Some excellent presentations on the panel I’m on. But it’s tough to be on a panel and blog at the same time, so please pardon my sketchiness…

Pam Meyer gives a fascinating talk on her research into online dating services: What men and women think the other sex is lying about (status, weight), how extremely weak the links are (few people have met their online friends in the real world, trust is low). She says that online social networks have low entry and exit costs; how can loyalty be increased?

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp.org talks about the relationship of online and real world groups. Surprisingly, nline communities were among the first to use MeetUp.

Michael Cornfield takes a hard-nosed look at what the Net is good for in political campaigns. He defines “good for” as contributing towards garnering 50% + 1 of the vote in an election. He downplays the importance of using the Net for community building (the hippie stuff I like). He suggests that the national parties put up wikis so we the people can make a virtual party platform, that the debates ought to accept online questions that we have voted for, and that we set up a mechanism for monitoring what topics are actually being talked about online.

I talk about how the growth of messy, ambiguous, tacit relationships is required for engagement in political campaigns.

Now we head into a series of 20-min presentations.

Mimi Ito gives a great talk on the social networks that spring up around mobile phones in Japan. It’s a phenomenology of these networks, supporting the case the social software tools need to be simple so there’s room for small factors to trigger great emergence. (In response to a question about getting better input devices for phones, she says in Japan you can get keypad inputs for your PC.)

Rael Dornfeast talks about how new mobile technology allows us to be present to others in a bewildering variety of ways. He plays on Linda Stone’s phrase: Continuous (mobile) partial attention. Rael wants things like being notified when he’s waiting in public when there’s someone nearby who shares many of the same names in their address book. He says that we should consider not just writing for the Web. “You’r saying you’re most social when you’re sitting in front of your monitor.” (Great talk.)

Shelley Farnham of Microsoft Research talks about the social goals of social software: To have meaningful relationships with friends. Research shows that we use technology primarily to interact with our friends, not strangers. Similarity and proximity are strong determinants of friendship. Proximity is a huge predictor of friendship. The number of people we send email to correlates with how involved we feel we are with our community. She talks about intricate ways the real and virtual worlds interact. She refers to a http://research.microsoft.com/scg/#projects>project she’s working on.

After lunch, danah boyd leads off. She talks about how she has been trying to make sense of artificial social networks, including how they try to “configure their users.” She uses Friendster as her example. Your home page is a representation of self. [I'd say it's a presentation of self.] Gay men and Burning Man participants really picked up on Friendster because they’re “urban tribes” with shared interests and co-located. She says that half of Friendster lives in Asia. Each of these sub-populations create their own social norms. We create different facets of our selves for our different environments. Friendster gives you an environment for presenting a self not tied to specific task or context. E.g., a 26-year-old teacher signed up for Friendster as part of her Burning Man group. Nothing in her profile indicated she was a Burning Man person, but her friends had Burning Man-specific info in their profiles. Her students found her group of links and made assumptions about her own behavior.

People are upset about fakesters, she says. But fakesters are political actions. They want to do something that Friendster doesn’t let them do, including put up a profile to find fellow alumni or to provide pseudonymity. Publicly articulated social networks are a new architecture that creates new social dynamics, danah concludes. Great stuff. (I’ve just picked a couple of ideas.)

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Liz Lawley has a great blog entry about the importance of backchannel IRC conversations. We’re on the back-backchannel here at the Microsoft conference and it’s been a very interesting phenomena because of the cultural schisms its surfacing. (Can you surface a schism?)

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[Sketchy, semi-random notes from an afternoon of 20-min presentations, with much much much backchannel chat]

Warren Sack gives his twenty minute presentation. Social computing addresses two questions: 1. How can the insights of social science be applied to design better software? 2. How can software be designed to address social problems? He talks about a software prototype that does a “translation map“: “The Translation Map is a prototype system designed to facilitate collaborative translations and geographically-based messaging” (from the site).

Now Warren asks if software should be evaluated in terms of social capital? Are there private, public and social capital? Nah, it’d be better to think about this in terms of space. When you introduce a new technology, it redistributes the private, public and social space.

Q: (Clay) Danny O’Brien says that on the Net we have public and secret speech, but not private speech…

Paul Resnick talks about reputation systems: A system that aggregates and distributes info about what people have done in the past so people can make decisions about what to do in the future. He’s done a study that has some preliminary results: A sense of uniqueness leads to more ratings, and people respond to challenges to create more ratings.

He talks about eBay. About 1 in 100 transactions gets a negative feedback. But we don’t know if that reflects the actual rate of satisfaction. His lab studies show that reputation leads to more trust and trustworthiness, but long-term partners is even better. We know from eBay that having a positive reputation brings in about 8% more money, in his study. Reputations are useful when interacting with strangers, but aren’t so important if you already know the person because your experience will trump what others say. Short histories create the best incentives but long term tell you the most about the person. (Paul’s research confirms what we suspected.)

Susan Herring talks about “Weblog as Genre.” Her group randomly sampled blogs from blo.gs They looked at the producers, purpose and structure of the blogs. They coded 44 features and quantified the results: Adult males produce blogs that are filters, while women and young people do more personal journals. 50% of blogs didn’t have links to anyone else. The average blog had 6.5 links out. The blogosphere is densely interconnected: The average degrees of separation of the blogs in the sample was 3.8.

Jonathan Grudin talks on “IM and Blogs in Work Environments.” IM he says will be the predominant form of information exchange in business. He says that IM is playing much of the role that email did in 1984. Business is hot on IM, he says, which is different from email 20 yrs ago. In one project, he interviewed 20 people in the Puget Sound. He found they’re technically adept but don’t now much about blogs. In another study, they looked at 400 early adopters of a new IM client at Microsoft. Managers and older users use it differently. Technophobia and switching costs are dropping. Socially, you can IM down but not up, which is maybe why the managers like it.

Steve Whittaker writes about “Designing for Informal Communication and Social Organization.” How do we manage complex social orders? Animals like fixed roles. Apes like dominance orders. The social view says that there are two aspects to being human: Social representation and informal communication. But what is informal communication? His research, within one domain, shows that it takes place between two people, impromptu, and lasts about 2 mins. They looked at ContactMap and tried to build a complex social representation of who communicates with whom by analyzing email. People liked its graphical view of the social net. ContactMap worked better than email for some particular social tasks. But there are issues around scaling.

Wade Cunningham talks about wikis, which he pretty much invented. He says that if wikis and blogs had been invented first, maybe we wouldn’t have had email. He says that wikis generally aren’t trashed, so maybe people are good. Clay quotes Wattenberg and someone who said that the cost of trashing a wiki is higher than the cost of repairing it, so that’s why they generally aren’t trashed.

Elizabeth Churchill talks on “Social Computing and Lightweight Collaboration.” She shows a video of Sticky Chats, chats that attach to portions of a document. Looks useful. Another project, the Plasma Poster, uses a large screen as a public board by which distributed groups can post shared info, leave msgs, etc.

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I’m at a small conference on social networks put on by Microsoft Research.

During the brief intros, I make a fool of myself early on, getting it over early. I say that social networks worry me because they are based on explicit declarations of relationship, and because they’re putting valuable relationships behind proprietary walls. Well, it turns out that “social network” means something different to the academics; I meant “artificial social networks” like Friendster. Much of the room must have been puzzled.

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp gave the opening talk. Excellent, but I’ve blogged it a couple of times before.

Now a panel starts.

Ze Frank, who has an ultra amusing site (see The Alphabet, for example), is being arch and funny about social networks. “Where’s the status on line? Where are the velvet ropes?”

Joi denies that social networking tools necessarily diminish social lives and/or spirits. Blogs, he says, is publishing, but IRC is “hanging out.” Changes in presence are events, and people should be able to know about those events. Social software like Friendster filter this: Who do you want to know about your presence, and at what level of detail? Cellphones give you presence, location and mobility, none of which we’ve had in computers, and that makes a big difference.

Tim O’Reilly: We’re in the early stages of building an operating system for the Internet as a platform. We need an architecture of participation. He’s excited about Microsoft Wallop because it tries to find the existing implict data about relationships. We should be creating loose confederations that allow us to query distributed personal/social info (with the proper privacy and permissioning, of course). “We need to reinvent the user control of social networks using an end-to-end architecture…” [Right on!]

Clay’s 10-minute talk is called “The subject of this talk is not explicit.” He wants to talk about an early mistake social network software is making. Orkut made it one-click easy to make someone a friend. The number of friends went through the roof but the network no longer reflected reality. So, they added a second click: How much of a friend? I don’t need this data; Orkut needs it to create a visible and formal model of the network. But how valuable is a formal model? There’s nothing Orkut can extract from a photo of a face that’s as interesting as what we get from it in an instant. The most important information is implicit.

So, Clay says, what led Orkut to make these wrong decisions? What is Orkut thinking? 1. It thinks that what people are doing when they think about social situations is a form of computation. This is like AI’s mistake. 2. And Orkut also assumes that, when asked, people can express they rules explicitly…but that’s false. [Loved the talk. These are topics I've been writing/thinking about, and Clay puts it all so well.]

Steve Johnson says his first two books argued against the idea that the Net consists of little echo chambers. Instead, think of it as a place in which strangers interact and new things emerge. Emergence refers to Jane Jacbob’s view of cities. [I've been reading Death and Life...a fantastic book.] He’s afraid that the new social networks are “neutering” these adventurous places. And now people — Joi, for example — are talking about the software social networks overlaying real places. He’d like to use Amazon’s Search Inside facility to search inside his own library, or the libraries of people one or two degrees away. Then he talks against the echo chamber idea: The Net is an echo chamber compared to what, he asks incredulously? TV? Even if you just follow bloggers in your general universe of interests, you’re still following links out to more diverse ideas than ever before. He points out that the criticism used to be that the Net was nothing but flame wars. Now the criticism is that it’s echo chambers. But, he worries, we are creating these social network tools in order to decrease our contact with others. [Jeez, is he good!]

Q: So, is FOAF bad, Clay?

A: No, FOAF encodes links. The degree to which you have to express a full, formal relationship will inhibit its adoption.

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The Telegraph in the UK has a story about agitation against some of the British Sign Language gestures. (Thanks to danah for the link)

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Joi just pointed the backchannel at the Microsoft conference I’m at to Boing Boing’s photo of hyenas. All around the table, the jaws of those of us connected to IRC are dropping.

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I just learned from David Silver that in 2002 the White House declared Sept. 11 as “Patriot Day.” Why do I find this distasteful?

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Businessweek writes about Google’s refusing to run ads from an environmental group…

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Talk about eerie. Elena rides her motorcycle through Chernobyl, equipped with a camera and dosemeter. (Thanks to Joi, with whom I got to hang out with last night, for the link)

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AKMA has had the best idea of the significant interval: Since Larry Lessig allows anyone to record the audio of his book, Free Culture, for non-commercial purposes, why don’t a bunch of us each record a chapter?

Within a couple of days — before Amazon could get me my copy — almost all of it’s been done. You can get the list of links on AKMA’s site.

Too cool.

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I just published the latest - and possibly last? - issue of my newsletter:

The fate of JOHO: Should we carry on? Why I hate Friendster. Really: I have excellent reasons to be wary of social networks. Now want to hear the real reasons? The slippery slope of slippery slope: Thank goodness for slopes. Walking the Walk: Open Source. Cool Tool: AutoHotKey, and an X1 you may not want to refuse. Game I’m playing: Blackhawk down is fun but disturbing Internetcetera: Miscellany from Linux Journal and Mother Jones. Bogus Contest: What’s my book about?

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You know how Doc corrects people who talk about “consumers”? “As Jerry Michalski says,” Doc objects, “consumers are gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash.”

I feel the same way about the word “medium” when applied to the Net.

A medium’s job is to deliver a message. It does its job well if that message is delivered intact. But that’s not how media actually work because we are not passive containers. Rather, in the process of understanding something, we let it affect us. It shapes us, and we shape it. We absorb it into the context of our lives. The more completely we absorb it, the “wronger” we get it from the point of view of, say, the marketer who wants us to take it exactly as he put it.

This is never so true as with works of art and creativity, which is why it’s in the artist’s interest to lose creative (but not necessarily economic) control of her work quickly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, the idea that works are content moving through a medium has led us to think that appropriation and reuse is an insult to the artist, and possibly a violation of copyright, when it is in fact a sign that the work is working on us. We honor it by making it our own.

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn’t care about it.

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It’s heartening that Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” puts morality at the heart of Google’s mission. It’s a lot better guideline than “Ruthlessly enrich ourselves” or “Crimp the air supply of our competitors.” I personally would like to see “Make the world better” become an explicit part of every company’s charter, just as a reminder.

But, “Don’t be evil” only poses as a principle. It’s not a principle because it can’t be applied to a situation. It can’t be used to guide action. Does not demoting an anti-semitic site’s rank constitute doing evil or not doing evil? Saying “Don’t be evil” just doesn’t help us decide.

A more dangerous — because more subtle — faux principle is the Libertarian one that says “The goernment that governs least governs best.” It looks like it can be brought in to settle a discussion’s hash. But it turns out to be totally unhelpful. Everyone agrees that governmental bloat is a bad thing. The real question is: What constitutes bloat and what constitutes “least”? When a Libertarian invokes the “Least Governement” principle to explain why she doesn’t want the government to inspect children’s toys, the response is: Yes, but is this a case of least-ness? After all, Libertarians aren’t anarchists. They believe in some level of government regulation. As we argue about toy inspections or seat belt laws or inheritance taxes, we will have to argue the specifics of each case: Are these regulations necessary and desirable? The “Least Governement” principle doesn’t help us at all. It is a faux principle.

At least Google’s faux principle tells the company to be alert to the moral dimension, even though the principle can’t help with the answers. And it’s phrased so succinctly that it won’t fool anyone into thinking that it could actually direct action; Google’s expression seems to have a little distance, a little irony, a little self-awareness. That’s good because, while it reminds us that businesses are moral entities, we shouldn’t think that not doing evil is as easy as it sounds.

[See Josh McHugh's Wired article on Good and Evil at Google.]

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The Jewish Journal points out that a search for “Jew” at Google puts a site for Jew haters at the number one position.

It sure seems to me that’s Google been gamed by anti-Semites. At least, I hope that’s the explanation since the alternative is pretty grim.

I admit that this is a tough - and interesting - case, but I’d like to see Google move the site down since Google’s aim is to provide us with good information. And, sure, I’d say the same thing if the first hit for “Catholic,” “Black,” “Arab,” or “Mel Gibson” were hate sites. But, the Jewish Journal article reports that David Krane, Google’s director of communications, says: ‘Google merely reflects what is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless [a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t make any tweaks,’ he said.”

Google’s motto is “Do no evil.” That works fine so long as the issues are easy and the group discussing them is homogeneous. So, if hate groups game Google and people are led to a site designed to fuel hatred, does “preserving the sanctity of our algorithms” count as doing evil?

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Andre Durand of PingID says that there are three tiers of ID:

Tier 1: Personal identity: Me. Myself. Possibly I.
Tier 2: Corporate identity: An ID issued to let me into their space
Tier 3: My marketing identity: The buckets companies sort us into for marketing purposes, e.g., a Platinum Frequent Flyer.

We have lots of IDs. “Identity inflation.” Most of our identities are T2. Andre himself has over 100 identities. He’s given up on keeping track. The trajectory isn’t sustainable. Already we generally only have a few passwords. The idea behind federation is that identity in one domain should be transferable across domains. E.g., if I have an account at Company A and click through to Company B, my identity automatically gets transferred, with permission. I could have one place for my address book, I could make it my address authority and it would transfer data to other domains and apps.

There are three protocols: SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), Liberty Alliance, WS Federation (IBM and Microsoft).

Nikolaj Nyholm has a problem with federation. People here are thinking about a perfectly engineered, IT world. Federation is part of the equation but not the way it looks today. The way it stands, if federation were in place, if you put a new SMTP on the Net, it wouldn’t be able to send email to anyone.

Dick (Panelist): The web of trust won’t extend very far. It’ll work if it’s United talking to Hertz, but not more widely…

Eric Norlin: Liberty Alliance sits between authentication servers.

Dave Sifry: It’s software we run on our sites that says that we trust, say, LinkedIn, etc. From a business perspective, it means that there’s some subset of these companies that agree to trust one another’s authentication systems and will use the same middleware to accomplish this.

Andre: Why can’t I use the protocols to link to my social connections? We should be talking about this.

Nikolaj: I have no sense of “home” in the Liberty Alliance…

Ted: Nikolaj is right. The nerve Microsoft hit with Passport was: Who’s going to control my ID?

Andre: Here’s one possible outcome of federation. In large enterprises, they have created ways to handle the redundant ID’s in multiple directories. They create a virtual directory. Now, if you add up all the account info with all the companies you interact with, that’s your useful digital ID today. Suppose I had a dashboard running on my PC, like the enterprise’s virtual directory. It’s likely a p2p client will exist on my PC or cellphone that gives me control. I don’t have to move all the information onto my own computer.

Doc (moderator): Do the protocols for enabling that exist today?

Andrew: Yes, I think they do. I’m describing an application layer on top of the protocols.

Steve Pelletier (Sun): The consumer vision is great, although it’s early. But the world is full of ID systems that will never merge. You need something that enables all those identity repositories to be integrated if only for business reasons. And you need protocols to extend this to customers. That’s what federation does: cross repositories and cross schemas.

Doc: I hate the word “consumer.” I’m a customer.

AOL guy: Before we can do federated ID for social networks, the social networks have to figure out what their business model is.

Isabel Walcott (The Research Board): We’ve discussed ID federation with F100 companies. The way I see it, this is about access control. Companies haven’t figured it out. If social networks could solve this problem, it could go into the corporations. There is no “god” at these big companies saying who can have access to this or that part of the DB. It happens on a peer-to-peer basis: Someone’s boss says which field or part of the DB you have access to. How do you manage access control at the object level? It has to be in some sort of p2p fashion.

Someone: There are legacy solutions that won’t be displaced. You have to layer on top of them, like PingID.

Jeremy: It’s not just the pain of sign-on. It’s also the pain of registering for a new service. A few cases: Company B allows customers of Company A to become registered customers, dynamically, moving my profile. The social networks could be a home base for relevant attributes about me. A federation of those in which my attributes could be relied upon by other online services would be appealing to me. I.e., I can dynamically become a cars.com user using my social network ID and profile. You could do that now with the existing standards.

Nikolaj: Today we have an ID where we can reach other: email. But it has no other attributes. You can’t authenticate itself. Or, your credit card uniquely identifies you. You can even use it to exchange info through a proxy like PayPal. And that’s what we’re looking for.

Someone: Do we have a schema for the info that we think is useful? No, we don’t. The metadata around my demographics and psychographics. Will people create a common tool across social networks so I have a single user experience?

Andre: Jeremy’s comment may have uncovered a business model. If the social networks glommed onto these protocols and built a service for users that allowed them to store the info…

Brian Dear: How about FOAF?

Nikolaj: There’s no layer of authentication.

Jeremy: It’s an attribute.

Someone: We may not want to connect social networks. E.g., one’s for business and the other is personal.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn: I’d only do federation if I had a business case justifying it.

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This idea that arose from a meeting at the Aspen Institute is apparently starting to take off. In this “birds of a feather” meeting, Lori Fena (Aspen Institute) says that the Accountable Net addresses problems like security and spam. The solution is to build accountability into the applications. E.g., an identity system and reputation system would let you know who’s sending you a msg and what that person’s reputation is. With regard to security, if there were identity and reputation attached to a packet, you could decide which packets to trust. [Ack! Scary!] It has to come with transparency and user choice as well. Communities can make their own rules. (The other forum leader, Tara Lemmey (Markle Foundation) talks about a federal security project.)

Government agencies don’t trust other government agencies, someone says. The CIA wants to be sure that the data it shares with another agency is treated with the same level of security.

Q: What does an “authenticated user” mean? It seems to imply that a user only has one identity. Digital certificates never took off because you couldn’t link them to other attributes of the person such as bank account.

A: (Jon Callas) There are identities, not identity. I have at least four as I sit here: the PGP employee, the home-owner, etc. Authenticated means authenticated to another agency.

A: (Tara) You have soft identifiers like name and social security number. You have hard identifiers like biometrics. You have your wake, which is all the place you’ve been. And you have your creative output. All of these are part of identity.

Q: How can this be kept ahead of the people who would develope evil tools (evil from a privacy point of view)?

[Lori cites John Walker's Digital Imprimatur]

Q: (Me) Where can I find out more about this proposal that scares the daylights out of me? I don’t want to talk about it here because that’s not the point of this meeting.

A: There may be regional forums.

Someone in the group says that we’re moving to a decentralized system where everyone gets to make his own decision. [But what will happen in a world in which large interests can make demands of us?]

Q: (Keith Teare) We’re moving into an assumption of distrust. We shouldn’t. I prefer to assume good and deal with evil rather than building big systems to prevent evil.

A: (John Patrick) Maybe working with academia would be a good way to bridge the theoretical and the practical. Maybe we should break it down into bite-sized prototypes.

Lori: Almost a research agenda that breaks it down into the key ideas.

Tara: We are already building an alpha for the national security components.

John Patrick: Authentication would be a real good place to start.

Elliot Noss (Tucows) says we could focus on the large mail server folks and get a win there.

Jon Callas: SPF [Sender Policy Framework] is an accountability system because it says that if mail came from this set of servers, it’s from me, and if it didn’t it’s not.

Someone: Accountable for what? What are you doing to define that? Are you putting together a priority list of what are the behaviors that our society is defining as unacceptable on the Net?

Lori: It’s accountable to one another within groups and applications. We don’t want to be the central authority. We want to move our principles for rule-making and enforcement; we don’t want to say that you should make the following rules.

Someone: In a perfect world, we’d all have perfect authentication, identity, etc. [Not in my perfect world.] Can’t be done centrally. It should be driven to the edges.

Bob: The free market won’t do this. Databases didn’t talk with one another until the federal government said it wouldn’t buy your DB unless it supported the spec. [More terrifying. It should be decentralized but accomplished through government intervention?]

Michael Miller: What about in societies where you can’t express yourself?

Lori: Maybe we should have checklists for people designing applications. E.g., “Have you thought about how your product can maintain anonymity in societies where there isn’t free speech?”

Tara: Many of these systems are being designed for or by the government. They will be influential.

[I remain nervous about this initiative. The intentions are good, of course; two of its leaders are former heads of the EFF, a great credential. Esther is enthusiastic about it. Damn fine reputation system. But I have deep doubts about how well its voluntary nature will be maintained. The large entities that are highly motivated to support it — government, corporations — will require that we participate. We won't be able to say no without walling ourselves off from much of the Net. Social networks, not social fences! On the other hand, this meeting assumed we already know what the Accountable Net is, which I don't. I can't even tell if it's a lobbying effort or an attempt to come up with standards/protocols. So I am, once again, speaking out my ass. I am undoubtedly wrong about it and look forward to understanding it.]

Whitepaper

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From the Daily Mislead. I cannot warrantee its accuracy.

BUSH ALLOWS GAYS TO BE FIRED FOR BEING GAY

Despite President Bush’s pledge that homosexuals “ought to have the same rights” (1) as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation.

More at Loose Democracy

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ESRI is the leader in GIS systems. Their stuff takes geographic data and manipulates it. First, it creates electronic maps to look at (and zoom in on, put various layers onto, etc.). But, that’s just one thing that a GIS system can do with geographic data. I covered ESRI for the issue of Esther’s Release 1.0 I wrote a couple of months ago, and I was very impressed not only with their technology but with their public mindedness. I’m also convinced that GIS is going to be big news over the next 2 years.

Geography and GIS provide a framework for language and knowledge, Jack says. GIS is an enterprise system that organizes workflows. Geography is essential to colalboration.

He shows a very cool animation, flying in to Honolulu from space, and then distinguishing it from a virtual reality app by toggling on shading that shows cell phone coverage. Then he flies into Greece and then to Everest. Too cool. [What a way to explore the world! It's the atlas I want!]

GIS is a formal information system, he says. It’s a generic platform. Whole bunches of apps are being built using it. GIS is evolving from a digital abstraction to a becoming a “nervous system” for our globe. [I like "The Semantic Earth," the title of my Release 1.0 article. Yes, I'm patting my own back.]

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I shared a cab ride to PC Forum with Adam Berrey of OnFolio, and then yesterday I got a demo. It looks very useful. It lets you save and organizes ages and snippets of pages.

You know how many bookmarks I have on my bookmarks list? About five. I can’t tell you why, but I just don’t find it an hospitable environment for saving pages and scraps. OnFolio looks like it might do it. The foldering is easy, it saves bunches of metadata, and it wraps entire pages into .mhs files that contain all the images. It also looks like it’ll make it easy to share folders, although I personally don’t have much interest in that.

I’ve tried other such products. The closest any came to meeting my idiosyncratic needs was one from AskSam. Eventually, however, my file got corrupt, or the product upgraded and I didn’t, and I lost all my research. I neglected to ask Adam, however, what the story is with export.

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Hank Barry (former CEO of Napster) moderates. He cites a Pew study that says 44% of Net users say they’ve contributed something to the Net. 140M camera phones in 2004. 115 photo-sharing services. DeviantArt has 4M works of art posted. And there’s growing resistance to ISP offerings that restrict uploading.

Shane Robison (HP [Home of computers armed with DRM to lock you out]) says that his customers want to produce their own content.

Rob Glaser (RealNetworks [Talk about your bad defaults! Real is close to deceptive when it walks you through its install program]) points out that not everyone wants to create their own music, although they do want to post their photos. And they want to package up playlists, etc.

Lisa Gansky (Kodak’s O-Photo) says 0-Photo has a billion images, a third of which are printed. [Yikes!] The demographic skews to women. George Eastman realized that he had to market to women. When digital cameras first came in, the men bought them and downloaded the image, holding them hostage on their hard disks. O-Photo eases the sharing. The “soccer moms” tend to print more than the younger demographic. Kodak Mobile is a subscription service for cellphone cameras. That gives us a sort of “streaming intimacy.”

Q: Why can’t I get my IPaq and IPod to work together?

A: (Rob) Because Steve Jobs, for reasons known only to him, won’t license the FairPlay DRM manager that IPod uses. Either of two things will happen: Apple will return to its historic single-digit share, or the market will be slowed because they’ll say, “What, I bought an IPod and I can only shop in one store?? What is this, the Soviet Union?” (Applause.)

Shane: We’re working with Apple on this. It’ll get straightened out.

Q: [Steven Levy] Now we have tools that give people quasi-professional ways to create media. Are we going to make media for one another, or is it more of an American Idol sort of thing where people make media in order to filter up?

(Rob): Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

Q: This revolution has been around the corner for years. But there’s a way to push it forward. There will be an explosion in grassroots video when people can be seen by others on the TVs in living rooms.

Shane: When everyone has access to broadband, the TV can become an interface.

Rob: It has to do with the shortage of narrative-form story-telling skills. There’s a dearth of creative talent. [How do we know that?]

Shane: We have to make big content owners comfortable with using our environment. We’re making progress. There’s a fine line between giving them the kind of protection they need to distribute their property and giving consumers they need. You’ll see some announcements soon showing we’re making progress with the content companies. [Be afraid.]

[So, here's a complaint about these sessions. They are too top-heavy with industry bigwigs. I know that's the draw of PCForum, and where else will you get the heads of Yahoo, AOL and Google on the same panel? But why wasn't there anyone on this panel who is doing end-user creation? I'm suit saturated! Nevertheless, this was an interesting panel.]

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The Governer of Wisconsin is writing a blog. It looks, feels and smells like a real blog written by an actual person. Very cool. [Thanks to Frank for the link.]

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Eric does research on the behavior of shoppers and browsers.

Defaults matter (he says) because people like to be able to make choices, but they don’t want to have to make choices. E.g., if the form for new employees that lets them opt into a 401K plan starts out with 3%, lots of people will take that “choice.” E.g., XP defaults to having firewalls off. The biggest change they could make would be to pre-check the box on the form where you make the settings.

People are very loyal. The average time people spend on Amazon decreases on repeat visits. That’s because we get better at navigating Amazon. This locks us in. And in travel, most people book at the first place they look.

He shows data that if you use clouds as the background of your web site, people are willing to spend 15% more for furniture. [Damn lizard brain!]

Remember, he says, that we’re very different from our customers. The customer wants appropriate defaults; “defaults are the most important you can make” to shape behavior. The customer wants to minimize search. And the customer wants to pay in ways that minimize psychological cost — that is, paying $20 for product and shipping together is different than paying $15 for the product and then paying an added $5 for shipping.

Q: How do we go from $0 to $0.01, which you’ve said is the biggest hurdle?

A: Have them pay for added services.

Q: How about subscription prices?

A: Give ‘em a two-part tariff.

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Dave Sifry, everyone’s favorite techie, is talking about Technorati. “It’s a search engine for conversations,” he says. [Disclosure: I'm on their board of advisors.]

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I’m in MetaCarta’s break-out session. CEO John Frank is presenting. MetaCarta finds all the references to places in large bodies of documents and then enables users to find all the documents that refer to a particular place.

Disclosure: I’m on their board of advisors and worked a bit on this presentation. Because of that, I’m not going to blog it. But, I will say that this is very cool technology with immediate application. Go out and buy several now. Thank you.

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Steven Johnson gives a great talk on the topic of his book, Mind Wide Open. [I wish I could write like Steve. Total author envy.]

First he recounts the result of his own brain scans: When he was floundering, trying to come up with an idea, much of his brain lit up. When he was focused, the amount of brain activity went down. “People say that it’s a shame that we only use 10% of our brains. But that’s like saying that in many words, Shakespeare only uses 10% of the alphabet…how much better it would be if he used all the letters in every word.”

He says that dopamine causes the brain to explore its environment it has been disappointed in an expectation. Fascinating.

He ties this then to why video games are addictive. Video games have a clear reward structure, and frequently the reward is the desire to explore new areas (”I just need to play another 4 hours to unlock the next level of Myst!”). [Hmm, now that I think of it, shouldn't the desire to explore new territory be tied to the failure to get a reward?]

Q: Are you now a determinist?

A: It’s important not to have discussions of the brain’s physiology get turned into determinism. We’re a mix of culture and genetics. The brain evolved to capture the idiosyncracies of an individual life.

Q: [Cory Doctorow] How can we neuro-amateurs distinguish crap from non-crap?

A: The Symphony in the Brain is a good book on the topic.

Q: [Neal Stephenson] Did the scan show any activity in your cerebellum.

A: No.

Q: Has this knowledge made you a better person?

A: Not really. You can recognize some patterns and that can be helpful.

Q: Who’s winning, the reductionists or the emergence-ists?

A: I tried to stay away from the question of the origin of consciousness, an incredibly difficult question.

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Each of the innovative companies presenting this afternoon has 30 seconds to tell us why we should come visit them:

Convoq - the power of web conferencing delivered onto your desktop

Informative - Identify “influentials” to expand your brand.

Intelligent Results - Make meaning out of telephone reports

Language Weaver - Statistical machine translation

MetaCarta - Find all the documents about a place

Mind Fabric - Natural Language Processing to listen to what customers are saying

N8 Systems - Helping IT and businesspeople understand one another

Scalix - “Delivering on the future of email”

Technorati - Searching the part of the Web that changes all the time (= blogs)

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Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security) says security is primarily social. The techno solutions don’t work if the social environment doesn’t support them. Much of the stuff being done in Homeland Security isn’t worth the cost; cost isn’t considered.

Robert Liscouski from Dept of Homeland Security says that they do consider cost.

Bruce: Wrong economic model. It’s not the cost of loss. Take Iraq. It cost us $200B to invade and occupy Iraq. Doing it was good, but was that the best use of the money? Did we get our $200B’s worth?

David Johnson of NY Law School, explains the Accountable Net proposal that came out of a meeting at the Aspen Institute. It would let you know that you’re dealing with an authenticated person and enable trust networks while staying decentralized. Here’s Esther’s description from her NY Times column on the topic:

The idea is simple: People on the Internet should be accountable to one another, and they are free to decide whom to interact with. The goal is not a free-for-all, anarchic Net, but one where good behavior is fostered effectively — and locally…

The basic rule is transparency: You need to know whom you are dealing with, or be able to take proper measures to protect yourself. The accountable Net is a complex system of interacting parts, where users answer not just to some central authority, but to the people and organizations whom they affect.

John Palfrey puts it this way:

We think the internet will become more orderly over time, but we do not agree that the internet needs, or will easily yield to, more centralized authority — private or public. To the contrary, we believe a new kind of online social order will emerge as the result of new technologies that enable a more powerful form of decentralized decision-making. These technologies will give private actors greater control over their digital connections. They will enable both end users and access providers to establish connections based on trust, rather than connecting by default to every other network node and trying to filter out harmful messages after the connection has been made. Because of these new developments, participants on the internet will be more accountable to one another than they have been in the past.

…As long as ISPs, enterprises, and individuals use systems that require those who interact with them to authenticate themselves and/or provide acceptable reputational credentials — using a contextually-appropriate mode of authentication — then everyone can decide when to trust someone (some source of bits) and when to filter someone else out of their online world

[Allowing users to do this themselves is far preferable to letting governments or ISPs do it, of course. But in establishing my web of trust, am I simultaneously turning the rest of the Net into a web of distrust? How much will we give up in cuttting ourselves off from that? I don't know the answer to this question, but John's use of the phrase "their online world" instead of "our online world" is worrisome to me. On the other hand, this proposal — which I don't understand well — is coming from people I trust completely and who do understand it. So, I have no trust in my knee-jerk reaction. I definitely want to learn more about this.]

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Kenneth Hess talks about the lessons from the Columbia investigation. After showing some startling video — an animation of the failure and video of the pieces streaming to earth — he says that the investigation concluded the problem ultimately was with NASA’s culture. NASA got over-confident. Corporate politics had set in. They looked to prove flights were unsafe, not that they were safe. There was overt and subtle time pressure. These factors caused them to ignore the indications that there was a problem with the foam.

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[sketchy notes]

Eric Schmidt is being interviewed. He says that Google has lots of ways to get better. He points to two. First, Google doesn’t always put the right link in the first slot. Second, there’s what others — not Eric — call the “deep Web.”

Orkut is part of their strategy to learn how to collect information [from the social networks], as well as building their ours. The privacy issues will only get worse. For example, Google is getting sued by people for making available public documents that show they were convicted of crimes. But when push comes to shove, the company’s policy is “Don’t be evil.” He says people generallly agree about what is evil. [Say wha'? Could the opposite be any clearer? The fact that it doesn't seem that way to Google is an artifact of their homogeneity. Which also means that they just haven't happened to hit an issue that rends that homogeneity. I hope they have a set of back-up policies stored in a "In case of ambiguity break glass" container.]

Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (265M users) says that social networks can help people synthesize information and create an affinity group of people who may have never met but who can share knowledge and make searches more precise.

Jon Miller says that AOL traps about 3B spams a day. Esther suggests that the user should pay the ISP: you get, say, 100 free emails a month. Yahoo says spammers would still find it worthwhile. Eric suggests that we’ll have public and unlisted emails.

Q: Thanks for Google News. And will you do Google for the home?

Eric: Google News has had an ever bigger effect outside the US. And we’ve done some work on Google for the home, but we haven’t solved that problem.

Q: [Tim O'Reilly] I tend to think technology advances through hacks. Social networks are currently bad hacks that tell me we really need to add P2P protocols to address books so you can visualize your real social network instead of building a faux social network.

Eric: It’d have to be connected to some sort of server to manage all the different devices you’re using. The current social networks are simply trees of information that computers could construct on their own if we simply gave them permission. It’s more a permissions issue. The current SN’s will probably evolve into being more than simply introduction services.

Esther: The problem is “friend inflation.” And, also, these SN’s require you to make social relationships explicit. [Right on.]

Eric: Social networks will get better as we figure out what problem they’re intended to solve.

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