Paul Aiken gave a speech presenting the Authors Guild position on Google Print. I’ve posted a copy here. Here’s a snippet:

We bet Google is right. If books were digitized and searchable on the Internet, we bet Google could make a pretty penny by allowing its legions of users to search that database. And what a mind-boggling database! An assemblage of the nation’s copyrighted books, the result of the efforts and investments of hundreds of thousands of authors and thousands of publishers, served up in handy excerpts by Google’s generous computers.

But here comes the bad part. Google says that its copying of these books — that its scanning of countless copyrighted volumes, then using optical character recognition technology to digitize the text of those works to create files to assemble into a new, unimaginably vast database, surely one of the largest databases ever assembled — that all of that copying and use of these works, would be fair use, so it doesn’t need a license from anyone for this copying. For good measure, it’s handing over a digital copy to its partner libraries, and telling them its OK to post the works to their websites. That, too, I guess, is fair use.

Hint: He doesn’t really think it’s fair use.

I’m not a lawyer and don’t know whether it counts as fair use. But as a citizen who wants to live in an ever smarter world, I hope Google Print goes ahead. I think ultimately it’s going to build more business for publishers, but that’s not my first concern. We need to get way smart real fast, and Google Print is a big step forward. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the email.] [Tags: google GooglePrint DigitalRights]

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Andy Carvin has set up a multi-lingual blog aggregator for the WSIS conference in Tunisia at which governments that don’t understand the Internet will propose regulating it into something they do understand. [Tags: wsis DigitalRights internet]

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ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn’t liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger’s access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger’s name or Internet address.

Number 5 on Forbes’ list of how corporations should fight back against bloggers who say things companies don’t like.

For the record: Daniel Lyons’ Forbes article about blogging is basically an argument against free speech. [Tags: forbes dmca copyright DigitalRights blogging]

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Since I’m saying something Forbes won’t like, please allow me to “lift” some copyrighted text from Forbes.com, just to make it easier for them:

NEW YORK – For a company whose motto is “do no evil,” Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ) has come under a surprising amount of criticism of late for being green-eyed. The internet giant and abettor for college term papers is facing a legal obstacle against its plans to scan and index books from three major university libraries. The cry for an injunction comes just weeks after the Authors Guild sued Google for copyright infringement–and the same day as a small financial firm in London cajoled the internet giant into dropping its Gmail trademark in the U.K. In defense of its latest venture, Google, led by Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, has maintained its intentions are to “make millions of books easier for people to find and buy,” by cataloguing them online. Not so, says the Association of American Publishers, which is filing the suit. As the suit was quoted by The Associated Press, Google is infringing publishers’ copyrights “to further its own commercial purposes.” The internet behemoth’s “Print Library Project” is an offshoot of “Google Print,” a program which publishers are not as vexed about–because work is used with permission. The former, more controversial project sees a part of each book scanned and displayed online as part of a sprawling catalogue. Any featured author who is rattled by the idea has until Nov. 1 to notify the company so their work can be excluded. In the last year, media reports have speculated that Google, the research-project-turned-corporate-giant started by Forbes 400 members Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was beginning to lose its “no evil” philosophy. But with deep-pocketed competitors like Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ) and Time Warner’s (nyse: TWX – news – people ) America Online, can the Google mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” really be all that straightforward? Meanwhile, Google’s earnings are announced today. Its shares gained about 8% over the quarter, and are up about 60% since the year began. On Oct. 4, the stock hit a 52-week high of $321.28 on the Nasdaq.

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In the lefthand column, I have a link to my disclosure statement, a practice I recommend. But, although I’m honest in it, it doesn’t really get at the truth.

For example, I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. But that’s not the relevant fact. Yes, I’ll make some money if Technorati goes public or gets bought. I’m not sure how much, but not enough to consciously affect my behavior. What does affect my behavior and disposes me to like Technorati, despite their flaws, is that some of the people who work there are my friends. Even then, I wouldn’t knowingly lie or go out of my way to mention the company. But I like helping my friends, even in tiny ways. The possibility of making some money actually serves as an inhibitor: Before I post something about Technorati, I think about my motives. (And, yes, I generally add a disclosure statement in brackets.)

So, in the interest of transparency, I propose a standardized Disclosure Code to get at the actual influences that affect one’s blogging. Entries would include:

WT	Work there
WXT	Worked there
AWR	Applied there, was rejected
FT	I have friends there
CPF	Cocktail party friends
BTMHF	Been to my house friends
HMS	Hot monkey sex. Say no more, wink wink.
PIHT	I have people I hate there
X +1/-1	Ex-girl/boyfriend works there; ended well or badly
WSLTH	Went to school with someone there but I’ve lost track of her/him
FT2	A friend of a friend works there
SUT	I’m sucking up to them
WTOMS	Wish they’d offer me stock
ITOF	I thought of it first
SBO	I sued the bastards once
IJND	I’m just name-dropping

Anyone know how to submit a proposal for an ISO standard?

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This evening as we were trying to TiVo The Simpsons while watching The West Wing live by using the second cable input, which goes straight into the TV, an operation requiring the use of all twelve remotes, two of them simultaneously, I lost track of the Grand Unified Theory behind our TV/TiVo/DVD/VCR/cable box/PS2/amplifier configuration and had to be guided step by step by our 14 year old son.

My time has passed. Today and tomorrow belongs to him.

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Poking around the BBC site, I found some free online language courses that may have been there forever. I spent a few minutes learning Italian, and now I’m ready to go to Firenze. (Of course, I’m always ready to go to Firenze.) [Tags: bbc italy]

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It’s hard for a vegetarian — or, well, an inhabitant of the earth — to say something good about McDonald’s, but here goes:

McDonald’s is switching to Newman’s Own fair trade coffee in 658 of its New England outlets. And it’s pricing a cup lower than Dunkin Donuts and (of course) Starbucks to further entice people to drink coffee that’s better for others.

Of course, McDonald’s will be carving each cup out of a half pound of rare Amazon woods encased in styrofoam that’s been specially formulated to suck ozone out of the atmosphere, but, still, you have to give McD’s some credit… [Tags: mcdonald's fairTrade coffee PaulNewman environment]

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First, read Jeneane’s prose-poem, We used to bleed here.

Then go to the Hemorrhoids Tips page and read the list of helpful information for hemorrhoid suffers.

Two points:

1. The hemorrhoid page might want to refine its search string since it seems to be getting a feed of anything with “bleed” in it.

2. Congratulations, Jeneane, on having your poetry published in the prestigious literary journal, Hemorrhoidal Tips :) That’s gotta be a first.

(Thanks to Euan for the link. Plus, he has a PDF capture in case they fix their query.) [Tags: JeneaneSessum EuanSemple TheObvious poetry]

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Does anyone know how to program a Visual Basic 6 (not .NET) form so that its contents get loaded into the Movable Type create-a-post Web form? So, imagine that I have a text box in VB that gets filled with the text “Here is my post.” I’d like to press a button, launch a browser so that it opens up my MT editing page, and have the “Entry Body” text box there get loaded with “Here is my post.” (I know how to launch a browser to a particular URL.)

Note: Comments telling me that VB6 sucks and I suck for using it are not, technically speaking, helpful.

TIA.

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You know those 3D pictures you have to go cross-eyed to see? Here are some short 3D movie clips of the same sort. To get the illusion, start off with a still from the AVI and get it to go all 3D on you. Then hit the play button. (If you can’t get them to pop into 3D, poke around on the Web for instructions. I don’t know what to tell you.)

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My friend w came back from Halloween festivities a year or so ago and found this msg on her Panasonic microwave.

She says there is no “child’s portion” setting.

Odd. [Tags: odd]

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David Berlind suspects Microsoft muscle and money is behind the official opposition to the Commonwealth’s standardizing on the OpenDoc format. And David makes the right point bluntly:

All Microsoft must do to prove its point — that Massachusetts has some anti-Microsoft agenda designed to keeps its products off its procurement lists — is call Massachusetts’ bluff. The company doesn’t have to lift one engineering finger. All it must do is issue a press release announcing that it will support for ODF.

Call, raise or fold, Microsoft. [Tags: microsoft DavidBerlind opendoc]

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When Pres. Bush accepted the letter of resignation, how do you think he explained to himself and to her the reason she wasn’t accepted? Since I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he proposed her, I can’t imagine what sense he’s making of it now.

“You would have made a great judge. If only they’d gotten to know you the way I do, Harriet, instead of being rushed to judgment.”?

“You were a victim of Washington insiders who’ll do anything to damage this presidency.”?

“Gosh, Harriet, I guess the Senate just isn’t ready to have a woman on the Supreme Court”?

And so we march on to a new nomination by a man who takes Clarence Thomas as a model Supreme Court Justice. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Reddit has turned up The Case of the 500 Mile Email. Pretty bizarre and some nice detective work. [Thanks to Greg for the link.]

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us spoke twice at the Berkman Center yesterday. I blogged the first session, but I was moderating the second so I couldn’t. Both sessions I thought were excellent: Joshua is a low signal-to-noise communicator, he’s working on important issues, and I find his point of view unpredictable (which is a good thing).

Here’s some of what I thought was especially interesting. (Warning: Miscellaneous list ahead:)

Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.

Delicious is not going to go after the enterprise market. Instead, eventually Joshua will make an open source version available. I was surprised by this since I’ve been talking about tagging with a fair number of large companies who are excited about it and would buy a version of Delicious for internal use. Joshua thinks he couldn’t charge enough. I think they’d pay substantial sums for it.

Joshua’s elevator pitch says that Delicious is about remembering stuff. I continue to think its success is due to its social nature. The disagreement is one of emphasis only. But if I were his marketing vp, I’d tell him to market the tagstreams, not the bookmarks or the tags. Of course, I have no data supporting my view, but I was never that sort of marketing vp (i.e., reality-based).

The rate of tag spam seems incredibly low: A couple of incidents a week. (Tag spam means someone tags a page with hundreds or thousands of tags so that people will come to it.) In part, said Joshua, that’s because tag spam brings you no google juice.

He is not using stemming software that recognizes “blog,” “blogging” and “blogs” all have the same stem in part because there is meaning to the variants and in part because he hasn’t found any that’s good enough.

A little thing: I learned last night that if you use the tag “for:someone,” that bookmark is sent to the Delicious user with the name “someone.”

By the way, the evening session will be available as a podcast sometime soon. I’ll let you know. [Tags: delicious JoshuaSchachter berkman tagging]

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Beth Kanter did an excellent job live-blogging the evening discussion. Thanks, Beth!

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Reader2 lets you list books you’re reading or plan on reading, tag them, search by tags, etc. Here’s its explanation of why you would use the site:

* You can easily find new and interesting books through user-defined categories, searches, and popularity among users.

* You can find users with similar book taste and see what they read (if you want this thing to work, you’ll need to add 10-20 books first).

* You can keep track of your friend’s books through RSS feeds.

* You can export books list to your site / blog.

Class assignment: Compare and contrast with LibraryThing and Berkman’s H20 .

(Thanks to Ian Forrester for the link.)

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[I wrote this before Joshua's double talks at Berkman today - I thought both were excellent - and came home to discover I never posted it. So here it is, in non-reverse-chronoogical order.]

In preparation for Joshua Schachter’s appearances at the Berkman Center (Plug: at 6pm, he’s the guest at a “Web of Ideas” discussion to which you’re invited) I checked his own page at del.icio.us. He has his bookmarks grouped into headings that tell you a lot about him. So does his tagcloud. Same for the rest of us. And, I’m guessing, the subheadings do not necessarily match what we would have listed on a profile page under “interests.” For example, Joshua has headings for ephemera, food, and time. As we create tags, discovering the subheadings we need may tell us something we did not know before about our interests, just as my college buddy Hank in his junior year looked over the courses he had taken and said, “Gee, I guess I’m interested in China.”
That del.icio.us tags and subheads are public of course influences which ones we list. For example, I didn’t want to use del.icio.us to track pages I was visiting when researching large screen TVs because, well, I’m not proud that I was researching large screen TVs. The rest of you may not be as small-minded and vain as I am, of course. [Tags: tagging JoshuaSchachter berkman]

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Liz Lawley blogs Karen Schneider’s presentation to librarians on blogging ethics. Sounds like a great presentation. [Tags: KarenSchneider LizLawley libraries blogging]

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us is giving a lunchtime talk. His presence has sold out the small conference room at the Berkman Center so we’ve moved to a bigger room.

What follows are paraphrases of what he said; I am certain not only to have omitted much but to have gotten stuff wrong, so before you get pissed at Joshua for saying x, you might want to check that he in fact didn’t say y and I said he said x.

He built delicious in 2003 to manage his own links. He had been using a text file, but twenty entries into it he had already introduced a tag into it.

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

The Chinese firewall blocks delicious now.

Hard core tech pages have gone from 25% to 17% over the course of this year. “So interests are starting to broaden.”

Q: How would you describe delicious to a layperson?


A: It’s a way to remember stuff. Links initially but we’re adding some new types.

Q: How do you improve performance, i.e., latency time?


A: We’re continually upgrading. At times scrapers/spiders are half the load.

Q: Delicious is aggressively without a user interface, so I think of it as a pipe instead of as a consumer destination…


A: I’ve finally hired people who have a different sense of user design than I do. We’ve done a round of UI testing — the one-way mirror, etc. That was an entirely terrifying day. Once they figured out the point and got through the URL, people like the interface. It does what it does without a lot of jokey stuff, etc.

The API: People do get value out of it, but it’s also a political statement that it’s your data. Plus I’m lazy.

Q: What’s the financial model?


A: The same as any other advertising-backed discovery engine, like Google. The people who are using it are paying us with information. Ten times the number of people are on the site but not signed in than those who are signed in.

Q: What about the August spike on Alexa?


A: Everyone had it. Don’t know why.

If I had imported the categories out of DMOZ, people would have said “Screw this” and would have left. Tagging is the easiest thing people could do and get any signal out of it all. People tag things “read later” which is useful to them but not to others.

I’ve spent too much time working with fuzzy models of the world to need discrete taxonomies. There’s no such thing as a perfect categorization. There is value in controlled vocabularies, but that doesn’t really map to the task. I’m not trying to categorize the web but helping people find stuff later.

Q: I found people because only 4 of us were using the “Africa” tag. How about making that more explicit?


A: I wrote the code to do that but it wasn’t pleasing. It tended to be dominated by people who have more tags overall.

Q: Is this compatible with the Semantic Web?


A: It’s easy to express your tags in RDF. That’s easy. Doing OWL is as hard as everything else is, namely, impossibly hard.

Q: What’s the infrastructure?


A: Mason (?), SQL [did he say "mySQL"?], lots and lots of replicas of the database for scaling, which isn’t good. The data still fits on a single disk. The search engine is a full text store and the recommendation engine is a database I wrote by hand (BerekelyDB).

Q (me): Which are you going to push, the individual or social uses?


A: You won’t use it if it’s not useful to you. But we’ll put in more social structure. Group tags are coming — tags that are lightly permissioned. You’d tag it as for a group, e.g., “groupname: tag.” (Example: nptech, a tag used by people in the non-profit tech field.) In the case of people collectively organizing around a tag, I think you want to amplify that. We’re trying to put in privacy now; it’s a little bit of a challenge to do and keep it fast.

I worry about systems that stay in stealth mode. There’s stuff you’re not learning. We generally push code out to the live site 2-3/week.

Q: Say more about group tags and privacy…


A: Items can be private. If it’s tagged for you or your group you’ll be able to see them. The items won’t be visible (in order to avoid problems with totalitarian governments.)

There are 8 people at Joshua’s company now.

Q: Why “tags” instead of “keywords” in coming up with the terminology?


A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don’t see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

Q: (me) Will we see typed tags, e.g., for events you get a field for time and a field for place?


A: I would like to store more rich datat types but that won’t happen immediately, e.g. contacts and events. You can make a date tag now: “date._____” There’s stuff about the url, stuff about the post, stuff that belongs to you. E.g., if you bookmark an Amazon url. I could go get the bookcover, the price, etc. Then how do you represent them. We have to figure out how to do that once we’ve got performance up.

Q: As delicious scales, certain tags become meaningless. E.g., the “china” feed is pretty useless. But if I could specify subsets or groups…


A: You’d create a group and let people in. It will be implemented as a tag, so you could get a feed of (say) “berkman” and “china.” (With your inbox you can map tags, i.e., this person’s “china” is that person’s “asia.”) We have something called “the nework” coming; I originally called it “friends” but that was somewhat creepy. You identify people as being in your network and get feeds from them. [A group will be an established set of people who opt in. A network is a set of people you designate; they will not know they're a member of your network. I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip my face off."]

I’m not trying to build up the delicious community. There are plenty of communities.

Almost no one subscribes to a person/tag. Most subscribe either to a person or a tag. So, if you bookmark something and someone else has notes (nee “extended”) on that thing, you’ll be able to see them in your inbox. (”Inbox” is badly named, Joshua says.)

About a third of people who create accounts never come back.

Q: Do people use ISBNs as tags?


A: Not many. Amazon is one of the top bookmarked things. The number one bookmarked site is delicious itself.

Q: Tag spam?


A: In general it’s not that big a deal. Every couple of days, and they pop right out as outliers [or as "outliars"? :)]

Q: Are you building systems to monitor the trends of what people are doing?


A: Right now it’s not hard to identify the outliers. It’s not our focus. But my background is in analyzing bulk data.

Q: How about letting your users see that data?


A: I’m generally wary of this. If I publish the most clicked-on list, then it becomes a high score list that people will try to get on.

Q: Do you think there is a niche for something that is delicious but with more structured data?


A: That’s faceted classification and there are other people doing it.

[Tags: berkman JoshuaSchachter delicious]

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They agreed with [Tim] Bray that the number of pages is increasing dramatically, finding that the size of the Internet seemed to double between October and November, 1995, going from 1.3 million to 2.6 million HTML documents.

Tim also noticed that average page size had remained consistent at 6,500 bytes. (From “The Dublin Core and Warwick Framework: A Review of the Literature, March 1995 – September 1997″ by Harold Thiele.) [Tags: internet TimBray OpenText]

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Ethan does a superb job blogging and reflecting on a presentation at PopTech by ten young African innovators the conference — to its great credit — brought to the conference. What a great idea!

Ethan live-blogged the whole conference. Fantastic coverage. And IT Conversations streamed it and will make the sessions available as podcasts. (I skipped the conference this year because I need to work on my book. But from all accounts, it seems to have been as thought-provoking and eclectic as ever.) [Tags: PopTech EthanZuckerman africa]

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My children can’t imagine what it was like before Rosa Parks. They are appalled when we tell them.

I mean that as a tribute to her.

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The story for which Rosa Parks is famous is not as I was taught it.

I was five when she refused to move out of the whites-only seats at the front of the bus. I was told that she was a humble Black woman who, after a hard day of work, was too tired to get up. In fact, she was a committed civil rights worker, a secretary in the Montgomery office of the NAACP where she recorded reports of racial discrimination and interviewed African-Americans with legal complaints. (I in fact was taught she was a white family’s maid. Did those telling the story just assume that that’s what black women do?)

It’s a better story the first way, but why?

The mythic version is so powerful because of what it doesn’t say. Obviously, the point wasn’t that she was tired, that she collapsed in the seat and was physically unable to stand up. Presumably she was tired every day. The point of the myth is exactly that this day was like every other except for what happened in Rosa Parks’ heart. On that day like any other, a woman like any other rose above the accepted condition. Like the first photo of the whole earth seen from space, Parks’ refusal to change seats transformed our perspective. What had been presented as an inevitable way of the world Parks revealed as a fragile system with which — suddenly — one did not have to comply. The heroism of non-compliance was, Rosa Parks showed, available to everyone.

That’s why the story works better the more “ordinary” the hero is.

We like stories of ordinary heroes because they tell us heroism is within our grasp as well. (Why we aren’t instead shamed by their implicit denunciation of our own failures to be heroic is beyond me.) But, while stories of the humble becoming heroes may appeal to us, a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable: She didn’t postpone heroism, waiting for the moment to happen to her. She became a worker for civil rights in a time and place where that took daily heroism.

Then, on December 1, 1955, she was tired of complying with a system that degraded her, so she came to a full stop, not knowing the consequences. She demanded the system either acknowledge her dignity or demonstrate its full depravity. It takes a genuine faith in human goodness to think that we will not let a system stand once its corrupt nature has been exposed.

I would be happy to celebrate Rosa Parks Day every December 1. We Americans would be better for explicitly embracing her true story as a mythic expression of our values. [Tags: RosaParks]

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Cathy Young, a contributing editor to Reason magazine, in her column today in the Boston Globe goes on about how irresponsible bloggers got the facts wrong when John Henry Hinrichs killed himself, whipping up terrorist hysteria and undoubtedly making matters even worse for Hinrich’s family.

Let’s for now assume that Young is right that the bloggers saying there’s a coverup are wrong. (She cites a Wall Street Journal article and a Congressperson as her sources.) So, she’s found an example of bloggers getting something wrong. What exactly are we supposed to conclude from that? After all, The New York Times has been known to get some things wrong, whipping up terrorist hysteria. There’s a name for the fallacy Young’s column commits: Hasty Generalization.

What’s the name of your magazine again, Cathy? [Tags: media CathyYoung JohnHenryHinrichs]

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Ah, flickr! How much do we love thee! [Thanks to Ben Hyde for the link.] [Tags: metadata flickr EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Joshua “del.icio.us” Schachter is going to be my guest at Tuesday night’s “Web of Ideas” at the BerkmanCenter — which, by the way, is open to the public. I’m going to interview him and then we’ll have open discussion.

So, what do you think I should ask him?

And, do you wanna come? If so, here’s a map. It’s 6:00-7:30 on Tuesday. And, yes, we’ll try to get it up as a podcast, but then you’ll miss out on the free pizza. [Tags: JoshuaSchachter tagging berkman delicious]

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Our electrician, Walter Nowicki (yeah yeah, he should get a wiki, haha) replaced an old plug and thought I might want to blog about it. He’s right.

The house is about 100 years old. Walter guesses the plug might be 60 years old…

[Tags: trivia]

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This ad made me laugh. Overall, it’s a terrific piece of work. (Maybe everyone has seen it. TiVo has taken me out of the advertosphere.) [Tags: ads marketing]

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I’ve been off the air for four days. Four! I believe that’s four times the maximum interval since I started blogging for real in 2001.

I’ve been through the upgrade from hell, trying to move from Movable Type 3.11 to 3.2. In fact, it’s not quite done yet: The existing comments are not yet back online, although any comments you leave now will stay; the old ones should be back in a day or two. Sorry!

Six Apart (the Movable Type folks) has been incredibly helpful; they’ve been through more hell than me on this one. The main issue was that I’ve been using BerkeleyDB as my database instead of mySQL, and the Berkeley database dump apparently was corrupted. So, this isn’t your typical upgrade. Apparently I’m taking the cake for the hardest upgrade ever. Whoopee?

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The best thing we have going for us is our American belief that no one is above the law. That’s why this report by Human Rights First, covered by Reuters, is so disturbing. It reads like a script for a particularly grim episode of The Sopranos.

Deaths of prisoners in our care are troubling, even if inevitable. A failure to take responsibility is a worse betrayal of what we say we stand for.

Every time we act like we’re above the law and above common decency, we make our country less safe. [Tags: iraq terrorism]

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Well, they were at the next table. Diana’s back — after two hours of staring, I feel we’re now on a first-name basis — was to me, but I had a full view of Elvis about five feet away.

I am happy to report that he seems to be a well-mannered young man.

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Suw traces the history of telecommunications from carrier pigeons through email to blogs. She proceeds to talk about the nature and importance of social software behind the firewall, replete with examples. She’s quite convincing. (Suw talks without PowerPoints and without notes, in perfect um-less paragraphs.)

[Tags: SuwCharman blogging blogon2005]

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I keynoted BlogOn this morning (where keynote = yell a lot). I don’t know how it went. Afterwards, as the adrenalin faded and the self-loathing kicked in, I missed the next panel, which apparently took apart my presentation and deposited the scraps in small paper bags later distributed to waste bins throughout Manhattan to make sure they do not reassemble.

The break was great though. Lots of people I like, some of whom I know.

I heard most of Dick Hardt’s presentation on Identity 2.0. The content is great, of course, but as many others have pointed out, Dick’s hypnotic PowerPoint style is truly unique. It’s a bit like watching a sing-along video.

Now there’s a panel on RSS and one-to-one marketing. Scott Gantz of Yahoo begins by pointing to research that shows a high percentage of Web users use RSS without knowing it.”The individual ultimately is in control,” Scott says. [Adrenlin is still subsiding. I'm having trouble calming down enough to pay sufficient attention. Sorry for the lousy blogging.]

[Tags: blogon2005 identity DickHardt]

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Anyone else having trouble with Gmail today? Mail delivery has been extremely slow all morning, and I’ve gotten the Gmail “problems” page a couple of times. [Tags: gmail]

[LATER;] It’s me. My ISP, RCN, has a router down. Weirdly, I seem to be able to get everywhere except RCN and mail.google.com. Actually, I occasionally do get to mail.google.com, too, but it’s spotty and intermittent. A friend tells me that he suspects RCN uses a proxy it doesn’t tell me about, but I don’t really understand that and don’t actually care so long as the invisible proxy remains working and invisible.

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Tristan Louis is beginning 5 days of blogging about blog metrics for business.

Dave Sifry of Technorati posts his latest “State of the Blogosphere” metrics. [Tags: blogs blogosphere]

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You the critic: James Bond

The BBC News website asked for your critical assessments of the Bond movie actors, with a judgement on whether new Bond Daniel Craig will live up to your favourite’s time in the role.

This kicks off a new and occasional series on the Entertainment section, where we plan to invite knowledgeable fans to contribute to our coverage of big news stories.

Of the many excellent pieces we received, we have chosen a suitably Bond-like seven for publication – two on Connery, one on each of the other Bonds and a missive from “Miss Moneypenny”.

I liked the appreciations of Dalton’s and Lazenby’s interpretations. And it’s good to see the BBC continuing its experiment of opening up its staid pages, even in such a tightly controlled way. [Tags: bbc entertainment JamesBond]

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Barbara Ganley has a terrific post about whether the Net, and blogging in particular, is disconnecting kids from the world or engaging them in new ways. The post is rich with examples. (And, yes, she does talk about one of my posts.)

Barbara is a Lecturer at Middlebury College who uses blogging in her courses. Plus, she’s got some great photos of South America at Flickr. [Tags: blogging BarbaraGanley]

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HearUsNow.org, a project of Consumers Union, which is the publisher of Consumer Reports (got that?) has put together a toe-tappin’, cute music e-video warning against media consolidation.

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Terry is having a lump removed from his breast. He blogs about it primarily to tell us what it’s like to be a middle-class American without health insurance.

None of this is any fair. But his story — like so many of his stories — finds and gives hope.

We all wish you well, Terry.

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Ever want to make your own highway signs? Head on over here. Unfortunately, it only creates the sign in a applet window, not as a downloadable graphic, throttling the urge to be a wiseacre in public. (I had a little display problem with the java app: If the button labels don’t appear, try clicking the stripe under the line that says how much memory is available.) (Thanks to AKMA for the link.) [Tags: akma]

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First, Judith Miller relies on Ahmed Chalabi — paid operative for Iraqi exiles — for a series of exclusives about those nasty WMDs pointed at us by Sadam Hussein, providing crucial support for Bush in his run-up to the war. Then she plays the “I have no recollection at this time” card when asked how Valerie Plame’s name (well, “Valerie Flame” as she noted it) first made it into her notebooks.

The Times had to apologize for it getting the build up to the war wrong. A little worse than switching the captions under the names of newly-weds. Now Miller can’t recall who first told her about Valerie Plame? How much more credibility is this Pulitzer Prize winner going to cost to the Times?

As always, Jay Rosen is the first person to read on this story. His take is that Miller essentially hijacked the newspaper. And it has cost us the truth: She didn’t pursue the Wilson/Plame story in the summer of 2003 when it might have had some effect on support for the war and on the election; she has only in the past couple of days agreed even to “cooperate” with the NY Times’ reporting of her own case. As Jay says, “The news pages of the New York Times were edited for months under the principle: don’t report anything that would anger the prosecutor or affect Miller’s case.”

It’s one thing to be gamed by a punk like Jayson Blair who lied so outrageously that you’d have to be as nuts as him to think he was making it all up. It’s another to be gamed by a senior Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. That requires a systemic flaw. If the Times’ editorial process is so broken and unreliable, what else are they getting wrong? And, beyond firing Miller, what can they do to get right?

The truth is that my trust has shifted. I find I trust The Times and other mainstream media far more after they’ve gone through the blogosphere. E.g., I trust Jay’s blogging of the the Times’ coverage — and the remarkable voices in his comments section — more than I trust the coverage itself.

[Tags: media JudithMiller JayRosen nytimes journalism]

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