My son Nathan and I were today discussing how we Bostonians abbreviate street names. We call Commonwealth Avenue “Comm Ave” and Massachusetts Avenue becomes “Mass Ave.” We noticed that many of the local three-syllable streets have meaningful nouns for their first syllable. So, we could call Washington St. “Wash,” Chestnut Hill Avenue “Chest” and Beacon Street “Beak.” Yes, technically Beacon only has two syllables, but we want to be able to say we live near the intersection of Wash and Beak, and not far from Chest and Beak.

Despite the Boston passion for abbreviations, we tend not to shorten “VFW Parkway.” Nathan noticed that that’s seven syllables, and thus could be the heart of a haiku. Here goes:

The name is too long:
VFW Parkway.
I call it “The Veef.”

Or perhaps you prefer a non-scanning Limerick:

In Boston we tend to abbreviate
the names of long streets, to alleviate
the rush and confusion
of syllables in profusion
That if said would make us extremely late.

[Tags: boston limericks haiku]

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Tad Adelstein lays out Microsoft’s political influence — the raw type that has dollar signs and zeroes — in a specu-factual sort of way. Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff make appearances.

I still want to know who prompted the investigation of Peter Quinn, the Massacusetts CIO who pushed for the state to use only apps that support open standards. Quinn was investigated for taking junkets, charges that were subsequently found to be baseless. Quinn nevertheless resigned a couple of days ago.

Since the Globe trumpeted the charges, and then piccolo-ed Quinn’s exculpation, I’d think the Globe would want to know who played them like an out of tune violin. (Hmm. Technically, that wasn’t a mixed metaphor, just a failed one.) [Tags: PeterQuinn microsoft massachusetts opendoc bostonGlobe]

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Rageboy’s incredible list of NewAge++ titles has made it to the top of Amazon’s “So You’d Like to…” lists.

Meanwhile, AKMA responds on his blog to the fascinating comment thread attached to my brief posting about Daniel Dennett. AKMA writes beautifully, starting with the title of his post: On Certainty of Others’ Folly [Tags: RageBoy akma newage spirituality amazon]

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I posted a question to the Logitech customer forum because my new MX1000 mouse seems to pull downward— I have trouble getting it to point precisely where I want it, so I’m doing a lot of mis-selecting. Today I received an auto-mail message from Logitech telling me that they’ve noticed that no one replied to my question, so they’re escalating it to a human Logitech support person.

Cool!

BTW, if you care about the problem I’m having with the mouse, you should know that I have another Logitech mouse (a Click! model) plugged in simultaneously and it doesn’t have that problem. Yes, I have the latest drivers. [Tags: marketing customerSupport logitech mice]

It turns out that laser mice like slick surfaces. So, I’ve taped a shiny page from a magazine to my mouse pad and the mouse is working much better now.

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King Kong defines what it means to get your money’s worth. Now that’s movie making! Yes, it’s “just” an entertainment, but you try imagining an entertainment like that.

Peter Jackson (with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) is an incredible story-teller. The Skull Island segment is a non-stop 45-minute (30 min? 60 min? I wasn’t checking my watch) action sequence that’s brilliant in its choreography, visual imagination, clarity and articulation. As the twists twisted, I was laughing with glee at such barrelhouse film-making.

And it’s not just chest-beating and dino-bashing (much as I liked both those things). Jackson gets at the mystery of inarticulate connection in a way that the original did not. In fact, he gets at it in a way that few have.

So, no, not great art. But great entertainment.

March of the Penguins can’t help but be fascinating since the life cycle of emperor penguins is so unintelligently designed that it’s as close to fiction as facts get. The movie is awesome.

But…

First, it goes on too long. (I know that’s the usual complaint about King Kong, but I would only have cut a few minutes out of the final battle.) The penguins drudge across endless frozen vistas. The penguins huddle. Got it.

Second, it doesn’t answer some obvious questions, including: “How the hell did they make this movie?????” and “What would have happened if having humans around disrupted the penguins’ reproductive cycle?” (If an emperor penguin had set up a camera in our bedroom, I can guarantee you that we wouldn’t have had children.) Fortunately, there’s a “making of” feature on the DVD that does answer those questions and more, including how exactly the feathered comedians get it on. [Tags: KingKong MarchOfThePenguins movies films penguins IntelligentDesign PeterJackson]

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According to a story in the WSJ by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Juying Qin:

“In a rare show of resistance for China’s state-controlled media, many editors of the daily newspaper Beijing News refused to work Thursday after authorities sacked its top editor for leading coverage criticizing the government.”

From what we know, these are heroes. And heroes are so often sparks:

China’s active community of bloggers was quick to report and denounce Mr. Yang’s departure. One Beijing News editor wrote on his Web log, “There is no way to retreat. The butcher has lifted a knife … so let’s just die in a beautiful way.” That posting was later taken down by its host Sina.com, but other bloggers continued to re-post the comments by displaying a graphic image of the original posting.

[Tags: china media]

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William Safire is agitated by the use of prefixes as stand-alone words, as in “super” and “intro.” Personally, I have noticed that when my children say “Thanks,” I am likely to respond “Welc.” For no particular reason.

BTW, Safire’s agitation is actually a pretext (thin) for a not-very-fresh rant about the meta-ing of culture. [Thanks to David Isenberg for the link.]

[Tags: meta WilliamSafire language culture Postmodernism]

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Ethan Zuckerman has put together a 10-question quiz about the year in Africa. 60% is a high score, Ethan says. The good news: You couldn’t do worse than me. Note to self: Must read Global Voices more.

And on his blog, Ethan crunches some numbers to show the growing presence of Chinese blogs. For example, MSN is hosting at least 2 million Chinese language blogs. And Ethan wonders if blogs on Bokee, the popular Chinese blogging platform, are even showing up in the statistics. Says Ethan: “Researchers hoping to make broad statements about weblogs are going to have to start getting profoundly polylingual.” [Tags: GlobalVoices EthanZuckerman china blogosphere]

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I suffer from a brain deficiency that keeps me from being able to compile comprehensive lists. If asked to name the top three bodily functions, I’m likely to remember “breathing” two days after I’ve turned in the the test. I actually had to come to an accommodation with a CEO I reported to because he liked to go around the table and ask for list-y information, e.g., “What will be the top three threats we’ll face in the next 18 months.” I freeze.

Anyway, I enjoy a good top ten list as much as anyone. For example, J.D. Lasica has a list of the “Top 10 Tech Transformations of 2005.” The only things I can think to add are wifi (particularly the municipal version of it) and AJAX.

At AlterNet, Tai Moses has The Ten Best Top-Ten Lists. Of these, the Top 10 Grocery Lists from Grocerylists.com is the oddest.

Anyone have a top ten list of top ten lists of top ten lists? The year can’t end until we’ve gone meta-meta! [Tags: lists]

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Last night I dreamt that I ran into someone I knew as an acquaintance (not someone I know in waking life, fwiw) who’d gotten married a couple of months earlier. So, I told her congratulations. A few minutes later I realized this was the third time I’d run into after the wedding, and each time I’d congratulated her.

I was explaining this to a friend (in the dream), feeling chagrinned, and said we needed a word for this particular social faux pas.

My friend (or maybe I) suggested “Exaggulations.” [Tags: dreams humor]

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The philosopher Daniel Dennett is interviewed in Der Spiegel (in English) and talks insightfully about Intelligent Design and Darwin. Really good contextualizing explanation.

Then he goes off on religion in a way that I personally find not just tiresome but sloppy. He, like Richard Dawkins, talks about religion in general, as if all religions were the same, as if one critique fits all. Further, he’s such an outsider to religion that he assumes believers are all simpletons. I find that smug, irksome and not very philosophical. [Tags: DanielDennett IntelligentDesign religion philosophy]

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The BBC reports on Bush’s reading list:

His reading includes When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House by Patricia O’Toole, which is about the former leader’s African safari and his attempt to return to politics after leaving the White House in 1909.

He is also reading Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground – an account of the daily lives of US soldiers as told by Robert Kaplan, who accompanied several units overseas.

He is an “avid reader,” said his spokesman, spreading mirth throughout the land.

So, what would you put on his reading list?

The Best and the Brightest, to understand how even smart people go wrong.

Oedipus Rex, for some insight into his own psychology.

_____??

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Lisa Williams points to a friend who was fired from DeVry University in Westminster, Colorado, for what she had written in her blog. They didn’t warn her, nor did they tell her what they found so offensive. That sucks. [Tags: blogs dooce]

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Terrific speech by Sen. Boxer last week. [Tags: iraq BarbaraBoxer]

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William Denton has unearthed and posted 15 minutes of SR Ranganathan talking about Melvil Dewey in 1964. Ranganathan was the great reforming library scientist and Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal system. This is like finding 15 minutes of FDR talking about Coolidge or Leibniz talking about Descartes. I can’t wait to hear it, but first I have to make breakfast for our kids… [Tags: taxonomy ranganathan EverythingIsMiscellaneous WilliamDenton]

I’ve transcribed the audio. It’s got lots of holes and errors, so feel free to improve it.

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Yesterday I finished the rough (rough!) draft of Chapter 5 of my book. It’s on the nature of the “leaves” of knowledge that we’re piling up willy-nilly. The aim of the chapter is to show how different that approach is from the traditional assumption that knowledge is a stable, inter-generational domain, divided into disciplines, to which we may get to contribute if our contributions are judged worthy by the gatekeepers.

But what is one of these so-called leaves anyway? I end up arguing that unique identifiers (unique to particular namespaces, although because this is supposed to be a book of general interest, I don’t use the word “namespace”) are important nodes around which meaning clusters, and that’s about as close as we get to there being actual leaves. And since there are multiple namespaces, and then there are all the clusters based not on IDs but on hyperlinks and meanings, the “pile of leaves” metaphor implies too much neatness and order. Knowledge is much more “intertwingled” than that.

“Intertwingularity” was coined by Ted Nelson and is a word that really works.

In the course of the chapter, I talk about ISBNs, the book identifiers. Out of the blue, I chose the edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Rockwell Kent because I was fascinated by the copy my parents had when I was a kid. So, I go on and on about ISBN 0679600108. Yesterday I googled 0679600108 and discovered that it is the example others have used when writing about ISBNs. Out of the gazillion books, why did I choose this one?

In Chapter 5 I also talk about Universal Price Codes and, oddly, go down a path (that I’ll probably delete) about the 1989 decision to expand the UPC to include enough digits to encode information for individually-weighed portions of seafood. (Yes, that’s just how fascinating my book is.)

Then I went for shabbos lunch to our neighbors’ apartment. The husband works in the deli department of a local grocery store. And guess what he starts telling us about? How he individual wraps and prices particular cuts of seafood in order to meet the kosher needs of the community. What are the chances of that coming up in conversation?

Yes, these are at best coincidences. But call ‘em synchronicity and a little chill can run down your spine. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous TedNelson]

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Pito Salas wonders if the market’s expectation that broad classes of software just ought to be free is preventing some very cool apps from being developed. And before you jump all over Pito, keep in mind that he’s been working hard for over a year (or is it two years?) on an open source aggregator, BlogBridge that he provides, yes, for free. (Disclosure: I’m on BlogBridge’s board of advisors, without any expectation of compensation. I’m also a friend of Pito’s.) [Tags: PitoSalas blogbridge OpenSource]

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Some Delilah has sheared Johnny Damon locks, as his new owners, the Yankees, require. To me this is only a reminder that hometown teams have nothing to do with the hometown. I get no sense of pride because the “Boston” Red Sox won the World Series. If players were required to have grown up in the town they’re playing for, maybe the team’s location would mean something. (Ok, so it’s a stupid idea. I’m not much of a sports fan.)

And The Boston Globe is shearing itself of some of its best people, including Ed Siegel, Thomas Oliphant, Jack Thomas, Ed Siegel, Richard Dyer and Renee Graham. Yikes. Thirty-three in all are falling to the budgeteers’ knives. Boston just got stupider.

Maybe they’ll start to blog. [Tags: media boston]

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Grant McCracken blogs about three ways of taking the depth and seriousness of the Net’s effect on culture. Here’s a distillation, but you should read the whole thing:

1. Disintermediation – “The Internet is an efficiency machine. It removes the friction…”

2. Long Tail – “The Internet is a profusion machine. It allows small cultural producers to find small cultural consumers, and as a result, all hell is breaking lose…”

3. Reformation – “It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them. This reformation model says, in other words, that the coming changes will deeply cultural…and not merely social (model 2) and economic (model 1).”

He concludes by offering a fourth. And, he notes that the first three are telescoping: If you believe 3, you also believe 2 and 1.

My view: Left free of large institutions trying to stifle the Net, it would become #3. Anyway, Grant offers us useful distinctions. [Tags: GrantMcCracken internet]

Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis have posted a piece they wrote for Nieman Reports, called “The Future Is Here, But Do News Media Companies See It?” The cutline gives away the surprise ending: “Traditional news media are not yet willing to adopt the principals of the environment in which they find themselves.” Good all-around survey of what’s going on.

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Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog. Yay!

And what’s the first word in it? “So.” As in “So I have a blog.”

Remember when “so” indicated a logical connection between two thoughts? “I complained about the soup, so the chef spit into it?” Over the past ten years, beginning in (I think) Silicon Valley “so” flipped to become a way of easing listeners into an entirely new topic. Or into a welcome new blog.

So what? So, that’s what. (Thanks to Mark S Petrovic for the link and pointing out the “so.”) [Tags: TimBernersLee tbl blogs]

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Kevin points out just how wildly wrong are Susan Cheevers‘ metaphors when she describes how “intellectual property” works on the Internet. Kevin substitutes his own far more accurate metaphorical description.

Our moral reasoning always (?) moves by metaphors, but metaphors are never perfectly accurate (or, if they are, they’re uninteresting), so our moral reasoning never is utterly persuasive. Still, metaphors are all we have, and Kevin’s are MUCH better than Cheevers’.

[Tags: DigitalRights copyright KevinMarks SusanCheever]

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Islamicate argues interestingly that CS Lewis’ tale works better as a Muslim allegory than as a Christian one.

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After twenty years — twenty years! — Microsoft Word still can’t do the most basic of its selling points: Placing graphics into text. (Note: I am using Office XP, which puts me a rev behind.) For almost twenty years, I’ve been trying to tell Word where I want graphics laid out. Word still won’t listen to me.

I want my page to look like this:

But, after twenty minutes of trying, this is the way Word keeps insisting I want my page to look:

That happens to be with the layout set to top-and-bottom, but it’s what I get for various other layouts. If I drag the image where I want it, it bounces back to the top of the page where the top portion would be cut off if I tried to place it. Sometimes it bounces onto a new page entirely and I have to go hunting for it.

If I set the layout so that it’s inline, I get this:

Here’s a closeup:

No, it doesn’t help to create a drawing canvas first. All that does is limit the number of layout options Word can get wrong. Aaarrrggghhh!

I used to work for Interleaf. We were getting this right in 1986.

[Tags: MicrosoftWord annoyances microsoft]

Gaspar Torriero has discovered at least part of the problem. He writes in an email:

As I suspected in the comments, your document “Normal” style has the
line height set to “exactly” 18 points.

So when you insert an inline image which is taller than that, Word is
by design (and stupidly) sticking to that value and will not adjust
line height to suit the image. That is your problem. And in fact Word
is showing you the bottom 18pts of it…

To solve the problem, provided you do non want to revert to standard
line height, you should:

- insert new line
- modify Format -> Paragraph -> line spacing to “single” for that line
- insert inline image: line height will adjust accordingly
- everybody is happy

Well, we’re all happy except those of us who are chagrined because it turns out to have been our fault.

Nevertheless, based on 20 years of frustration and the weird transparency issue in the screen captures, I maintain that Word’s graphic placement is hinkey.

Thank you, Gaspar!

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Apparently — no independent corroboration — Kodak hired women at a convention in Kiev to drop things so they could repeatedly bend over while wearing Kodak-logo-ed panties and short skirts. (Thanks to Jeneane for the link.) [Tags: marketing kodak assvertising]

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Dan writes:

Starting in 2006, I’ll be putting together a nonprofit Center for Citizen Media. The goals are to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.

I’m thrilled and honored that the center will be affiliated with two superb universities in a bi-coastal partnership.

The two universities: UC Berkeley’s Grad School of Journalism and the Berkman Center. Woohoo! With this sort of backing and Dan at the helm, the CCM is likely to be a hotbed of ideas, innovation, and research. I think this is an ideal situation for Dan, and thus good for all of us. There’s no one I have more respect for than Dan, and I have a very good feeling about this new project.

FWIW, I’m more convinced than ever that citizens are going to be keepers of the public record (as Jon Udell has put it) more than they’re going to be journalists, and that the biggest effect of blogging on journalism is and will be the moving of the editorial function into the hands of readers. [Tags: DanGillmor media journalism berkman JonUdell]

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The most powerful institutions in our society don’t like the Net much. Oh, they like their reduced IT costs and they like their delusion that they can use it to market their messages to billions of us essentially for free, but they don’t like what so many of us feel is the liberating, connected value of the Internet. These institutions look at the Internet and see a mix of threat and opportunity. We — some goodly set of us — look at the Internet and see hope.

But one large institution may turn out to be special, as Charlie Nesson of the Berkman argued against my despair a couple of weeks ago: Universities. And here’s a little sign of hope: According to the NY Times, seven American univerisites have agreed to make freely available software they develop collaboratively. Janice Brand, who blogged the NYT report at CIO, says:

Peter A. Freeman, assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation, came up with today’s best quote: “It’s the science, stupid.’ It’s not the intellectual property.”

Bingo. And it’s the culture, stupid, not the copyright.

(Thanks to Kurt Starsnic for the link. Kurt also makes a good point about the Web coverage of the NYC transit strike.) [Tags: universities internet]

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The Participatory Culture Foundation has started aggregating open source bounty projects at BountyCounty.org. For example, solve GNOME’s Addressbook’s LDAP configuration problem and earn yourself $250… [Tags: OpenSource]

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Jesus was God’s blog. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Hmm, then I suppose the Talmud would be God’s blog for the Jews.

Anyway, I know I’m off base and off track here. Nevertheless: A Merry Christmas to you and your families. [Tags: blogging christianity judaism]

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When I was first introduced to Chris Dixon, a founder of SiteAdvisor.com, a few months ago, I was highly skeptical about his project. SiteAdvisor was going to tell people whether Web sites were safe. It struck me as over-ambitious, over-simplified and ripe for corruption. But after looking into it, I was impressed enough to join the board of advisors.

The SiteAdvisors.com site is still in stealth mode, but Ben Edelman — a security expert, Berkman fellow, and also on the board of advisors — has posted a long and thorough explanation of what SA is up to. So, the company is apparently no longer in full stealth mode.

Read Ben’s excellent post for the full story. Here’s my version:

SA has set up a slew of machines that crawl the Web, download whatever software they can find, and sign up for every email offer. They then run the downloaded software on virtual machines and note exactly what gets installed and how the registry is altered. They make up a unique email address for each site and note how many messages they get as a result. They also analyze the links to see if sites are part of nasty affiliate networks.

They then make all that information public via a Creative Commons license. You can go to the SA site and see exactly what will happen if you download software from an unknown Web site.

SA also sums up the results of this testing in a red, yellow, and green system of alerts. You can get a plug-in that will put those alerts next to every result on a Google results page. Hovering over the alert gives a summary. Clicking on it takes you to the full explanation. You can dive pretty deep into their analyses if you want. It evens build a mock inbox that shows you the subject lines of the spams you would have received had you signed up at a site.

So, I became a believer. First, I’ve spent a little time at the SA office and have gotten to know Chris fairly well, and I trust the SA team. Second, they answered all of my “Yeah, but” questions well: The data will be available through CC, there will be an API, there is room for users to comment on each site, the basic version will be provided for free and will be generously provisioned, their privacy policy looks good, they will accept zero advertising or other forms of vendor compensation. (Their business model includes offering a premium version at some point.)

I’ve been playing with the private beta, and I find it helpful and good-natured. And its database of empirical data, open via Creative Commons and an API, can become a very useful Web resource.

The site should be open for beta-business early next year…

[Tags: SiteAdvisor BenEdelman ChrisDixon security]

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The new structured blogging initiative is interesting and could be important. It establishes simple data standards for some typical types of things blogger blog about: Reviews, events, media, etc.

These types of metadata effort have the same basic dynamics: If they were widely adopted, there would be tremendous system-wide benefits — e.g., computers would be able to find, aggregate and normalize reviews of local restaurants because the phone number fields and ratings fields would be identifiable, etc. But, people don’t adopt metadata standards all that readily, despite the potential benefits. So, the success of structured blogging depends on how easy it is for bloggers and how appealing the benefits are.

Right now, the plug-ins are in beta Do not attempt installing them unless you are unalarmed by instructions such as “mkdir -m 777 ../sbimages” and “You will also want to edit your RSS 2.0 Index and change the<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$> .” It’s pretty straightforward but, at this point (in beta), definitely for early adopters.

The success of structured blogging depends on the blogging software providers making it one-click easy to use the structures. Then we’ll see what happens… [Tags: StructuredBlogging metadata EverythingIsMiscellaneous blogging]

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Martijn de Waal has posted a podcast of an interview with me from a couple of months ago. The podcast is about tagging ‘n’ stuff. It’s on Martijn’s new Dutch site on the future of journalism. (I haven’t listened to the podcast, and preemptively renounce everything I might have said.) [Tags: tagging taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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At least I really enjoyed doonesbury]

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Note: The kid was a hoaxer. I was a hoaxee. – Dec. 29, 2005

According to SouthCoastToday.com, a senior at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was visited by the feds after he requested a copy of Mao’s little red book via inter-library loan. The agents said that the book was on a “watch list.” They brought the book with them but would not leave it with the student.

Ah, books on watch lists. Visits by federal agents. University research under the all-comprehending eye of government bureaucrats. Thomas Jefferson would have been proud! [Tags: HomelandSecurity security libraries]

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One Web Day is getting even more exciting. This is Susan Crawford’s idea for a global celebration of the Web and its values of connectedness and creativity. As with Earth Day, its up to each locality to decide how to celebrate the day … and even what constitutes a locality is up to each locality.

Last night there was a get-together in NYC with a bunch of us on the phone. Too many good ideas.

So, mark your calendars for September 22. And start thinking about how you can celebrate the Web.

[Tags: OneWebDay SusanCrawford]

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Just in case someone else has the same problem: Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer both stopped displaying animated gifs for me recently. It turns out that it’s because of Zone Alarm, a program that is turning into a high maintenance pain in the ass. Anyway, to get the animations back, go to ZA’s Privacy pane’s Main tab and turn Ad Blocking to off. [Tags: zoneAlarm firefox InternetExplorer]

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Go here, and don’t forget to bring your eyeballs. (Link via Tim Bray.) [Tags: illusion OpticalIllusion]

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We saw Syriana last night. I liked it more when I left the theater than I do now.

I thought the acting was good. I found the narrative less bewildering than the reviews prepared me for. It came together better at the end than I expected. But it was surprisingly didactic given that it’s based on true incidents. The screenwriter seems to have invented characters in order to fill particular roles: Conscientious Arab Prince, Dissolute Arab Prince, Young Moslem ready to be molded into a terrorist, Hardened CIA Operative who speaks the truth, Slimy Corporate CEO, etc.

Too bad the character writing wasn’t just a little bit better. [Tags: syriana movies]

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Last night at the Berkman Holiday Party — pretty much what you expect: dry sherry, fair trade cigars, male and female strippers with Ph.D.s — I apparently had SJ Klein’s idea. SJ is a dedicated Wikipedian (who, according to his Wikipedia entry, won 3rd place in the Cambridge area vegan cake stable height contest in 2002), and we were talking about the bruited idea that Wikipedia might brand particular revisions of an article as stable and reasonably reliable so that people could more easily link to a Wikipedia entry without having to worry that it will be different when readers follow the link.

So, I suggested that we don’t have to wait for Wikipedia to do this. Anyone could certify particular versions of particular articles as reliable. I could, you could, the American Association of Pediatrics could, because this doesn’t have to happen on the Wikipedia site. Dozens (hundreds?) of other sites already take Wikipedia’s content as their own, under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons GFDL license. So, why not encourage various authorities (personal or institutional) to create their own seals of Good Wiki Keeping, publishing a virtual slice through Wikipedia. So, for example, on the American Chemical Society’s site you could browse through the set of Wikipedia pages that the ACS has vetted; the seals of approval could be presented as authorized versions of Wikipedia – authorized not by Wikipedia but by anyone who wants to claim authority.

SJ has been thinking about this for a while. (That seems to be generally the case with him.) He wonders what happens to the pages to which the authenticated pages link, and he wonders what happens when someone tries to edit the authenticated page from within the authenticated site. Lots and lots of questions. But I think SJ has a good idea.

Not to mention that it would be a perfect example for my book about how knowledge is becoming miscellanized, and reclustered using different organizational principles. [Tags: wikipedia SJKlein EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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David Stephenson blogs about the Wired article “Reinventing 911,” saying its discussion of Portland’s distributed emergency system validates his “Smart Mobs for Homeland Security” concept.

We should be definitely suspicious of the telcos’ insistence to Congress that their way of fetching emergency help is the best and only way. It’s so clearly an attempt by the telcos to trade on terrorism to maintain the telco’s unnatural hold on their market. [Tags: 911 terrorism security DavidStephenson]

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The Boston Globe reports on local citizen journalism, including Lisa Williams‘ H20Town. Says Lisa: “I have two small kids — you have to put off youthful fantasies of taking off for India. H2otown let me travel deeper rather than farther.”

The Boston Phoenix reports on video blogging. Steve Garfield says: “There are stories to be told. And there are a lot of stories out there.”

[Tags: blogging media LisaWilliams SteveGarfield]

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