In this edition of Radio Berkman, Cory Doctorow argues in favor of copyright … the part of copyright that protects the rights of readers to own (and not just license) books.

It being Cory, the discussion covers topics such as the way in which books are like dogs and his sentimental attachment to his digital collection.

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Ethan Zuckerman ponders what good is knowing if it doesn’t lead to effective action…and he isn’t asking this rhetorically. You want to read this because Ethan himself is an extreme knower, an extreme care-er, and a full time agent of change. I found that this post caused me to have an internal dialogue in which I kept interrupting myself. The world is just so hard to change, even when the need is so obvious and urgent, and yet we can’t let ourselves believe that knowing and caring can make no difference at all. What’s at issue here (at least in my internal dialogue) is that the model of knowing, caring, and acting isn’t explaining our experience. Or our hope.

Then there’s Evgeny Morozov’s review of Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution in the Boston Review. Evgeny likes Andrew’s book although he thinks it doesn’t explain enough about why Wikipedians wikipede. The comment thread is also well worth reading.

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The Berkman Center has announced the Online Media Legal Network that networks lawyers willing to provide free services with online journalists and other creators of online works who need legal advice for free or for cheap. It could be anything from helping to legally create a company to representing you in court when you are accused of infringing someone else’s tender copyright. This builds on the work that the Citizen Media Law Project at the center.

If you need some legal help, go to the OMLN.org website. If you are a lawyer who wants to volunteer to help, sign up at the website.

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Samuel Bowles is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called: “Kudunomics: Property rights for the information based economy.” He wants to look at how institutions are likely to evolve in the “weightless economy.”

“In an economy based primarily on embodied and relational wealth, individual property rights are difficult and socially harmful to enforce.” Adam Smith’s invisible hand fails in important ways. SB says that that’s not a new idea. The new idea is that we should be able to gain insight about the evolution of institutions by studying the reverse transition from the Late Pleistocene forager economy to the agrarian economy. So, SB thought he should run that history backwards, which he may get to talking about in today’s session. The forager economy may provide clues for the weightless economy of the future.

SB puts up an equation explaining wealth, which I could not follow or capture, a cobb-douglas production function. [I hear Ethanz typing. He's certainly doing a far better job liveblogging this than I.] One point: Once we domesticated animals, we turned wealth into something we could own. Network wealth = the value your connections bring you. The number of people who will help you in your field, share food, etc. Embodied wealth = the value of what’s in your head that’s actionable by your body. [I'm not sure I got that, and I'm certainly paraphrasing.]

The basic idea of the invisible hand theorem is that good fences make good neighbors. Arrow and Debreu showed in 1953 that competitive market allocations will be optimal (in the Pareto sense), but only if the markets are complete (”the effects of the actions of economic actors on one another take the form of contractual exchanges”) and increasing returns to scale are absent or small [I don't know what that means]. “Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost which will equal their true scarcity (social marginal cost): p=M =SMC” SB is going to show that that is not true in a weightless economy.

Much of the economy – the grain and steel economy — fits this invisible hand theorem. It works best if the goods are tangible, easily measurable in standardized ways. In this classic economy, there was sufficient competition.

But, it’s different in weightless economies, where there’s high first-copy costs, and low marginal costs. E.g., it costs a lot to produce the first copy of a CD but very little for the rest of the copies. E.g., the first copy of Windows 97 cost maybe $50M, but the second copy cost $3.

In the weightless economy, enforcing property rights paradoxically force a violation of the invisible hand theorem: You let someone charge $20 for a cd the marginal cost of which is $0.85.

In the economy of grain and steel, market structure was a mix of competition and stable oligopoly (”competition restricted to a handful of firms”). The info economy may exhibit a serial monopoly structure, but that’s not what he wants to talk about.

SB gives a summary of what he’s said so far: Dilemmas of the weightless economy: Increasing returns on both the demand and supply side make competition difficult to sustain. This winner-take-all dynamic generates lots of inequality. The critical thing: Private firms cannot conform to the p=MC rule, and property rights are both ambiguous and difficult to enforce. The institutions that have worked well for the past 200 yrs are likely to work less well in the future.

Kudu = An antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared (perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family). The culture of the foraging band: generosity, modesty about one’s success, sharing. Christopher Boehm (1982) wrote that group sanction is “the most powerful instrument for regulation of individually assertive behaviors.” But mobile foraging bands “and its collectivist and egalitarian norms and properties was eventually displaced by agricultural production.” The critical fact is that that increased land productivity so that a small plot of band was productive enough to live on, which provided an incentive for putting up fences and defending it. These prop rights were not enforced by states but by some form of mutual consent.

Just as agricultural facilitated unambiguous prop rights, the info economy is reversing this process. We’re returning to the early Pleistocene economy. Most of the animals could not be domesticated. Some became more valuable when domesticated. Is an online song more like a cow or like a kudu? “Will the attempt to domesticate the modern day kudu’s prove costly and ineffective?”

Arrow: “Information is a fugitive resource.” It runs away. “We are just beginning to face the contradictions between the systems of private prop and of info acquisition and dissemination.” “If Arrow is correct, how would we expect our economic institutions to evolve under these new conditions?” Institutional change is very hard to study. There aren’t that many French Revolutions to study. He is doing Markov chain models with others at the Santa Fe Institute.

“Could between-group competition and technological advance combine to induce a new property rights revolution?” Darwin explained change via in-group revolution, while Marx looked at between-group. This is complex between there are both individual and group selection processes, so they’re almost impossible to predict using math. But you can use models. There are many quilibria. Initial conditions do not matter.

He talks about his agent-based model of institutional persistence and innovation. (You can play with his “artificial history” models here: http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles It looks like a Windows executable you can download.) He describes three strategies in the model: bourgeois (own prop and defend it), civic (share and penalize those who do not), share. [See Ethan! Or watch the webcast when it's posted in a day or too. Sorry.]

If prop rights are stable, then an all-bourgeois society (protect what they have) is in equilibrium. Likewise if all civics. If all civics (share and punish for non-sharing), you can drift toward all sharers because they are behaviorally indistinguishable if there are not B who are trying to protect what they have. Using these parameters (which I am expressing totally inadequately and probably inaccurately), he and Jung-Kyoo Choi have run simulations. If prop rights are stable, the system tends towards equilibrium. If they are not — a bourgeois contests ownership — there is no equilibrium, although there is some moving clustering. Summary: “Evolutionary success of the ‘bourgeois equilibrium’ depends on prop rights being unambiguous.

But this is not the right way to understand the future because we don’t know how ambiguous prop rights will be, which depends on technological advances and the legal system.

Diff institutions have diff advantages. States are good at coercing, Markets allocate well. Communities handle the ambiguity of prop rights but fail where inequalities among members are very large. The problem of the info economy is that information creates both substantial ambiguity or prop rights and a lot of inequality (winner-take-all). The ambiguity makes it hard for the state to adjudicate. The inequality makes it hard for the communitarian values to succeed.

He ends by quoting Hayek: Whether central planning or competition works depends on whether you put all the pricing info in the hands of a central authority or adjust the prices by giving the pricing info to individuals. But now we have a third player: Markets and states, but also communities. Fifty years ago, people speculated that computers would solve this problem. SB says that we need a high level of info creation as well as making it available at its marginal cost. This is the question asked for hunters in hunter/gathering societies: Why should hunters hunt if they give it all away? Understanding this activity — mirrored in today’s collaborative environment — may help solve the problem.

Q: What do we know about the scalability of communities? The ambiguity seems to grow as groups get bigger.
A: How many people work on Wikipedia?
Q: The ambiguity there occurs in small groups.
A: Hunter-gatherers can’t take advantage of economies of scale or of diversity. Can moral sanctioning be done in on-face-to-face environments? We’re finding out.

Q: Can you talk about common pool resources (Ostrom)? [and two more questions]
A: The value of the network is the number of possible connections. There are therefore huge economies of scale. That’s where you get the winner-take-all from. Ostrom took some insights of Ronale Coase and extend them beyond firms, to include things such as communities. Are the motivations for sw engineers the same for hunters? Reputation. Fun.

Q: [me] What’s a community?
A: The non-state, non-market ways that humans connect and interact. [Hugely paraphrased!]
Q: [me] Is there enough in common among all those ways to enable it to be used as a factor in your model?
A: Communities have in common that they have a public thing, they have to figure how to share the benefits of this, and they;re not doing this primarily through enforceable contracts. But I don’t want to pin it down too much. Read “Against Parsimony” by Albert Hirschman.

Q: One of the child’s first words is “mine” because that it eanables it to differentiate itself from its environment. I think your theory would change if you asked if that’s a universal.
A: It’s not. Children differentiate themselves from their mother, but they don’t universally claim physical objects as their own. Private property is incredibly recent.

Q: In your agent-based model, could you drill down to see which types of prop rights are likely to be stable?
A: Yes, but not with agent-based models. Our theory lets us address this. We just haven’t done it. You should be able to look at the nature of the project — first copy costs, e.g. — and develop a typology of the sorts of things that are hard to solve, although changes in tech or law would change this.

Q: The gov’t role has be quite diff if you an economy of cows or kudus. How does this affect gov’t regulation?

A: My preliminary ideas: I don’t think it leads to more or less gov’t. It leads into different kinds of gov’t interventions. The aim is to take seriously when designing incentives you have to take into account that people have their own motivations. And if you introduce monetary incentives, you may get worse outcomes; I’ve recently written about this for Science. The solution to problems is always some combination of incentives designed by economists et al. and the moral incentives of most humans. These two are inseparable; addressing one without recognizing this can be disastrous. Some problem are solved not just by financial incentives but by some combination of people’s incentives and motivations.

[NOTE: Samuel Bowles is way more coherent than this livebloggery makes him sound. I lack the background to follow much of what he says. Much for me was like typing in the dark. So, I apologize to him and to you. And here's Ethan Zuckerman's far superior bloggage.]

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I’ve posted a video interview with Cory Doctorow at Broadband Strategy Week. Cory talks about the disproportionality of “three strikes” laws that take away Internet access from those who have been thrice accused of copyright infringement. Perhaps, he suggests, we should also take away Internet access from rightsholders who inaccurately accuse people of infringing copyright. The six minutes are a string of wonderful Cory paragraphs.

Cory’s new book is Makers. His explanation of why he Creative Commonses his books is classic Cory. Which is a very excellent thing.

BTW, right before this, I interviewed Cory for a Radio Berkman podcast that will be up soon. We talked about the future of books as objects you can own.

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Holy cow!

The Open Net Initiative, a group that monitors government filtering (= censorship) of the Internet held a book launch at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheik. A poster for the book — Access Controlled — contained the sentence: “The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.”

This statement was so objectionable, so outrageous, such a violation of common decency, such a hateful expression, such an offense to the tender sensibilities of UN diplomats that it must not ever be uttered. Security guards were sent to take the poster down.

If the people who want to govern the Internet think that’s beyond the pale of free speech, what the hell are they going to do with the rest of the Internet?

And, by the way, if you want to see what it looks like when UN diplomats take bold action, watch this video of the take-down itself.

[Source, video statement by ONI, BoingBoingage]

(Disclosure: the Berkman Center is a member of ONI.)

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It makes me very nervous to disagree with Umberto Eco because he is so fathomlessly smart. But I think in this case I do. Sort of.

There’s a fabulous interview with Eco in Spiegel (in English) about why he loves lists. He is characteristically pithy, provocative and wise. A crucial paragraph, from the beginning:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

I read the first sentence and was provoked, as Eco intends. Lists are the origin of culture? Please say more! But Eco doesn’t really explain, in this interview, why lists — as opposed to other forms of collections and orderings — are so important. The urge to make order, yes, but not lists themselves.

A list is one particular way of creating order. Lists are sequential and one-dimensional: Wines listed by year, or by place, or by ranking, or by the chronology of when you first encountered them. (Lists can be hierarchical, but they’re only lists if they can be resolved back down to the one-dimensional.) Lists thus are one elemental way of ordering the world. And they have a peculiar fascination, which Eco expresses beautifully. But I think it’s wrong to say that they’re the origin of culture. I think it’d be more accurate and useful to say that culture originates with collecting: Pulling things around us because of their appeal (a word I’m purposefully leaving vague).

I’m sure I’m making too much of Eco essentially drumming of interest in his exhibit at the Louvre, but the issue matters a little bit. I think (based on little to nothing) that lists emerged as a stripping down of multi-dimensional collections. Culture first happened (I imagine) when we pulled together pieces of the world that spoke to us in ways we could not articulate. We assembled them as spaces through which we could wander, or piles through which we could collectively sort (”Oooh, I particularly like that green shiny stone!”). Lists are an abstraction, and culture began (I suppose) with an unarticulated sense that some things go together — and perhaps our first conversations were about why.

Eco goes on to say many wonderful things about why we have liked lists, including proposing that listing properties of an object can liberate us from looking for the definitional essence of things. (For more on this, read his important book, Kant and the Platypus.) In fact, Eco suggests that a mother defines a tiger to her child “Probably by using a list of characteristics: The tiger is big, a cat, yellow, striped and strong.”

I have a bunch of issues with that.

First, that type of definition really just makes explicit what’s implicit in the traditional approach to definitions as essence. In the traditional Aristotelian approach, the essence is the creature’s spot in the hierarchy of beings. So, a tiger is a species of cat, and thus would be specified by its difference from other cats but also by all of the properties of the classes above it (mammal, vertebrate, animal, etc.). The essential definition and the list definition both consist of a list of properties, but the essential definition nests them so that they don’t all have to be spelled out, and so we can see which differences “count.” Eco says, “The essential definition is primitive compared with the list,” but it seems to me that a beautifully nested, hierarchical system of essential definitions is in fact more advanced — it requires abstraction and systems thinking — than a mere list.

But, I don’t want to miss Eco’s essential (so to speak) point here, which is that defining something with a list breaks us out of the notion that there is a single, knowable essence. Absolutely. There’s no eternal essence, “just” a set of properties that are relevant depending upon our circumstances. With that I wholeheartedly agree.

My second problem with this is that — as George Lakoff says in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, explicating and expanding the work of Eleanor Rosch — the mother (heck, maybe even the father) probably actually teaches the child what a tiger is by pointing at one, or at a picture of one. We learn through prototypes, not through essential definitions, and not by making lists. List-making is an abstraction and a secondary activity.

Third, the listing the parent does seem to me to not have the properties that make lists captivating to Eco. The parent isn’t trying to give a complete listing that brings a sense of mastery over the infinite and over death. She’s just pointing out some of the salient features. If it is a list, it’s not a list of the sort that Eco has charmed us about.

Fourth, while lists of properties are a useful corrective to thinking that things are exhausted by a definition of their essence, lists strip out so much that they don’t seem like much more adequate than essential definitions. A tiger isn’t a list.

This is just a fun interview in Spiegel, so I may be taking it too seriously. So, even if lists occur within culture — including the lists in literature he points to — rather than being the origin of culture, the interview does indeed help us to see why our fascination with lists is a fascination with something bigger than lists.

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Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups.

Here’s a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which is written in non-legal language and is only 2 pages long:

1. The agreement now has been narrowed to books registered for copyright in the US, or published in the UK, Australia or Canada.

2. There have been changes to the terms of how “orphaned works” (books under copyright whose rightsholders can’t be found) are handled. The revenue generated by selling orphaned works no longer will get divvied up among the authors, publishers and Google, none of whom actually have any right to that money. Instead it will go to fund active searching for the rightsholders. (At the press call covered by Danny Sullivan [see below], the Authors Guild rep said that with money, about 90% of missing rightsholders can be found.) After holding those revenues in escrow (maybe I’m using the wrong legal term) for ten years (up from five in the first settlement), the Book Rights Registry established by the settlement can ask the court to disburse the funds to “nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public”; I believe in the original, the Registry decided who got the money. So, in ten years there may be a windfall for public libraries, literacy programs, and maybe even competing digital libraries. (The Registry may also (determined by what?) give the money to states under abandoned property laws. (No, I don’t understand that either.))

The new settlement creates a new entity: A “Court-approved fiduciary” who represents the rightsholders who can’t be found. (James Grimmelmann [below] speculates interestingly on what that might mean.)

3. The settlement now explicitly states that any book retailer can sell online access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, including orphaned works. The revenue split will be the same (63% to the rightsholder, “the majority of” 37% to the retailer).

4. The settlement clarifies that the Registry can decide to let public libraries have more than a pitiful single terminal for public access to the scanned books. The new agreement also explicitly acknowledges that rightsholders can maintain their Creative Commons licenses for books in the collection, so you could buy digital access and be given the right to re-use much or all of the book. Rightsholders also get more control over how much Google can display of their books without requiring a license.

5. The initial version said Google would establish “market prices” for out of print book, which seemed vague because what counts as the market for out-of-print books? The new agreement clarifies the algorithm, aiming to price them as if in a competitive market. And, quite importantly, the new agreement removes the egregious “most favored nation” clause that prevented more competitive deals to be made with other potential book digitizers.

From my non-legal point of view, this addresses many of the issues. But not all of them.

I’m particularly happy about the elements that increase competition and access. It’s big that Amazon and others will be able to sell access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, and sell access on the same terms as Google. As I understand it, there won’t be price competition, because prices will be set by the Registry. Further, I’m not sure if retailers will be allowed to cut their margins and compete on price: If the Registry prices an out-of-print book at $10, which means that $6.30 goes to the escrow account, will Amazon be allowed to sell it to customers for, say $8, reducing its profit margin? If so, then how long before some public-spirited entity decides to sell these books to the public at their cost, eschewing entirely the $3.70 (or the majority of that split, which is what they’re entitled to)? I don’t know.

I also like the inclusion of Creative Commons licensing. That’s a big deal since it will let authors both sell their books and loosen up the rights of reuse.

As far as getting rid of the most favored nation clause: Once the Dept. of Justice spoke up, it’s hard to imagine it could have survived more than a single meeting at Google HQ.

Reactions from the critics has not been all that positive.

James Grimmelmann is studying it carefully, but quickly put up a substantial and detailed evaluation of the revisions. He is deep into the details.

The Open Book Alliance (basically an everyone-but-Google consortium) is not even a little amused, because the new agreement doesn’t do enough to keep Google from establishing a de facto monopoly over digital books. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not satisfied because no reader privacy protections were added. Says the ACLU: “No Settlement should be approved that allows reading records to be disclosed without a properly-issued warrant from law enforcement and court orders from third parties. ”

Danny Sullivan live-blogged the press call where Google and the other parties to the settlement discussed the changes. It includes a response to Open Book Alliance’s charges.

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It took only a little googling, but it isn’t dead obvious — until you know how to do it — so here’s how you connect your Droid to your Mac.

Connect the two via USB.

Pull down the Notifications sheet on the Droid. You do that by pulling with your giner on the very topmost menu bar in the system. You should see a USB symbol in that bar.

Click on the obvious entry in the notifications, which says something like “Turn on USB” or some such.

Check the Finder on your Mac. It should show a “NO NAME” mounted under devices. Welcome to your Droid.

(And then be prepared to trash your SD card by accident.)

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David Lloyd, who not only wrote some of the greatest single episodes in TV sitcom history [Chuckles the Clown youtube], but consistently wrote hilariously, has died at 75. I especially loved a lot of his work on Frasier. With the death of Larry Gelbart (best known for M*A*S*H, but also a writer for the original Sid Caesar show, and of the movie Tootsie), a generation is passing.

It’ll be time soon for someone to do a retrospective on The Funniest Generation that assesses the effect of its sitcoms on our culture. And you can remind us all you want of how awful most sitcoms were and are, but there has almost always been at least one really funny sitcom running throughout American TV’s history. Usually on a Thursday night on NBC, by the way.

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I gave a keynote at theCanadian Marketing Association’s Marketing Week conference in Toronto a couple of days ago. It was a new talk, and I tried to structure it carefully. I’ve gone through my slides, and here’s an extended summary of what I said (or meant) in this 35-minute (?) talk.

Title: After Conversation: Markets as Networks.

Part I: Networked Markets

As Doc Searls said, markets are conversations. But, Doc said something else that I think is just as brilliant: “There’s no market for messages.” That’s harder for marketers to hear, since it points to the essential fact of traditional marketing: The people marketers are talking to generally don’t want to hear from them. And I want to add one more thought to this mix: Markets are also networks.

Traditional markets consist of demographic slices, i.e., “social groups” of people who have never met one another. We choose particular demographics because we think they are susceptible to the same message. Thus, traditional markets are not real things to which we send messages. Rather, messages make markets.

Now, markets are networks…networks of people who converse and interact, spread out across the Internet. For example, at any one moment there are some number of parents with sick children who are on the Net talking and posting, on blogs, discussion boards, social networking sites, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. But that networked market is substantially different in 12 hours because their kids are getting better. And of course 12 hours is an extremely long periodicity for these networked markets. They change constantly. Think of how ideas ripple through Twitter. Furthermore, not everyone in the market of parents with sick kids are in it the same way. The illnesses vary, the seriousness of the illnesses vary, the relationships vary. Think about the gay network in this regard: I’m sometimes in this network because I blog about gay marriage. But if you, as marketer, fail to recognize the complexity of the interests in this group, then you’ll be sending gay dating solicitations to people who don’t want them, including some who are in this network because they’re posting homophobic comments. Networked markets are rippling, ever-changing, hugely complex, inherently unstable, and thus thoroughly unlike traditional markets.

In short: You can’t step into the same market twice.

In fact, these webs of connected people are characterized by their differences as well as by their agreements, by their individuality as well as their connection. (Q: What is the opposite of message discipline? A: The Internet.) This is very different from traditional markets which are defined by demographic similarities. Networked markets are equally defined by their differences.

Part II: The network properties of networked markets

Networked markets take on some of the properties of networks. Let’s look at a few of those properties.

1. Markets at every scale. The Internet works at every scale, unlike any other medium. [I should have said: ...perhaps except for paper.] E.g., Twitter works for Ashton Kutcher with 3M followers and for a tween with her 10 friends. But it is a different thing at each scale. The same is true for networked markets. It’s crucial to understand the social differences at each scale; thinking of Twitter as a single phenomenon is a mistake (for example).

2. Markets are held together by the same “glue” as networks. What holds the network together (not at the level of bits ‘n’ routers, of course) are the interests people express through their links. Likewise for networked markets. Shared interests, not messages, make networked markets.

3. Markets are transparent like networks. Because the connective tissue of the network consists of links, and those links tend to be public, the network tends towards transparency. (Note: tends towards.) I want to mention three types of marketing transparency that I think are crucial.

a. Transparent sources: We need to be able to follow links to the sources (the facts and conversations) that lead you to what you say.

b. Transparent self: We need to know you are who you say you are (no astroturfing or phony reviews!), but we also need to know that you know that you’re a fallible human like the rest of us. The posturing and perfectionism of traditional marketing increasingly will decrease the company’s credibility.

c. Transparent interests. The customer’s interest in a product often are not aligned with the company’s interest in selling it to her. The customer’s interests are complex (buying a bike to save gas money and to get some exercise and to save the earth and to feel like a kid), while, at worst, the company has a single interest. Because of this potential mismatch of interests, we need transparency about the company’s interests.

Summary: Transparency of (a) sources to trust your facts, of (b) self to trust you, of (c) interests to trust what you’re up to on our Internet.

Part III. Four challenges (plus one)

1. How does a marketer deal with the non-alignment of interests? At the very same time, the market may range from wanting to sing kumbayah to being near-violently politically opposed. Tough problem. Part of the answer is to be willing to embrace a straightforward advocacy (with facts and reasons and full transparency) about positions much of the market may disagree with. In a network based on difference, honest disagreement is better than a phony agreeableness.

2. Cluetrain advocated authenticity. Over the years, I find myself agreeing more with Chris Locke’s skepticism about the concept. What does it mean for an organization to be authentic? It’s hard even to make sense of the term. E.g., does it mean that everyone has to agree with the founder’s opinions? Does it mean that people who are working there simply because it’s a job have to pretend to be enthusiastic?

3. Companies are hierarchical because hierarchies scale up to the size of an army (= the number of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter followers). But hierarchies don’t interact with networks very comfortably. E.g., who speaks for the company?

4. Respect the conversation. Although markets are conversations, conversations are not markets. The conversations are more important than your marketing. And if you participate, then truly participate; don’t participate with the secret aim of subverting the discussion.

5. The hardest thing for marketers: Resist opportunities.

The End.

(By the way, here’s Marketing Magazine’s brief write-up of the talk.)

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I got my Droid about five days ago, and immediately took it on the road with me, which meant I didn’t have the quality time I wanted to settle into a nook and read Persian love poetry to it. But, I did get a sense of how it looks to a a rushed n00b. Also, I come to it from a Blackberry 8830, not from an iPhone, so my expectationshave been set rather low in some ways. Here’s an initial report. (And here’s an initial report from Dave Winer, whose new Droidie.com site I’m enjoying. And here’s an initial report from Bijan Sabet.)

Positives:

It’s an open device. Yay!

It’s great for browsing. Fast. Clear screen.

The built-in gmail client is pretty good. In fact, if you’re livin’ the Google lifestyle (gMail, gCalendar, gReader, gMaps, gMacrame, gAutoclave,, etc.) it feels like a seamless environment.

The turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps is far better than what I was paying Verizon $10/month for on my Blackberry. The Bberry version was too frequently disastrously off by a couple of blocks.

The on-screen keyboard’s autocomplete function works well. (I have little to compare it to, though.)

Five megapixel camera. I haven’t done much of anything with it, but the few snaps I took seemed pretty good. It has a little flash built in too.

The physical keyboard is ok. The 4-way browsy button is a little small for my thumb but is sometimes useful to have.

The arrangement of the desktop seems good.

16gb!

You can run multiple apps and have multiple browser windows open.

There’s a unified notification screen you can always pull down from the very topmost menu bar.

Finding and installing apps is dead simple, at least through the Apps Market. Buying them is easy too.

Speaking your desired location into your phone and having it plot your destination is still pretty cool. And speaking queries to Google not only it works, it often generates amusing guesses , especially lower down on the list. (”How to install Droid themes” became, in guess #5, “How to install troy reed queens”) (When the future arrives, it usually looks like a gimmick.)

Negatives and questions:

I’m getting less than a day of use out of the battery, using it almost entirely for email and surfing, and almost not at all for phoning. I have the wifi and bluetooth turned off. The Droid reports that about 40% of my battery’s power is going to the display; I am using the default times for putting the thing to sleep. (At the moment, it tells me 80% has gone to the display, but it also tells me that it’s been 17mins since I plugged it in, when in fact it’s been 10 hours.)

This is a Stupid User issue, but when setting it up, I gave it one of my gmail addresses, which it took as the default address. I added my other one, but then wanted to switch the new one to be the default. That cannot be done without doing a complete wipe down of the machine. On the other hand, the wipe-down and re-activation were easy.

The slidey-dots pin code entry screen is easier than typing in the numbers. But there is no way (according to Motorola’s support line) to put in a “Please call this number if you find this phone” notice that can be seen without entering the PIN. So, if you lose your phone, the person who finds it won’t know how to contact you. I sure hope someone comes up with an alternative PIN screen.

It supports a handful of gestures (so to speak), but not enough.

The text system needs an autotype utility. I haven’t found one yet. Opening up the existing autocomplete vocabulary would help, but even that only works when you’re using the onscreen keyboard, not the hardware keyboard.

When using the soft keyboard, there’s no way to move the text cursor except by stabbing the entry screen with where you want it to be. Since your index finger is probably at least 4opts wide and you may be using what looks to be about 4pt type, the accuracy is pretty random. (When using the hard keyboard, the 4-way rocker moves the cursor within text.)

It’s not a world phone. I’m going to have to take my Blackberry to Europe, and ask Verizon to temporarily activate it.

I haven’t found a way of foldering apps yet. The pullout screen that shows you what you have installed is arranged alphabetically, but at some point I’m going to want it to be arranged hierarchically. [NEXT DAY: See the second comment, from Mark, for how to create folders on the home screen.]

The default background is a hideous, depressing, semi-corroded, dark gray slab of metal. What were they thinking?
I want more apps! (I could use a good, free or cheap, solo Texas holdem game.)

But…

…Notice how many of the negatives could be — and very likely will be — fixed by some clever developer.

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Giles Turnbull at the Morning News reports on his research interrogating (gently) children from different families about what they call various Lego pieces. Quite interesting in its own taxonomic way, and a topic that’s amusing even just to contemplate.

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Derek Barry blogs Jay Rosen’s keynote at the Media140 in Sydney. Jay gave his ten commandments (in the form of tweets) for press in the age of the Internet.

(Jay apparently noted my post on transparency and objectivity, which Derek looked at and thought was “ironically anonymous.” I never considered that this blog looks anonymous, since I flog my books, have a disclosure button at the top, and list my twitter handle, but I can see how it would seem that way. I think I’m too shy/neurotic to fix it, though.)

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I’ve been honored with one of Ethan Zuckerman’s incredible liveblog postings. I gave a 45 min talk at the Berkman Center yesterday. I spoke quickly, waved my hands a lot, and spewed. [Rough draft here.] Even so, Ethan was able to commit an amazing act of streaming journalism, with very few places where I would even quibble with his summary and analysis.

He posted it immediately after I spoke, which I can attest to because if you read it you would never think that it was an unedited draft. It’s too thoughtful and well-written for that. This is Ethan writing on the fly, not merely typing or transcribing. Amazing.

independent of all that, I am very fortunate to be able to call Ethan a close friend.

[Later that day: Here's the video of the webcast.]

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Dr. Mohit Kaushal, director of healthcare for the FCC’s Broadband Strategy Initiative talks about the effect of healthcare considerations have on the thinking of those planning our broadband strategy. The

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Mike McGinn’s campaign platform is high on the city providing an optical fiber infrastructure to the city of Seattle.

Mike McGinn’s campaign is grass-rootsy.

Mike McGinn won.

Is Seattle going to go muni-fiber?

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“There is a way to herd cats: Move their food.” — speaker at a closed conf

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An unusual coalition is backing the http://eleven-eleven.org, trying to get 11 million Americans to each contribute $11 for veterans programs. It’s sponsored by BeyondTribute.org, and has been endorsed by Joe Trippi (the strategist behind the Howard Dean campaign) and John Hinderaker of the Republican Powerline blog.

The groups to whom the money will go are:

• American Gold Star Mothers

• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

• NY State for Vets

• Service Women’s Action Network

• Student Veterans of America

• The Bob Woodruff Foundation

• US VETS

• Veterans of Modern Warfare

• VFW Foundation

• Vietnam Veterans of America

• Wounded Warrior Project

You can contribute your $11 here. [NEW NOTE: The widget I had included was hanging my site, so I removed it :( ]

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According to the Boston Globe, how many travelers fly in or out of Boston’s Logan Airport every year?

You win this quiz (and get exactly nothing as a prize) if your answer is within an order of magnitude of the right answer. (And I should periodically acknowledge that my friend Paul English invented the Order of Magnitude Quiz.)

The answer is in the first comment.

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Draft of my talk on the end of information at the Berkman Center. [NOV 11: Here's the video of the webcast done on Nov 9. Ethan Zuckerman's extensive and amazing live blogging of the talk is here..]

I have been working for weeks on a talk I’m giving at a Tuesday lunch at the Berkman Center, where “work on” means erasing more than I’ve written. I’ve done more complete rewrites than I can count, mainly because I can’t figure out what the point of the talk is. I started out knowing what the point was, but as I actually wrote it, I knew less and less. So, here’s a rough outline of the current sorry state of the talk.

I. Information has been the dominant metaphor

This is the easy part. From cradle to grave, we’ve reconceived of ourselves and our world as information. But, except for the technical definition, we don’t know what it is (and most of how we’ve reconceived of ourselves has nothing to do with the technical def, and most of us don’t know the technical def anyway).

II. A discontinuous history

“Info” has two ordinary senses that precede its take-over by Claude Shannon in 1948: It’s something you’re about to learn, and it’s the content of tables. Shannon then introduced his technical definition, which only a tiny percentage of the population understands. Nevertheless, info became the dominant paradigm. So, what enabled it to take over our culture? Two notes: 1. I am explicitly not going to talk about its utility or its politics of control and mastery, both of which are obviously crucial to the answer. 2. I am going to contrast the Info Age with the Link Age (or whatever we’re going to call the new epoch).

Enabler 1: Information scales

Info scales sufficiently to enable large corporations to manage themselves. But its scaling strategy is to exclude everything that doesn’t fit its rows and columns. E.g., the personnel database contains only a tiny bit about what employees know about one another. In the Age of Links, we include everything. Links create a world of abundance. The irony is that while the Info Age’s strategy was to exclude bad and useless info, in the Age of Links we’re better able to manage the abundance of crap than the abundance of good stuff.

Enabler 2: Info is a resource

It’s a resource in that it’s useful to us. We can retrieve stuff from it, using the criteria of precision and recall: Did our query get only the right stuff and all the right stuff? In the Link Age of Abundance, however, getting all the right stuff is a disaster. (Which is why we invented two new criteria: relevance and interestingness.)

Furthermore, info is a resource from which we fetch nuggets of value. The Web, though, is a place that we enter and navigate. The irony is that in the Age of Info, we thought about entering an info space as becoming Jeff Bridges in Tron. Or, we thought that if we entered the info space because it engulfed us, it would be a cold world of men with clipboards, as in movies such as Desk Set. In the Link Age, the place we enter is fully social, and is becoming completely integrated with the real world space.

Enabler 3: Bits apply to everything

We sometimes talk about atoms vs. bits because anything can be turned into a bit. Bits are thus coextensive with the universe. But, bits can represent anything in the world because they are so fundamentally unlike the world. Every other measurement measures some property of the world (height, weight, shoe size, whatever), but bits measure pure difference. The world bits model always shows itself in particular ways, in particular properties. Bits are thus profoundly unnatural; they exist only because we take them as bits. They are thus very much unlike atoms.

Further, bits reduce everything to the simplest of differences: yes/no, 1/0. Links, on the other hand, are put in place to find and tease out differences that are complex enough to require language and to be worth pointing out.

Enabler 4: Information explains communication

Although Shannon expressly was not trying to explain human communication, his diagram matches our basic view of communication as the movement of code through a conduit. (Paul Edwards is good on this, as on many other issues.) Plus, Shannon’s popularizer, Warren Weaver, expressly said the theory applies to people speaking, pipers piping, dancers dancing, and just about every other form of communication. Still, we have to ask why think of communication as the process of moving symbols through conduits when so much else is required, and so much more is implied, by even the simplest of human conversations. Part of the answer is, I think, our Cartesian metaphysics that thinks that we experience representations of the world, and thus can only communicate by shipping messages to others that affect their representations of the world. The world itself has dropped out of this equation: We only have heads and conduits between them.

This basic picture of communication of content moving through a medium to a receiver treats communication as an obstacle to be overcome, for noise keeps banging on the conduit. This is how the world looks if you come out of an experience where communication was difficult, as was the case for the early info scientists, some of whom had worked on how to improve communications on a noisy battlefield. (Paul Edwards again: The Closed World is excellent.) But hyperlinks are neither content nor medium; more exactly, they’re both. Like a path, a hyperlink assumes an existing world, a shared ground. (Links are a very special sort of path, though, because they are generative of their world.)

Enabler 5: Information lets us understand the world

Models let us find what is essential and common among all that which they model. But they deny the abundance of the world and the fact that the world doesn’t behave the way we want. The contingent does show up in the Info Age view of the world. It shows up as noise. In the Link Age, succeed by making the world noisy: creating a path among ideas that differ. (This is not noise in Info Theory’s sense.) Of course, we rightfully worry that amidst this differential linkage we will only seek that which is familiar and reassuring. The success of the Link Age depends upon it remaining as noisy and full of difference as possible, the opposite of how the Info Age measured success.

So, as I write this out, I can see some sections that don’t really add up. For example, Enabler 3’s discussion is pretty incoherent. But that’s why I’m writing this out now.

I have one day left to get something presentable out of this, since I am out all day on Monday. And I’m jetlagged and pretty exhausted now. Ack.

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While Apple has blocked the Someecards app because some of the cards have made fun of public figures, Google has asked the app to port on over to Android phones.

(BTW, I got a Droid today.)

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Yochai Benkler, the project lead on the Berkman Center’s analytic survey of how broadband works around the world [pdf] responds to critics and questioners.

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The Supreme Court of Arizona has ruled that the metadata included in electronic doucments is covered by the public records law. If the state has to make the document available, it also has to make the metadata available.

The court reasoned analogically:

“It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records law, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public records,” Justice Scott Bales wrote.

According to the AP article:

The Arizona decision likely will have a “persuasive effect” on other states’ courts, said Dan Barr, an attorney who filed a brief on behalf of the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations…

The ruling also means requested electronic records must be provided in that form rather than paper printouts, which makes them difficult and costly to search, Barr said.

Sounds like a good ruling to me…

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I’m in an airport, beginning a day of transit that seems to bend time in a Time Zonish way, so I haven’t had time to actually read this Pew Internet report, but my understanding is that it challenges the assumption that mobiles, texting, the Internet, and all the rest make us more isolated. It turns out (apparently), that Internet and cell phone users have larger and more diverse social networks than non-users. Which way the causality runs, I don’t know. But the Pew Internet stuff is invariably interesting, so I thought I’d point it out.

Now, it’s off to the airport gate so that I can circle the globe in the wrong direction, reverse the flow of time, and finally remember where I put that Superman comic in 1958.

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I’m at IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in Milan. The Europe-wide president of IAB, Alain Heureux, is giving a talk that includes a section on the self-regulatory mechanisms IAB is proposing as it watches Brussels begin to formulate policy.

Alain goes through the following “road map”:

1. Opt out. It’d be a burden on the user to ask for opt in for IP addresses and cookies, so it’s important that there always be opt-out mechanisms. There could and should be centralized pages that explain exactly what the various types of cookies are, what they’re used for, and that give users the ability to turn them on or off.

2. Education and transparency. There should be sites [built by IAB?] that educate the public and that are completely transparent about the practices.

3. Good practices and codes of conduct.

4. Communication.

5. Research. Alain points to a survey of 32,000 customers across Europe (the MCDC), and a consumer benefits study that tries to quantify the economic value that users are getting at all those free sites we love so much.

By the way, attendance at the Italian IAB (pronounced “yob”) continues to increase. It started 7 years ago with 300 people, and this year there are 7,000 attendees, which is up 20% over last year. Pretty impressive given the state of the economy.

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Some folks, including Nadia El-Imam, have put together an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 that is going to be presented alongside the declaration of the European ministers at the Malmö ministerial conference in about 3 weeks. They’re looking for signatures.

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The Google Operating System blog (independent of Google) has a useful post explaining why it’s a bad idea to send large attachments, even though Google now lets you attach files up to 25MB in size.

The reasons the post gives have to do with how inefficient attachments are for the system: They get expanded and require multiple uncached downloads. But, those reasons won’t carry a lot of water for people who just want to send their 25MB Powerpoint presentation to 35 people who simply have to see it. (Mea culpa. Except these days it’d be Keynote for me … which seems to make much larger files than Powerpoint.) Until we come up with an easier way to send around files — or a way that adds enough other benefits — we’re going to be wrapping our attachment anvils in brown paper and twine, sticking stamps on them, and sending them through the emails just like God and Google intended.

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I have to say I enjoyed this message from Bill, urging his fellow Mainers to vote against Question 1, which would undo the state’s gay marriage law. I’m in agreement with Bill’s opinions, but I also admired the writing and rhetoric.

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From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

So, this is good techie news, but also a bit more.

(Here’s the NYT on the news. And I heard about this from my friend Britt Blaser, whose Open Resource Group citizen-to-government software runs on Drupal. (Disclosure: I volunteer as an adviser to Britt’s group.)

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Joe Trippi has an important post about to understand the upcoming election results: The electorate’s Us vs. Them has changed from Our Party vs. Their Party to The Electorate vs. Anyone in Power:

Voters are increasingly seeing themselves as “us” and both parties in Washington as “them.” They are not going to discriminate between the two parties in 2010. The results next Tuesday will likely demonstrate the voter’s frustration with those in power, regardless of party. Far from signaling a backlash against Democratic rule and hope for the Republican Party, the results on Tuesday will signal that in 2010 incumbents in both parties, of all ideological stripes should be frightened.

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A judge has ruled that email is not protected under the Fourth Amendment. This sounds wrong to me (although I am very much not a lawyer), but what I really enjoy are the many many arguments by analogy as slashdotters try to figure out what email is like, so we can see what privacy expectations to port over from the familiar world of telephones, Fedex trucks, and glass-bottom boats.

I’m not saying there’s a better way to figure this out. I just enjoy watching us flounder our way through ethical dilemmas.

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I’m finding the cultural politics of Droid’s marketing to be fascinating.

Droid is Motorola’s competitor to the iPhone, based on Google’s open source Android operating system. Of course it’s marketing itself head-to-head against the iPhone. Verizon’s “iDon’t” ad was totally in iPhone’s face: iPhone doesn’t do x, y, and z, but Droid does.

But Droid isn’t just going against iPhone’s features. It’s drawing a cultural line. Apple is for hippies, it’s saying. Droid is for power geeks.

For example, at Verizon’s “Droid Does” page, if you click on “Open Development,” the message is:

Droid doesn’t judge app makers. We don’t care about their politics, their lifestyles or their attitude. If they make a great app, we will share it. That’s how we have over 10,000 apps in Android Market™. Simple, isn’t it?

This is cross-over geek and business trash talk.

At “Hardcore,” the text is:

This is no granola crunching, flower child phone. It’s more powerful than you need and faster than you can handle. Basically, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. And it’s ready to do your bidding. What shall you have it do first.

Weird anti-hippie, geek power lord, high-performance sports car, S&M vibe.

“Power” continues the sports car trope:

Look under the hood of this machine if you dare. There’s a fast CortextA8 processor, 16gb of memory expandable to 32gb and a WVGA 854×480 screen. Now step back. It’s revving up.

Out of my way, hippie!

And perhaps: Out of my way, girls! The Droid marketing is hitting a lot of (traditionally) male notes.

The cultural alignment will be fascinating to watch.

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BoingBoing runs a terrific photo of chimps watching a dead chimp being transported, and asks anyone to deny that the chimps are grieving.

On the one hand, I don’t doubt for a moment that animals feel emotions. (Neither did Darwin, by the way. He seems to have been quite connected to his dogs.) Nor do I doubt that the chimps are grieving. I just don’t think the photo is evidence of grief; someone who doesn’t think animals feel social emotions wouldn’t be swayed by it. It just shows that chimps can pay attention.

Of course, the more important point to me isn’t whether what chimps feel when a member of their group dies is grief or should be called something else. It isn’t even whether animals feel what we call emotions (although I’m sure they do). The point is that animals other than humans care about themselves, their world, and sometimes others. The caring can be so primitive that at one end of the spectrum it’s not worth arguing for, but pretty far down the stack I’m convinced that to deny that animals care about what happens to them — and, eventually, what happens to their significant others — is just perverse. That caring is what we feel as emotions. The fact of that caring is the fundamental reason I’m a vegetarian.

But, that’s not what I wanted to ask. The comments to the BoingBoing post are quite funny. Along the way someone points out that 98% of our DNA is the same as the chimp’s. Which always makes me want to ask: How much of our DNA do we share with animals not nearly as obviously like us? With whales? With flounders? With brine shrimp? How much difference is in that top 10% of shared DNA?

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Elizabeth Goodman of UC Berkeley is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on a project she’s just now beginning. It is, she says, “half-baked.” She’s going to compare walled gardens in the computer sense to the original referent of “walled garden” and experiences of community gardens which often are fenced off. She says she comes to this from a design background, and has been looking at “how the metaphors we use shape the possibilities we imagine for them and how people can act in them.”

A walled garden was originally a commons, a common ground people can use. We use the term in tech talk because it is a common and concrete metaphor. But, “its salience relies on associations with imagined wall gardens.” Can we expand the “walled gardens” metaphor to make it a more useful tool for thought? Can we do so by looking at real walled gardens?

The initial uses of the term (first in 1680 and then in 1757) was very positive. But digital wall gardens lack openness, can’t share info across networks, that limits what you can look at, etc. Examples: Kindle, the AppStore, and Facebook. When people illustrate digital WGs, they tend to show beautiful, Victorian gardens…not at all like what you experience in your Facebook stream.

Elizabeth notes that walled gardens originally were created not to keep people about to create a microclimate. Fires could be set to raise the temperature. This should help us to see WGs as places of work and production. “So, is it useful to compare how we think about digital walled garden social network sites to how urban gardeners think about members-only community gardens?”

She studied community gardeners and park volunteers in the SF area for two years, because she was interested in shared management. She points out two things about the community garden photo she’s showing: Only members get in, and they’re not collectively cultivated. Each person gets her own small plot. “It is kind of like MySpace”: You can make your own plot as hideously designed as you want and no one will bother you, although if you don’t maintain your site, you get kicked out. (She notes that someone has insisted on distinguishing gardening from landscaping, a distinction she does not much care about.)

Q: [me] Does “gardening” vs “maintaining” when applied to digital realms imply gender? Were gender implications driving its adoption?
A: Probably yes.

Q: How about farming vs. gardening?

[Discussion has become quite conversational, which is wonderful for everyone except the liveblogger.]

Q: Walled gardens keep people out. Digital WPs keep people in.

Q: People in digital WGs have no sense of shared maintenance/management.

WGs are actually less communitarian than I had thought.

Q: First time I heard something called a WG on the Net was AOL.

Q: Is using Flickr, Facebook, or MySpace a faustian bargain?

Q: Urban dwellers really like living near a community garden even if they don’t garden in it. The walls are fences so you can see what’s there.

EG: And that’s a bit like Flickr: People can see much of what you post there.

EG: Here’s a photo of an unwalled garden by a master grower who is going something like a social display of his skill/artistry. But here’s a photo of community garden where a bean plot is next to a mixed flower plot.

Q: [me, summarizing the back channel] The first use of “WG” was for AOL, where the pitch was the order and safety of AOL vs. the wildness of the Web. Now WG seems to refer to locked places. I.e., garden vs. wild becomes walled vs. unwalled.

Q: WGs demarcate space for special creative uses.

[I am doing a completely lousy job here. The conversation is too interesting, plus there's the backchannel. I give up. Sorry. You'll be able to find the webcast at the Berkman site.]

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The latest interview with a member of the FCC Broadband strategy initiative is now up at BroadbandStrategyWeek.

Elana Berkowitz is Director of Economic Opportunities for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC.

17:20 mins

0:00 What do you do?
2:30 It’s very complicated. How do you decide what should be done by the public sector, by the private?
3:53 What’s the process by which you gather this information? Have there been workshops?
4:45 Workshops specifically on economic development?
5:37 You have all of this open input, but at some point — Feb. 17 — you have to decide exactly what you’re going to recommend…

9:15 What are the chances that what you recommend will make use of existing social networking platforms that are privately held, as opposed to having the government build, or pay for the building of, a new type of platform that perhaps repeats some of the functionality privately built ones offer.
10:42 So we’re not likely to see FaceGov or TwitGov…?
11:22 Just in case, I think I’ll take those domain names :)
12:35 So, how can the social sector get involved in this?
14:25 You come to this job right after a citizen journalism project called Off the Bus. Can you explain that and the relation between these two phases of your life?

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I do like the fact that Google has a “Google Data Liberation Front.” Their mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.” Google announced another positive step in this direction for Google Docs. All this is good, and even if it’s over-marketing Google’s openness, it’s the right value to be marketing.

Still, I wish it were easy to download a backup of my gmail.

LATER that day: Meanwhile, Microsoft is opening up its PST mailbox format.

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Brough Turner summarizes and explains an hypothesis put forward by David Reed that much of AT&T’s bandwidth overload is self-inflicted.

As I understand it — which I admit is not very far — AT&T may have its servers misconfigured. If AT&T has set the servers’ buffers (particular servers — see Brough’s explanation) too large, then they disrupt the network’s traffic self-regulation loop. TCP increases its transmission rate until it starts losing packets. At that point, it cuts its transmission rate in half. So, if all those iPhones are transmitting packets that are being buffered instead of notifying the sending servers that they’re not being received, all those iPhones just keep increasing their transmission rates, further overloading the network.

Feel free to enumerate all the ways the following is wrong. I don’t claim to actually understand it. Here’s Brough’s summary:

It appears AT&T Wireless has configured their RNC buffers so there is no packet loss, i.e. with buffers capable of holding more than ten seconds of data. Zero packet loss may sound impressive to a telephone guy, but it causes TCP congestion collapse and thus doesn’t work for the mobile Internet!

If Reed’s hypothesis is correct, then presumably much of the congestion on AT&T’s network (but how much is much?) could be reduced by shrinking the buffers and allowing TCP to do the self-regulation it was designed to do.

:ATER: Brough’s article has been slashdotted.

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Some posts from Berkpeople this week that I thought I’d call out:

Dan Gillmor responds to a Washington Post op-ed that calls for federal subsidies to support local news gathering.

Andrew Moshirnia at the Citizen Media Law Project opens his piece on the MPAA’s attempt to make some TV content un-recordable this way:

Between sparkling vampires and slobbering zombies, the Undead have found new life at the box office these days. So it makes sense that the MPAA, inspired by the success of the long deceased, has decided to resurrect the odorous, oft-defeated idea of “selectable output control.” We can only hope and pray that the FCC will shoot this idiotic (but dangerous) idea in the head, and grant consumers a brief respite (before the inevitable sequel). For those of you who are unaware of the movie industry’s idiotic plan to castrate and consume your DVR, allow me to shine a light on the lumbering terror.

Issa Villarreal at GlobalVoices writes about the rising sentiment in Mexico that Internet access is a necessity, not a luxury, despite the government’s new Internet taxes.

Chilling Effects reports on ClearChannel’s success at killing the annual Unity Day celebration in Philadelphia because it claims it has a trademark on the term, even though the celebrations started in 1979. Stupid stupid marketing, if nothing else.

And then there’s Ethan Zuckerman, wondering what gets some people so interested in other cultures that they’ll hollow out a winter jacket in Ghana to join with other Wu Tang lovers.

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The FCC has put up a site — openinternet.gov — where anyone (after registering with a valid email address) can post an idea, or vote existing ideas up or down. I love the idea of the feds opening discussions up, although, I am not convinced that this particular implementation achieves its presumed aims. But, what the heck! Try-fail-try is the right rhythm for the Net.

The site defaults to listing the ideas reverse chronologically, which adds some serendipity, or you can choose to view them listed in order of popularity, which encourages piling on. You can also browse by category/tag.

Anyone who registers can post a comment. The comments are unthreaded, discouraging much development of ideas but also discouraging flaming. You can report a comment as being “abusive,” but otherwise cannot rate them.

At the moment, the most popular posting is from Tim Karr, who, according to his biography at SaveTheInternet.com, a site sponsored by FreePress.net, “oversees all Free Press campaigns and online outreach efforts, including SavetheInternet.com.” Tim — who I know a bit and like — is an activist. He has the most popular post at the FCC’s site presumably because FreePress.net sent out a mailing urging supporters to vote it up.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s how politics is played in this country. If an anti-NN group sponsored by, say, AT&T wanted to play the same game, it’s perfectly entitled to. It’s not hard to imagine a well-funded group swamping FreePress’s shoestring efforts and getting orders of magnitudes more people to thumbs-up an anti-NN comment.

Which is to say that an open discussion board like the one the FCC has posted can serve either of two purposes. It can be a place where people come for rational discussions across political positions, or it can serve as an informal poll of citizens’ sentiments about an issue. But combining the two means that neither works very well. It becomes simply an opportunity for gaming the system.

It seems to me that sites such as these cannot serve as a poll that has any value at all. Besides, we have lots of other ways of gauging public opinion, including scientific polling and elections. If, on the other hand, the FCC wants to sponsor a forum for useful discussion or to generate new ideas, it could modify the current implementation. For example — and these are just ideas that may turn out to be gigantic belly flops — comments could be divided into two tracks, pro and con, with most-popular listings for each. Readers could be allowed to vote up but not down. Comments could be threaded. The comments could be rated. Postings could have buttons for “agree/disagree” and “interesting,” so that the site could highlight articles that people disagree with but find interesting.

All of these techniques could be gamed because everything can be gamed. Some discussion boards do work, though. I don’t know what the magic keys are, but I’m pretty confident that a political discussion board that includes an overall popularity contest will so encourage gaming that its results will necessarily be unreliable. At the very least, the popularity contest should be confined to determining the best arguments for each side.

But I don’t want to close on a negative note, for the FCC is to be congratulated on its efforts to open its processes up not only to lobbyists and geeks who know how to walk and talk like an FCC commenter, but to the general public. And it’s doing so in the proper Webby way of taking small steps and not being afraid to fail in public. That takes guts.

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