William Gibson has an brilliant op-ed in the NYT about our inability to make sense of an entity like Google. “Google is not ours. Which feels confusing…,” he says. Exactly.

But then I think Gibson misidentifies the cause of the confusion. He continues: “Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another.” He says our “every search” is “a miniscule contribution.” But, that’s not why were confused. I’d venture that very few people realize that Google uses our searches to refine future results. And if they did know, I doubt they’d care. Who would expect to be paid for that, any more than we expect any company to pay us for learning from its logs?

The confusion many of us feel about Google is based on a different problem with the “ours.” Yes, “Google is not ours,” as Gibson says. But why on earth would we think that it is? Do we think GM is ours? Ok, bad example, but you know what I mean. It seems to me (i.e., Im guessing and generalizing) that we think confusedly that Google is ours both because as Gibson says it is such an important part of our shared ecosystem and because Google has presented itself as being so consistently on the side of its users.

This started right from the first day Google went on line with a search page that had nothing on it except its logo, a search box, and two buttons. There is nothing on that page that is not there to help users. That search page has become one of the most valuable pieces of “real estate” on the Web, and just about every marketer on the planet would be selling off pieces of it to advertisers. Google did not. This design aesthetic embodies a cultural aesthetic and an ethics that has been relentlessly pro-user. (Craigslist, too. Wikipedia, of course. And many, many sites down the Long Tail.)

Yes, of course many Google pages run ads, which is not something users have asked for or would ask for. Even so, Google has strictly limited the permitted obnoxiousness of ads, a policy that — given Google’s need to make a living — comes across as being on the user’s side. Google sells us to advertisers, but it controls the worst predatory urges of those advertisers.

So, whats confusing about Google is that it feels so much like it is ours — for us, like us, of us. it is not just another entity in our ecology but is an important enabler of it. But, we also know that it’s a corporation out to make money. We don’t know how to make sense of this so long as we hold both sides of what, traditionally, would be a paradox. As Gibson says, we have not seen its like before.

The confusing part reflects the hope: Perhaps in this new world were building for one another on line, we can get past the age-old assumed alienation of business from customer. The Net is ours. We built it for ourselves and for one another. We’ve done so using collaborative techniques few would have predicted would have worked. The Net is ours profoundly. Google has seemed to be the one BigCo that genuinely understands that — understands it beyond a mere alignment of interests dayenu!, understands the depth and importance of the way in which the Net is ours.

So, when Google acts in a way that seems to benefit itself but not us — arguably in its initial proposed Google Books settlement and the Googizon proposal — the violence of the shock measures the depth of our belief that Google is ours — for us, like us, of us. If even Google is not ours, is there then no hope that this time, in this new world, we can get past the structural antagonisms and distrust that have characterized the old world of our economy and culture?

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The Oxford English Dictionary has announced that it will not print new editions on paper. Instead, there will be Web access and mobile apps.

According to the article in the Telegraph, “A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years.”

It has been a long trajectory toward digitization for the OED. In the 1990s, the OED’s desire to produce a digital version (remember books on CD?) stimulated search engine innovation. To search the OED intelligently, the search engine would have to understand the structure of entries, so that it could distinguish the use of a word as that which is being defined, the use of it within a definition, the use of it within an illustrative quote, etc. SGML was perfect for this type of structure, and the Open Text SGML search engine came out of that research. Tim Bray [twitter:timbray] was one of the architects of that search engine, and went on to become one of the creators of XML. I’m going to assume that some of what Tim learned from the OED project was formative of his later thinking… (Disclosure: I worked at Open Text in the mid-1990s.)

On the other hand, initially, the OED didn’t want to attribute the origins of the word “blog” to Peter Merholz because he coined it in his own blog, and the OED would only accept print attributions. (See here, too.) the OED eventually got over this prejudice for printed sources, however, and gave Peter proper credit.

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This morning the Library Lab had a very productive conference call (yes, there are such things, you cynics!) with Steve Midgley about the federal Learning Registry.

The Learning Registry is a new project coming out of the Dept. of Education and the Defense Department, intended to provide easier, smarter access to federal content. The LR will list sources and provide ways to subscribe to metadata about the content at those sources. (There’s more in this blog post.)

It’s a fascinating project, and seems headed in the right directions. Unlike what we usually think of when we think of federal metadata projects, Steve is trying to keep the LR as lightweight as possible, providing transportation and subscription services, but not trying to come up with new standards and specs for metadata. This is purely a back-end effort, with no plan to build a data.gov-ish portal.

Very interesting. Meta Web 2.0-ish. Very cool that our government is thinking this way.

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The Boston Globe’s Ideas section — by far my favorite section of the paper — today reviews Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air. (Lewis is a fellow at the Berkman Center.) It’s an excellent review in both senses (until a last paragraph that assumes we all agree that gene sequences obviously ought to be patentable). (Here’s live-bloggery of a talk Lewis gave at the Berkman Center.) Last week, Robert Darnton reviewed the book in the NY Times. And Salon did a review in the form of a comic book.

There’s also an interview with Andrew Pettegree about what it took to get printed books to catch on. Apparently it wasn’t the big books but the proliferation of smaller books that created the market that sustained the printing of books.

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A study by Gunther Eysenbach in PLoS Biology suggests that open access articles “are more immediately recognized and cited by peers than non-OA articles published in the same journal.” Therefore, he concludes, “OA is likely to benefit science by accelerating dissemination and uptake of research findings.”

The study consisted of comparing citations among OA and non-OA articles published June 8, 2004 – December 20, 2004, in PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Thanks to Don Marti for the link.)

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Nature and the University of California are in a negotiation that at the moment looks more like a game of chicken. Norman Oder has a very interesting post about it at Library Journal. “UC says it currently pays $4,465 per NPG [Nature Publishing Group] journal, while the proposed cost for 2011 is $17,479. Nature responds that the proposed cost per download represents a very good value.” Nature contends that the current pricing represents and overly-generous discount. Further, Nature points to a per-download cost of $0.56 under the new prices. Keith Yamamoto, a professor and executive vice dean at the University of California San Francisco, is threatening to organize a UC boycott of Nature titles.

It’s all very complex and I don’t claim to understand it. But it is yet one more indication that this system is very broken.

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Awesome Ukrainian 3d lightshow. Watch at 480p

(Via empath at Metafilter)

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Last January, Jean-Claude Bradley, an associate professor of chemistry at Drexel, posted about an assignment he gave his students: He asked them to find five different sources for the properties of a chemicals of their choosing. The results were sobering.

For example, in one case a paper that had spent five months undergoing peer review before being accepted by Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering got the water solubility of the chemical extract of green tea (EGCG) wrong. The source of the information had it right — caffeine is 21.7 grams per liter and EGCG is 5g/l — but likely through a transcription error, the number for caffeine got appended to the number for EGCG, resulting in EGCG’s solubility being reported in the paper not as 5 but as 521.7. That number is off by two orders of magnitude, and is so high that you’d think one of the peer reviewers or editors would have caught it. The chain of data in this case goes back through several more sources to a published experiment that, unfortunately, does not contain enough information to enable us (well, chemists like Jean-Claude) to fully judge its accuracy.

Jean-Claude’s point is not that all scientific data is wrong. Rather, it is that “trust should have no part in science.” Instead we should be able to check the sources of data, preferably all the way back to the lab notebooks and the raw instrument readings. That’s the impetus behind Jean-Claude’s open notebook science initiative.

Note that in this case, the correction to the published error is likely to come via a blog, but our ecology does not have an obvious or routine way in which good bloggy information can drive out bad published data. But, no nostalgia here, please! As Jean-Claude’s post shows, for all its peer reviewers and expert editors, the old ecology gave errors a stubborn rootedness.

If you accept that humans are more fallible than we’d like, then you build systems that accommodate change. Paper is not very accommodating in this regard. Worse, its fixity has contributed to our false confidence that we can get things right and know when we’ve done so.

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Google has bought Angstro. Nancy Gohring at PC World says:

Angstro marks the fourth company that Google has acquired this month. It bought Slide, a social games developer; Jambool, a company that makes a platform for managing online payment for virtual goods sold on gaming and social-networking sites; andLike.com, a visual shopping engine.

Angstro’s Rohit Khare (who I know from conferences) in his blogging about the acquisition wrote: “”While our work here may be done, the struggle for open, interoperable social networks is still only just beginning, and I’m looking forward to working on that in my new role at Google.” I don’t know what Rohit’s role is going to be at Google, but he’s a good person to have anywhere, and especially if he’s going to push Google toward the goodness of a single, open, non-discriminatory Internet.

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Rob Spence, a film maker, lost an eye. Rob Spence and Kosta Grammatis are working on replacing the eye with a wireless video camera, an invention that Time magazine called one of the 50 best of the year.

Now Rob is looking for a Rose McGowan wannabe (as in Grindhouse) with an amputated leg who would like a machine gun as a prosthetic.

The requirements for applicants:

Hereʼs the basics for the real Cherry Darling.

(1) You can be from anywhere but preferably close to Toronto, where I am from. If you truly kick ass it doesn’t matter where you are, we will find a way.

(2) We are going to help build you a paint ball machine gun leg and video document the process.

(3) When it’s all over you are going to take out dozens of dudes in a paintball gun match filmed Robert Rodriguez style.

(4) Your missing leg should be machine gun appropriate.

Send a photo, your height, and your story to:rob@eyeborgblog.com

But with only a paintballer, how will she do the Quake-style rocket jump like in the movie??? Without that, what’s the point?

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I’ve been struggling with a section of my book that maintains that science is a form of publishing. It’s a useful lens, I think, for understanding some of the ways the Net is changing science.

This morning, I went for a book to read on the bus and came across Richard Rorty‘s Consequences of Pragmatism, a collection of essays that I had read half of and put aside about six months ago. And what’s the very next essay I was up to in it? “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things, and it proceeds by finding better and better explanations of the visible. …

Here is another way of looking at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model …. and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But, of course, it never is, any more than is the true meaning of Coriolanus or the Dunciad or the Phenomenology of Spirit or the Philosophical Investigations. What makes them physicists is that their writings are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature, not that they all are someow “talking about the same thing,” the same invisibilia Dei sive naturae toward which their inquiries steadily converge.

Rorty’s essay applies the same distinction to philosophy as a way of explicating Derrida … and it is one of the clearest, most sympathetic, and most delightful explanations I’ve encountered.

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I choked up this morning at the quote at the very end of this editorial from the Boston Globe:

It may never be a day off for state workers, but it is an increasingly important holiday for Massachusetts residents who take their state’s history seriously: Aug. 21. On that day in 1781, a young woman from Sheffield was the first slave to use the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, with its stirring language of “all men are born free and equal,’’ to win freedom in court. Her case was a precursor to a 1783 decision by the state’s highest court that ended slavery in Massachusetts.

Last Saturday, more than 100 people gathered in Sheffield to honor that woman, Mumbet, who took the name Elizabeth Freeman after her emancipation. The event was at the Ashley House, the home of Mumbet’s owner, Colonel John Ashley. To help in her case, Mumbet had enlisted a lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick. Once free, she worked as a midwife, nurse, healer, and employee of the Sedgwick family.

The Ashley House and Mumbet’s grave, in Stockbridge with the rest of the Sedgwicks, are stops on the Upper Housatonic Valley African-American Heritage Trail. Other trail high points include the site of black historian W.E.B. DuBois’s childhood home in Great Barrington and the Pittsfield house of the Reverend Samuel Harrison, a chaplain in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War.

“Any time while I was a slave,’’ Mumbet once said, “if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I was told I would die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it, just to stand on God’s green earth a free woman.’’ The heritage trail and Aug. 21 holiday keep that spirit alive.

I think there are two reasons why Mumbet’s words make me well up, besides the fact that I feel a personal connection to that beautiful part of my freedom-loving state.

First, slavery is so unimaginably, grindingly, persistently evil yet it failed to crush her hope. How can that be?.

Second, it took so little to end that massive evil. It took a judge and a pen.

Of course, the judge could have that effect because he was part of a state constitutional system that put courts between laws and the people they govern. Our imperfect system is structured to allow the sudden assertion of human good.

Then and now when that happens – and we look mainly to the courts for it – rejoicing and tears run together.

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Amazing hummingbird video http://bit.ly/aJbGni (via boingboing) [twitter: boingboing]

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Netflix has a 128-slide deck, meant to be read not talked through, that explains the company’s culture, including why they don’t award a fixed number of vacation days. I find it liberating, humane, and slightly scary.

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According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a St. Louis Park couple had so many books that they bought the house next door and turned it into their own library.

The article doesnt tell us how many books they own, but a reasonable guess might be, oh, 200 gigabytes worth.

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From the Boston Globe today:

Blagojevich a distraction for Democrats
Former governor’s retrial complicates campaigns in Ill.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Alexi Giannoulias had planned to talk jobs. The Democrat in a tight race for President Obama’s former Senate seat wanted to take the opportunity to say his Republican opponent had helped wreck the nation’s economy.

Reporters, though, only wanted to talk about the ousted Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a newly convicted felon who is expected to be retried on some counts.

The unfinished business of the Blagojevich trial poses a major new hurdle for Illinois Democrats, who are already facing a difficult election season. Despite hopes that Blagojevich’s trial would wrap up well before the November vote, a retrial could begin as soon as this fall, in the final weeks of campaigning.

Blagojevich’s saga will keep diverting attention from the pocketbook issues Democrats want to talk about as they try to keep Obama’s old seat…

Hmm. Shouldn’t the actual headline be:

Media continues to distract Democrats with Blagojevich
Journalists’ pandering threatens democracy in Ill.

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The weekly Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Rebecca Tabasky:

• Jonathan Zittrain works through the Google/Verizon announcement link

• danah boyd shares an email about divisions between Brazilian social networks link

• Ethan Zuckerman on “virtual, person to person, then virtual” communities link

• Steve Schultze, like, links to some web security discussions link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Malaysia: Where is Press Freedom Heading Now?” link

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I’ve got a new job: I’m co-director of the Harvard Library Lab, a part of Harvard Law School. I’m excited.

The Lab (the name is going to change) was created by John Palfrey a year ago when he became head of the Harvard Law Library (and Vice Dean for Information and Library Resources at the Law School). JP had been executive director of the Berkman Center. The key thing to understand is that the Lab was established by someone with a commitment to openness, collaboration, the importance of libraries, and the goodness of the Web. JP’s short form mission for the Lab is to “hack libraries” — in the good sense, of course, of innovating to expose even more of their value. Libraries are the centers of communities of scholars and researchers offline, and they ought to be (or at least inform) the centers of those communities online as well.

I’ve been consulting to the Lab for the past year, reporting to the fabulous Kim Dulin, lawyer and librarian, who is now co-director with me. We have a small but extraordinary team of folks who combine knowledge, imagination and vision with the ability to incarnate all three in software. The Lab has been working on a handful of small projects and one very large project. For now let’s just say that the projects generally take advantage of what libraries know — content, librarians, the users, all their interactions, all the metadata they generate — in order to help researchers and scholars find what they need, understand it, and share what they’ve learned. Something like that.

Also, the projects are awesome. And open source. And, whenever possible, collaborative in every direction. I’m there half-time so that I can finish my book, but my spirit is there 100%. (Also, my spirit works nights and weekends.)

There’s tons to do and a fantastic set of people to work with. I can’t wait to begin next week.

Frequently Asked Questions that no one has actually ever asked:

Yes, I’m still a senior fellow at the Berkman Center.

Yes, the Lab and the Center are independent of one another, but there’s a fair bit of happy overlap.

Yes, we know that Lab’s Web site needs work. We’re working on it! Jeez!

Yes, the Lab is part of the Harvard Law School Library, but we take our mandate as being more general than that.

No, the Law School Library Lab that I’m at is not the same as the new Harvard Library Lab. The latter is a university-wide group that is going to spur and encourage library innovation by funding projects and pulling together the community of people interested in the future of libraries. The LibLab that I’m at will be changing its name soon because it’s just too damn confusing.

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Last night, we went to the movies, and the small crowd in the theater watched a really good trailer. People trapped in an elevator. Lights out. A shriek. Lights on. Someone’s been wounded. A confrontation. A flash. The elevator jerks. A sudden noise. Cool. The trailer completely shut off the pre-show banter around us.

Then a title screen came up, simple white lettering on a black background: “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.” And the entire audience let out a soft “Oooh” of disappointment … followed by a loud laugh at our collective response.

Mr. Shyamalan, your focus group results are in.

(The movie is Devil and you can see the trailer here.)

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Memrrtiks, Suashem is as odd as its name. Here’s the author’s “description” of the game:

A would have improduct desting quality, teamwork, cycle stratisfacticed the focused on increased by world-class leaderson that work environment.

Just in case that wasn’t clear, it’s sort of a side-scroller in which you shoot and dodge sprites. To start, press the space bar. It’s free.

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The Awesome Foundation’s giant hammock goes live in Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Awesome! [twitter: AwesomeFound TimHwang]

[Later that day:] Another Tim Hwang-ism: He points us to his “new favorite patent,” “a method of swinging on a swing.” Good lord.

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Perhaps the coolest thing about writing a book is that you have an excuse to interview people you otherwise wouldn’t get to talk with.

Today I interviewed Victor Henning, the co-founder of Mendeley, a very popular desktop app for researchers that indexes your PDFs, provides social reading and researching tools, and aggregates anonymized information about what researchers are actually reading and annotating. There’s a lot packed into Mendeley, all designed to help researchers find out what they need to know, primarily though social means.

Victor and some friends founded Mendeley as grad students when they discovered that although they were in different fields, their research needs and processes were very similar. In the twenty months since its launch in January 2009, it’s grown to 450,000 users, with 33 million documents in its database.

I’m thinking of using Mendeley as an example of how the scientific landscape has changed. Although it’s hard to find uncredentialed amateurs who, thanks to the Web, have made large individual contributions to science — for most of the sciences, you need lots of training and access to expensive equipment — the Net has changed the world in which credentialed experts work. For example, Mendeley is able to provide a much more responsive picture of the trendlines in scientific research than the “impact factor” by which journals measure their significance; the impact factor looks at the number of citations of the articles in a journal over the prior two years, divided by the total number of articles in the journal. Two to three years is a long time to wait to measure impact. Plus, as Victor points out, Mendeley can be much more granular.

As Victor says: “My personal opinion is that some form of credentials will always matter. It’s a heuristic to decide if some other person can be trusted. But credentials will not just be that someone is a tenured profession or is at a top isnstution or is published in Science or Nature. In the Mendeley context it may be that his paper has lots of readers, or lots of rankings or tags.”

The old authorities and credentials are still there and are likely to continue to have weight. But the ocean in which they swim is now filled with a lot more fish.

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Oscar Villalon has been inspired by Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter to use the video games he’s played as “digital Madeleines” to remind him of the phases of his life.

Unfortunately, I’ve been playing the same game for the past few decades. All that’s changed are the targets — Nazis, mutant space creatures, zombies — and the quality of the graphics. This is not a criticism of the games, which I love. It is a rather sad statement about my life.

(Thanks to Evelyn Walsh for the pointer.)

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Every course has a syllabus. In it are an expert’s ideas about the topics essential to the course of study and the works that explain those topics. And that’s at a bare minimum. Syllabi rock.

Yet, all that wisdom and goodness is locked in the syllabi, of use to the handful of students taking or considering taking the course. What a shame! Think of all we could do if the information in syllabi were made available for open access by humans and machines:

• Teachers could discover new ideas for how to teach a course.

• Students could browse among courses to see how other teachers teach them.

• Researchers could be guided by this canon-in-practice — both to the expected works and away from works that are too expected.

• Researchers studying disciplines would have a rich source of data to analyze.

To unlock these riches, several things have to happen.

First, the syllabi have to be collected and put into an open access repository. I’d love to see universities adopt open syllabi policies that require (ask? suggest?) that faculty submit a copy of their syllabi for each course they teach.

Then the syllabi have to be scraped so that the data within them is searchable by humans and parsable by computers.

Then the data should be put into some standard data format so that it can be more easily found, reused, and mined.

It’s this last step that I’m looking for help with. I’ve started a little project with Joseph Cohen to develop an XML schema for syllabi. (Joseph has a commecial project underway that could help with some of the other elements required to turn dead syllabi into a living beast at our command.)

If you’d like to jump in, go to the SylliXml wiki. (You have to register to edit.) We’re just at the kicking it around stage, and your contributions will be very helpful.

There are lots of questions to resolve. At the moment, we’re aiming at producing the most minimal schema we can, because syllabi are unstructured documents and trying to accommodate everything that might ever be put into one is a mug’s game. So, what is the minimum set of data and metadata that would make the information in syllabi amazingly useful?

Come play!

There is tremendous value hidden in the syllabi diaspora. Let’s unite and conquer!

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Jeff Jarvis has an excellent, provocative post about the topic of the book he’s writing: the economics of publicness. (I’m paraphrasing. Read his post to get it right.) I replied in his comments. The following is a modified version of that comment:

Your post makes me wonder about two axes of public-private. (Thank goodness there was only one axis of evil, because “two axes of evil” sounds extra special scary! But I digress.)

The private-public axis used to measure how well-known we are: Marilyn Monroe was a public figure but most of us are private citizens. That used to be pretty easy to compute and, because of the nature of the broadcast medium, it used to tend toward one extreme or another: He’s Chevy Chase and you’re not. You make the important point that it’s not that simple any more.

But there’s another private-public axis: who we really are and how we look to others. We have tended to believe, at least in the West, that our true self is the inner self. The outer, public self may or may not reflect our inner, private self, and we have an entire moral/normative vocabulary to talk about the relation of the two: sincerity, authenticity, integrity, honesty…

So, I wonder about — what I really mean is that I hope your book will help us understand — the relation of these two axes. Is the rise of publicness (in your sense of social publicness) getting us to change our sense that our private self (call it our psychological sense) is our real self?

In this regard, I also wonder about the rise of “authenticity.” I’ve gotten more suspicious of the term over the past decade, and wonder if it shows up more and more because of a sense that the new publicness doesn’t fit with the old axis 2? That is, we’ve entered a new Age of Publicness (in the new social sense), but then we worry that we’re losing the deeply-held values of the old psychological/normative model, so we go back to “authenticity” as a way of holding on to the old norm in the new model.

Well, all I can say is that I’m glad you’re writing this book!

By the way, I’m pretty sure I wrote something about this in Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I wonder if I still agree with myself. I suspect not, especially on the issue of authenticity.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young.

• Doc Searls might be wrong about the future of the Internet link

• Jonathan Zittrain gets to the core of net neutrality link

• CMLP warns against three-strikes Internet laws link

• Herdict discusses Australian Internet filtering link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Rwanda: Bloggers Discuss Presidential Election 2010″ link

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Afghan photobloggers, Ramadan memes, and Saudi women as perpetual dependents, all from Global Voices [twitter:globalvoices]

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American Public Media’s Future Tense has posted a looong post from me about the Googizon proposal. Here’s the beginning:

There is no denying that I am a Google fanboy. I postponed my technolust for an iPhone until I could get a Droid. I switched from the Firefox browser to Google’s Chrome. I use Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, and Google Maps, and I’d probably use Google Bugle and Google Tattoogle, if such things existed. I bought into Google products in large part because they tend to kick butt, but I have put up with some frustrations because I believed that Google was on my side. Our side. “Where are the other big companies that are standing up for the open Internet?” I have asked in public more than once.

So, Google’s joint proposal with Verizon hurt. Has Google cheated on me? Were there others before Verizon? Did Google ever really love me in the first place?

It then goes through my attempt to understand a bunch of the issues.

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That’s the headline of an article in the November 1930 issue of Popular Science (p. 36). No, it is not talking about shooting down flying whales. The opening paragraph:

Careless slaughter so thinned the ranks of the giants of the sea and made the whales so cautious that new ways of hunting them had to be found.

Machine guns mounted on airplanes seem to do the job pretty well.

(Please, no one tell Sarah Palin!)

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For the section of my book I’m currently writing, I’m looking for examples of contributions to science by amateurs in the Age of the Web. These can be crowd-sourcings, individuals with ideas or data that pushed a science forward, or some category I am not yet considering. (I’ve already briefly noted Make and Maker Faire. I’ve also spent some time in the book on Innocentive and other contests, but if you have a particular good example don’t assume I already know about it!)

I’d be grateful for any ideas or suggestions. Thanks!

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Pew Internet & American Life has a fascinating report on why Americans are not adopting broadband. Here’s some highlights Pew is circulating:

• Broadband adoption has slowed dramatically in the overall population, but growth among African-Americans was especially high last year.

• By a 53%-41% margin, Americans say they do not believe that the spread of affordable broadband should be a major government priority. Contrary to what some might suspect, non-internet users are less likely than current users to say the government should place a high priority on the spread of high-speed connections.

• In addition to their skepticism towards government efforts to promote widespread broadband adoption, the 21% of American adults who do not use the internet are not tied in any obvious way to online life and express little interest in going online.

• They do not find online content relevant to their lives. Half (48%) of non-users cite issues relating to the relevance of online content as the main reason they do not go online.

• They are largely not interested in going online. Just one in ten non-users say would like to start using the internet in the future.

• They are not comfortable using computers or the internet on their own. Six in ten non-users would need assistance getting online. Just one in five know enough about computers and technology to start using the internet on their own.

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I don’t know enough about the Slater incident to have an opinion, beyond unease at lionizing someone for dealing with a-holism by being an even bigger a-hole. — if that’s what happened.

But I do want to say that a couple of weeks ago I had an unguarded conversation with a Jet Blue flight attendant who had no reason to lie to me, and who went on for about half an hour about what a great place to work Jet Blue is. The perks are generous, the flexibility of scheduling is phenomenal, the people are fantastic.

You don’t often hear that type of enthusiasm. I already like Jet Blue’s respect for its customers. That they treat their employees with respect makes me want to use their services all the more.

BTW, the fact that one of their attendants cursed out an a-hole passenger and then jumped out the slide does not have the same effect on me.

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I ‘m reading The Coming of the Book, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958), who explain the arrival of printed books with an impressive attention to fact-based detail. Amazing scholarship.

Here are some of the points that struck me because of my own peculiar interests in this topic, in page-number order.

The “points ” by which we measure fonts were adopted in the 18th century. They are 144th of the length of the foot of the king of France at that time. (p. 60)

“…the Arab writer Mohammed Ibn Ishaq remarked in 989: ‘The Chinese write their religious books and their works of scholarship on sheets of paper which open like a fan. ‘ ” (p. 73). [If that 's how the West had written books, we wouldn 't have taken long-form thinking as the pinnacle of human reason.]

The book brought about a standardization of script. “Regional styles were the first to disappear. Then, more slowly the major forms of script were standardized until eventually the new roman type triumphed in the greater part of Europe… ” (80). Roman script was a simpler face that emulated the style of the classical Romans.

Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. Before 1500, about 20 million books were printed. (248) The population of Europe at that time was under 100 million. (249)

“Like their modern counterparts, 15th-century publishers only financed the kind of book they felt sure would sell enough copies to show a profit in a reasonable time. We should not therefore be surprised to find that the immediate effect of printing was merely to further increase the circulation of those works which had already enjoyed success in manuscript, and often to consign other less popular texts to oblivion. ” (249) [No long tail here!]

Of the books printed before 1500, about 77% were in Latin. 45% were religious books. 10% were on law. 10% were on scientific topics. (249) That meant there were about 3,000 different science titles printed. (258)

The initial effect of the printing press was to make the most popular books — the traditional classics — more popular, and to drive less-popular classics into non-printed oblivion. (253-4) “Especially often printed were the great medieval compilations in which …the sum total of available knowledge on all subjects was thought to lie… ” (258) The classics that “were already being read in the 15th century became even more widely known. ” (265)

Most of the science that was published was “of no lasting interest. ” Many of the science books were about “practical astrology. ” “So, printing does not seem to have played much part in developing scientific theory at the start, though it seems to have helped draw public attention to technical matters. ” (259)

“…at the outset…printing brought about no suddden or radical transformation ” although it did force the publishers to decide which books to print and which to ignore. (260) Many works we now treasure were ignored by printers during the 15th century and had to be rediscovered, including the Letters of Heloise and Abelard, most of Roger Bacon ‘s works, and the Chanson de Roland. (261)

“A desire for typographic accuracy and the constant search for the best manuscript version of a text … provided an immense stimulus for philological studies. ” (261) It also had printers searching for the authors of works that were frequently anonymous. Only now did artists begin to sign their works. (261)

By 1550, hand-written books were rarely used. (262) 30,000-35,000 different editions were printed befor 1500. Between 1500 and 1600, about 150,000-2000,000 different editions and between 150-200 million copies were printed. (262) By 1550, private collections of 500 books were common. (262)

To increase their markets, printers started commissioning and publishing translations. (272)

French only became the official language of France in 1539. (273)

Although printing helped some scholars, “on the whole it could not be said to have hastened the acceptance of new ideas or knowledge. In fact, by popularising long cherish beliefs, strengthening traditional prejudices and giving authority to seductive fallacies, it could even be said to have represented an obstacle to the acceptance of many new ideas. ” For example, printing didn ‘t help the public absorb or accept the geographic discoveries made in the 16th century. (278) [Printed books are echo chambers! :)]
TAGS: -berkman

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Yale grad student blogger Carl Pyrdum dismantles Newt Gingrich’s flame-fanning about the mosque proposed to be built near Ground Zero. Newt says the name of the mosque — “Cordoba — is understood by every Muslim to celebrate an Islamic conquest of Christianity.” In fact, Carl shows that it refers to a golden period during which all three major religions lived together peacefully and prosperously.

That factual error aside, Newt’s post commits the Fallacy of The They. He writes:

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for “religious toleration” are arrogantly dishonest. They ignore the fact that more than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca.

And they lecture us about tolerance.

So, those who are for religious tolerance are hypocrites if they don’t condemn intolerance within their own group? Ok. But who are the “they”? Not all of the “apologists” who support the right of Moslems to build the Cordoba mosque (e.g., me) support Saudi Arabian intolerance. The “they” implies otherwise.

The language Newt uses throughout also skews the discussion in a dangerous direction. “Islamists” instead of “Moslems”? “Apologists” instead of supporters? He says “arrogantly dishonest” to portray supporters as schemers. The post overall is intended to get us to see Moslems as crafty, devious, intolerant, and already too present in our culture (“more than 100 mosques”). Moslems, implies the post, are at war with Christianity (“No surrender”) and want to tear down our churches so they can put up grandiose mosques. Newt confines this to supporters of the mosque, but the language overall, the use of the lazy “they,” and the reference to what “every Muslim” understands reinforce broad existing stereotypes. I have enough respect for Newt to think that he must know what he’s doing.

Then, at the end of the piece, he ludicrously puffs the issue up with false bravado. “No surrender,” he writes. “The time to take a stand is now – at this site on this issue. ” Oh, yes, let’s inflate this with all the macho jingoism we can muster. Imagine Winston Churchill giving one of his wonderful blood-and-sacrifice speeches — “We shall fight on the beaches…We shall fight in the fields” — about some group proposing to build a church. Please, Newt, you just look ridiculous.

Allowing a mosque to be built within proximity of Ground Zero would be America at its best — a lesson to the world in tolerance and maturity.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young.

• Stuart Shieber defends publication-fee OA journals link

• Peter Suber intertwines search and open access link

• Ethan Zuckerman [twitter:twitter] blogs Kate Crawford’s “art of noise” talk link

• Radio Berkman 161: “A Brief History of Noise” link

• ProjectVRM previews the upcoming VRM+CRM Workshop link

• Doc Searls is not an eyeball link

• OpenNet Initiative on UAE vs. BlackBerry link

• Jonathan Zittrain [twitter:twitter] puzzles through Blackberry encryption, via Yossarian’s tent-mate link

• CMLP on warrantless FBI information gathering and ISPs link

• Harry Lewis isn’t surprised about fully body scanners link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Cambodia: Mixed views on Duch Verdict” link

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young.

• Stuart Shieber defends publication-fee OA journals link

• Peter Suber intertwines search and open access link

• Ethan Zuckerman [twitter:twitter] blogs Kate Crawford’s “art of noise” talk link

• Radio Berkman 161: “A Brief History of Noise” link

• ProjectVRM previews the upcoming VRM+CRM Workshop link

• Doc Searls is not an eyeball link

• OpenNet Initiative on UAE vs. BlackBerry link

• Jonathan Zittrain [twitter:twitter] puzzles through Blackberry encryption, via Yossarian’s tent-mate link

• CMLP on warrantless FBI information gathering and ISPs link

• Harry Lewis isn’t surprised about fully body scanners link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Cambodia: Mixed views on Duch Verdict” link

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With a precision that we can only assume they are winking at, Google has announced that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world.

The post, by Leonid Taycher, explains some of the decisions Google made when deciding what constitutes a book, but there are obviously cans of worms by the truckload waiting to be opened if someone really wanted to pin this number down. Or, put differently, there is no conceivable way of pinning this number down because books are too important and too ancient to be capable of anything except arbitrary definitions. Google does it in part by making one-at-a-time human decisions: “Twice every week we group all those records into ‘tome’ clusters, taking into account nearly all attributes of each record.” It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.

Actually, it’s dirty, messy work that would seem perfectly suited to an expert-amateur collaboration: Librarians and readers. For example, just think how valuable it would be to know that two books were almost considered to be the same! Not to mention all the other relations among books that we could together could discover and publish.

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History may only rarely be written by the losers, but it is always written by the writers.

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I interview Kate Crawford for RadioBerkman about the history of noise and and its changed nature in the age of social media. (Noise 2.0?). (By the way, Kate co-wrote the music that intros ands outros the interview.)

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I’ll wait for details before making up my mind about the Google-Verizon deal on Net neutrality, but CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments are somewhere between distressing and a stab in the back:

I want to be clear what we mean by net neutrality. What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s OK to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue.

That sort of neutrality would forbid access providers from playing favorites within a market — Comcast wouldn’t be allowed to let programs from NBC run smoothly while programs from CBS and YouTube run like unsprocketed crap — but, it gives up the most important non-market principle of the Internet: The Internet is not for anything in particular. It is for everything we can imagine. It is for us to decide what its for. The Internet is ours, not Verizon’s, not the FCC’s, and not Google’s.

So, why might Google be switching to a version of Net neutrality that is not neutral about what the Net is for? We could give Google the benefit of the doubt — “Don’t be evil” and all that — but when they start to pull this sort of crap, they lose some of the good will they’ve earned.

So, one possible, uncharitable explanation: Google has joined the chorus of commercial entities that think the Internet is for the delivery and passive consumption of “content.” That is, the Internet is a type of TV link 1 link 2. Why might Google be thinking this way? Perhaps because it doesn’t want YouTube videos to be discriminated against. Or, more likely, it wants Google TV to be able to compete well. So, because Google is growing a TV business, it now gets to decide that TV needs to shoulder aside all other traffic on the Net.

Is my guess right? I don’t know. I’m not saying I can read Schmidt’s mind. All I’m saying is that when Google acts like Verizon and Comcast, it heads toward deserving all of the good will that Verizon and Comcast have managed to accumulate.

Sen. Al Franken is asking US citizens to sign a petition to save Net neutrality.

A proposal: We shorten “Verizon-and-Comcast” to “VomiCast.” Just a thought.

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