penguin." I sputtered for a moment and then came up with the perfect response: "Is there a wrong way to underline a book?" Brilliant! It surrounds a tiny germ of truth with a massive coating of tasty misdirection, like rising to a challenge in one's proof of the Turing Incompleteness Theorem by faking a coughing fit. Tim afterwards sent me a thoughtful and thought-provoking message. So blame him for the following...

More of everything: The Internet is swamp of lies. The Internet is a haven of knowledge. Yes to both.

Whatever case you want to make about the Internet, you can make. Want to show that it contains the most wretched ideas and images? There's a whole bunch of sites you can point to. Want to prove that it is the salvation of democracy and rational discourse? Google and ye shall find. Want to show that it's a haven for red-headed sociopaths who raise chihuahuas for their milk? Yup, you can probably find those sites, too.

Twittering away: What looks trivial may turn out to be, up close, not so trivial after all.

Book notes: "Everything Is Miscellaneous" launched a couple of days ago. You thought I wasn't going to mention it?

Bogus Contest: Elevator Pitch: Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can't.

The abundance of meaning: If too much information is noise, what's too much meaning?

Every abundance generates its own pitfall. An abundance of wealth can lead to waste, moral corruption and even revolution if it isn't distributed with a modicum of fairness. An abundance of information becomes noise if we can't navigate it. But what about the abundance of meaning we've developed with the arrival of the Web? If too much information becomes noise, what does too much meaning become?

As Bill Clinton did not say, that all depends on what the meaning of meaning is...

The abundance of worthiness and the new relevancy: When there's an abundance of worthwhile pages on just about any topic, search engines need to evolve. 

...Yahoo's unexpected success turned it into a gatekeeper. Getting your site selected for inclusion in the Yahoo tree was a big deal. And the selection process was a black box: You could nominate your site, but there was no way to tell why it was selected or rejected.

Nevertheless, that solution worked well  when there were a million pages on the Web and search engines were wimpy. There weren't that many worthwhile pages on, say, bird watching, so you could trust Yahoo to have found a handful of good ones and to have spared you the dozens of crap ones. Sure, Yahoo faced problems as the Web got larger. The pile of pages to be sifted got bigger, and it required more and more employees to clamber through the existing tree to make sure none of its fruit had become withered with age or had gone wormy with spam. (Yeah, work that metaphor, loverboy!)

But the growth of the Web during the late '90s tipped the scale, changing the equation and our expectations....

Book stuff: (1) Why finishing a book sucks, (2) the new book's site, and (3) the book's word cloud

I decided to go the traditional publishing route with Everything Is Miscellaneous because when it comes to lifetime ambitions, I'm a traditionalist. Rail as I might about the mainstream media, I would still kill a minor celebrity (please let it be Paris Hilton!) to get published in The New Yorker. Also, and not incidentally, us Volvo-driving, Birkenstock-wearing East Coast liberals have to put the tofu and kelp on the table, you know.

So, given that my book will be repurposing trees, here's why it sucks to finish one...

A (commercial) model of miscellaneousness: BioMed Central embodies many of the current trends.

BioMed Central is a commercial publisher of peer-reviewed scientific research that permits open (= free) access to all of its content. In so doing, it happens to exemplify a whole bunch of trends, many of which are associated with "Web 2.0." It is not a voice from the future, describing visions we cannot yet imagine. It's in some ways more valuable than that, for it's an existing business, dealing with the future in practical ways. In it we can see not just where the Web may go, but where it is right now...

Why do movies suck?: We don't make that many movies, we invest heavily in them, and yet most of the comedies aren't funny, the suspensers aren't suspenseful, the action ones are incoherently edited. Why is that?
Cool Tool: The O'Reilly Hacks series
What I'm playing: Dreamfall and Devastation Troopers
Bogus Contest: Suggest a Daily Open-Ended Puzzle

Anonymity as the default: As digital identity management systems come one line, the norm is switching from being anonymous to being identified, with unintended consequences we may not at all like.

"Anonymity should be the default" doesn't say what I mean. Sorry to have put it badly. "Defaults" come to us from the software world where shipping software with the right options turned on can make or break a product. It may be that anonymity is the right default option for digital ID management software, but that's not what I meant. And if it is the right default, it will be due to anonymity's social, political and personal roles. Those roles are what interest me...

One Web Day: Earth Day for the Web. Come celebrate!

Susan Crawford — law professor, Berkman fellow, ICANN board member, blogger — has been working for the past year to make her idea real. Just as Earth Day is a time to celebrate our planet, One Web Day is a day to celebrate the Web. Just as on Earth Day it's up to each locality to decide how to celebrate, on OWD it's up to each locality — physical or virtual — to come up with an appropriate activity, although OWD encourages doing something that increases the Web's value and brings it to more people...

My Hundred Million Dollar Secret: I've self-published a kid's novel. You can buy it or read it for free. (My promise: Harry Potter does not die in it.)

I just published my novel for halflings (or "young adults" if you prefer), called My 100 Million Dollar Secret. It's about a boy who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery, but (for reasons explained) can't let his parents know and refuses to lie to them. In another sense, it's about the boy's growing sense of the moral obligations that come with having so much dang money. It's also supposed to be a little funny.

Cool Tool: RoboForm is great...except for one thing.
Bogus Contest: A contest no one really enters

Why believe Wikipedia?: Wikipedia is credible. Not always. Not in every detail. But nothing passes that bar except perhaps for some stuff scratched into stone tablets. What is the source of Wikipedia's credibility? Oddly, it has something to do with its willingness to admit fallibility.

Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found and fixed. Yet, Wikipedia is in some ways as reliable as the Britannica, and in some ways it is more reliable. Where does it get its authority?

There are a few reasons we'll accept a Wikipedia article as credible...

The end of the story (Or: The tyranny of rectangles: Journalism can't get stories right because the world doesn't fit into rectangles.

If you've ever been part of a story covered by a newspaper, it's a near certainty that you didn't think the story got it exactly right. Even if there were no outright mistakes, you read it thinking that the emphasis was wrong, that it didn't quite capture all sides, that there was more to the story, that a turn of phrase was prejudicial. You would have written it slightly differently. At least.

This is not because reporters aren't good at their job. By and large they are, and it is hard job requiring skill, experience and persistence. It also generally doesn't pay that well. The problem is not with the reporters. Lord bless them and multiply them. The problem is with the notion of "the story"...

Book report (Or: My obsession): The first draft of my book is done. Here's a brief report on Chapter 8.

...One odd manifestation of my obsession is that I never get to a point where I'm ready to talk about the book...

Walking the Walk: Raytheon tags. And taxonomizes.
Cool Tool: Diigo notes socially.
What I'm playing: Gun is disappointing. Indigo Prophecy progresses from cool to idiotic.
Bogus contest: Metadata for traditional authorities

Why the media can't get Wikipedia right: In the wake of the Seigenthaler Affair, Wikipedia made some changes. Why did the media get the story so wrong?

When the mainstream media addressed the John Seigenthaler Sr. affair — he's the respected journalist who wrote an op-ed in USAToday complaining that slanderously wrong information about him was in Wikipedia for four months — the subtext couldn't be clearer: The media were implicitly contrasting Wikipedia's credibility to their own. Ironically, the media got the story fundamentally wrong.

Most media reports presented the narrative line of the story roughly as follows: A person of indisputable honor was smeared in Wikipedia. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of its failings, the mainstream media shamed Wikipedia into reluctantly becoming more like them. See, Wikipedia was unreliable all along, just like we said! We're the grownups, and now we're making Wikipedia grow up...

Are leaves mulch?: Peter Morville's criticism of folksonomies, et al.

I'm very fond of Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, a highly readable exploration of what's going on in the field of information architecture, i.e., how we find stuff, written by a practitioner and thought-leader.

Larry Irons wrote to me recently, however, asking about Peter's jibe about the idea that I've been pushing, that we're moving from trees of knowledge to big piles of leaves...

Cool Tool : Power scanning!
What I'm playing: Murderous rivolity rules.

The year of unique IDs: We're about to get very interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. Very interested.

Last year, it was Web 2.0 and tagging. This year, it's going to be unique IDs (UIDs), and for the same reason that Web 2.0 and tagging matter: The Web is going miscellaneous. (The fact that I'm writing a book about the invigoration of the miscellaneous could not possibly have colored my perception. Nope. All of this is based on highly scientifical research done by people with clipboards who were teased as children.)...

Living on an Internet houseboat: Save the Net for aging hippies? Probably not going to happen.

As we survey the damage being done to the Internet by (sometimes) well-meaning regulators trying to save the Net from itself, I find myself asking: Are we living on the same Internet planet?

The answer pretty clearly is No. And it's not just regulators whose vision of the Net is so at odds with mine. There are plenty of academics, librarians, and even some of the Net's creators who view it as an occasional resource, a place to go to do research, and a swamp of filth.

To me, the Internet is a social world...

My book: Progress report: Here's what chapter 3 looks like.

Although readers of my blog might not know it, working on Everything is Miscellaneous is my full-time job. Here's what chapter 3 is currently about, although it may undergo drastic revision...

Relativism and the Net: Moral and cultural relativism used to be a lot easier.

The communications revolution of the past century has thrown into our face the fact that people have very different ways of understanding the world and different sets of values. We know this because magazines show us pictures of them, and on TV they're busy either behaving in their quaint ways or yelling at us. This new awareness of the diversity of our world has helped exacerbate our culture's depressing relativism.

There's something wrong with relativism...

Liking PoMo: Try as I might, I can't get past the high BS quotient of so many Postmodern essays.

Last week — or was it two weeks ago? — I went to Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, an eclectic festival of electronic arts with an url that, unfortunately, I keep mentally parsing as www.ArseLectronica.com. Quite a fascinating set of people, and much more artsy than the usual set of literal-minded bitheads I spend time with.

But, about half of the presentations set me onto a psychological merry-go-round ride during which most of me screams, "This is total bullcrap!" while a little voice tries to calm me down, insisting that these are very, very smart people so there has to be a brass ring here somewhere...

My book: Progress report (Or: How I spent my summer "vacation"): I'm working away on Everything is Miscellaneous. Here's what I'm up to.

I've been working all summer on Everything Is Miscellaneous. It's due into the publisher in July '06, making next summer seem like right around the corner. My how time flies when you have a deadline.

I did a heck of a lot of research these past few months, some of it entailing entering a physical library. Yes, there are still some around, and yes, the good parts still smell of dried leaves and mold. I also did a whole bunch of writing and just slightly less un-writing. (Some refer to this as "rewriting," but it feels more Penelope-esque to me than that.)

Here's where the book stands at the moment, and please remember that any and all of it is likely to be unwritten tomorrow...

[Now includes excerpts!]

Walking the Walk: The Beebster is doing some good stuff with knowledge management
What I'm playing: Brothers in Arms is overhyped. Painkiller is underhyped.
Bogus Contest: Net MadLibs

All I have to do now is write the mofo. Times Books is publishing Everything is Miscellaneous. Here's what a book auction is like...

Seems like forever, doesn't it? I can promise that it won't feel that way to me as I watch the deadline rushing toward me like an angry bull.

No, I'm not keeping up with your blog. It's time to drop the expectation that I've read yours and you've read mine.

I would like to. I really would. I like it and I like you.

But we're now well past the point where we can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with.

I just can't do it any more.

I've been faking it for a while.

Why I'm a pessoptimist —The Right to Connect: Let's not be too quick to compromise.

I'm confused. On the one hand, I'm a raving Tony Robbins optimist. On the other hand, I'm a Lessigian pessimist. The other day I figured out how I can contain such a contradiction. It's very simple.

Everything Bad is very very good: Steve Johnson's new book finds the value in pop culture

I just finished Steve Johnson's new book, Everything Bad is Good for You. It's going to be a best-seller if there's any justice in the world. [Hint: There isn't.]

I've been reading Steve's stuff for some time now and I think I've discovered what makes his writing style so good: He thinks well. He turns corners and pulls you with him. It's the kind of unexpected unfolding that makes narratives work, but Steve does it purely in the realm of ideas. He writes so well because he's so damn smart. (Also, he just writes so damn well.)

Walking the Walk: The Beeb rulz
Cool Tool: At last, multi-page faxing in Windows! Woohoo!
What I'm playing: Half Life 2 is the greatest game ever.

Trees and tags - An introduction: What are taxonomies, tags, faceted classification, folksonomies...? And do they matter?

The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree's branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet.

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge...

My life as a Berkperson: I've been at the Harvard Berkman Center since last summer and I think I'm beginning to understand what it's about.

Before I applied for a Berkman fellowship, I had to ask John Palfrey and Ethan Zuckerman, neither of whom I knew, a whole bunch of damn fool questions. I had no living sense of what it meant to be a Berkman fellow. Do you drink sherry at 4? Just how witty is the banter? Would I get a discount on ascots?

I've been a fellow since July. Here's what it's like...

Larry Summers and the Web as world: The blogosphere practically demands that Harvard-related bloggers say something — something! — about their President's comments...and that's evidence that the Web is a world, not just a medium

What's most interesting to me is the fact that as a blogger and a member of the Harvard community (fellows are not faculty members) I felt that I should say something about it. The blogosphere is becoming a moral space...

Trees vs. Leaves: Tagging may be shaking the leaves off of taxonomic trees, affecting not only how we organize ideas and information but how we think about organization itself.

Del.icio.us kicked "tagging" into gear by giving us a reason to tag stuff. It's a bookmarking site: If you come across a page you on the Web that you want to remember, you post the URL to your personal page at del.icio.us. On the way, you tag it with a word or two that will help you find it among the mass of bookmarks you accumulate. The kicker is that everyone else can see not only what you've bookmarked but all the bookmarks that share a particular tag...

Bridge Blogging: A new effort tries to break through the national boundaries implicit in the blogosphere.

My friends Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca Mackinnon, have, with others, started an initiative called GlobalVoices that aims at helping the blogosphere break through its natural tendency to cluster into groups that are too easily alike. GlobalVoices asks: What can we do to get the rest of the world's voices heard?..

Links: Some funnish stuff.
Bogus Contest: Wikipedia topics.

The future of facts (and the rise of fact servers): Are facts going to become as cheap and uninteresting as styrofoam peanuts?

The Wikipedia had to freeze the George W. Bush entry a few weeks ago because people were altering it to suit their political viewpoints at an alarming rate. So, the editors pared the page down to the non-controversial "core" of facts. There was still a lot of information there — much more than merely "He was born, he drank, he became president" — and occasional acknowledgements of controversies, such as whether Bush satisfactorily completed his National Guard service.

But, most interesting to me, towards the top, on the right, the Wikipedia ran one of the staples of its biographical entries: A fact box.

I find this two-tiered view of facts, quite common in reference works, fascinating. And in the context of a bottom-up work such as the Wikipedia, in the midst of a dust-up over what constitutes a factual account of the life of W, you have to ask: What's happening to facts?...

The end of data: In the new world of classification and categorization, data and metadata are indistinguishable.

There used to be a real difference between data and metadata. Data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it. Data was the folder and metadata was its label. Data was the contents of the book and metadata was the Dewey Decimal number on its spine. But, in the Third Age of Order everything is becoming metadata...

Walking the walk: O'Reilly's foo camp is brilliant marketing in which the product is never mentioned
Cool tool: Open source Audacity sounds good
What I'm playing: Far Cry
Email: How much of an anti-Semitic misogynist was Melvil Dewey?
Bogus contest: Name the metadata bundles discussed in "The end of data" article