You want your insightful TED coverage? Ethan’s got it. Getcha your insightful TED coverage heah.

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For the past couple of weeks, I haven’t been able to use Thunderbird as my mail client because it can no longer use Gmail as its pop server. I believe Thunderbird is configured correctly. I can’t get the Google settings to stick, though. I go to Gmail > Settings > Forwarding and Pop and select option #1 under Pop Download (”Enable POP for all mail…”) and I press the Save Settings button. I’m then taken back to my gmail inbox. But if I go back to the settings page, none of the options under Pop Download are chosen; the setting seems to be wiped out.

Any suggestions?

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Last night at a very interesting, delicious and fun dinner with a few blogging authors, I found out that my book title, Everything Is Miscellaneous, doesn’t translate well into French. Apparently the word the French use to label the miscellaneous box in a taxonomy is “autre.” But “Everything is Other” has a misleading existential overtone. “In Hell, everything is other,” Sartre might have written. I sort of don’t want people browsing for books to think that mine is a depressing post-War work about universal alienation.

That great French language expert, Monsieur Google, translates the title as “tout est divers.” I don’t know French well enough to be able to tell if that’s appropriate, odd, or possibly the punchline to a well-known dirty joke. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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I’m on day one of a mini-tour of Europe — Paris, Hamburg, Milan — talking about blogging with various business audiences. My main aim is to put blogging into a context bigger than business and to counter some misapprehensions. Overall, I will stress: 1. The social, connective nature of blogging: We’re not just 27 million individual op-ed writers behind walls of print; 2. If a company wants to blog, it has to give up an uncomfortable level of control; 3. Blogging is ours — for us, about what we care about, creating new “we’s” — not merely a tool for business. Of course, I expect to have my expectations subverted since I’m an American talking in three countries. (I also hope not to sound like the pompous a-hole I sound like in this post. But that may be aiming too high.)

The tour is sponsored by Edelman PR to whom I consult.*

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Ann and Nathan woke relatively early and went off to the synagogue. I went to my own “temple” where I caught up on my email.

By 12:30, we had packed and checked out. We headed out to San Marco to meet up with our daughter Leah who had gone ahead to meet a friend from school. As we made our way through the crowds, I worried that meeting someone in San Marco was going to turn out to be as practical as the time in 1969 when I agreed to meet a girl at Woodstock. But, because we’d narrowed the area to the clock tower, we found her.

Paolo had warned us last night that it was going to be a crowded day. As he said, some of Venice’s streets were declared one way for the weekend. Yes, one way pedestrian streets…and thank goodness for them. We were packed like the proverbial sardines, except vertical and moving more slowly.

(I did have a million dollar idea during the slow-motion stampede: Stock the canals with dolphins.(tm))

We made our way through San Marco, looking to escape the crowds. Eventually we found a restaurant with an empty table and had pizza, and then wandered directionally back to the hotel. After a vaporetto (water bus) ride to the train station and some serious hoisting of our big three suitcases — not a great city for people who need ramps, not steps — we are now on the train to Milan.

I’m missing Leah more than Venice, but I’m missing Venice a lot. [Tags: italy venice venezia travel]

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Kevin Marks links together danah boyd, Suw Charman, Susan Crawford and Douglas Adams in a fine post about how little we know about what the Internet will be. [Tags: internet]

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Venice is a ridiculous idea and its realization is indescribable. The throngs of tourists (including us, of course) cannot defeat the city’s basic architectural rhythm: Street, alley, passage, up a bridge, down a bridge, street, passage, open space.

And jeez are there are lot of tourists here! Even though it’s cold enough to have me buy a scarf and gloves (at surprisingly reasonable prices), the place is packed. Aside from the sheer number of people in the street, a small percentage of whom are in various revelers costumes, you’d hardly know it was Carnevale.

This morning we took the hotel’s shuttle boat to San Marco, the piazza where foolish seed-bearing tourists have their photos taken as pigeons flock around them; our children went through two bags of seed. Then we wandered. And wandered. It’s a scientifical fact that at any moment, 90% of the people in Venice are lost. The city is so confusing that even the concierge at our hotel couldn’t find some addresses. Way-finding works using the Internet routing technique: People point you to the next waypoint where you ask someone else.

We strolled and wandered all day. Venice is newly beautiful at every turn. We were driven by small goals: Find a photo store that doesn’t charge 9 euros for a roll of b&w film (try S. Lio, if you can find it, which you can’t); find a place for lunch where we could sit and eat something other than a panino or pizza (Hint: Don’t try the place we ended up where the pasta arrabiata was ok and the pommodore was not), find a gift for the girls next door who are feeding our turtles.

We staggered back to the hotel around 5pm, quaking with fatigue. The temperature had topped out at 50F and we had walked a long way. We fell into a sleep the depth but not the length of a canal, except for my wife who had been told by the synagogue in the Ghetto area that she had to come before 5:30 with her and our son’s passports if they wanted to be admitted on Saturday. So, she made her way there and back, lit candles and said prayers over a couple of local rolls.

Then we went out to dinner with Paolo and Monica Valdemarin. They took us to La Zucca (Santa Croce, 1762, phone: 041 5241570), a tiny restaurant with as many meatless dishes as ones with meat. The food was fabulous and the prices were reasonable. It was also wonderful to catch up with the Valdermarins. Thank you!

We got back to the hotel without getting lost, the first time in all of Venice’s history that any tourist has done so. [Tags: italy venice travel venezia]

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Tara Hunt is compiling reasons why people tag. To her list I’d add: So readers can read only the topics on my blog that they care about (which theoretically should lower my inhibitions about blogging “off topic”) and to increase (a tiny bit) the world’s meaning and/or intelligibility.

Go add your own reasons…

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Again just a couple of minutes left at the Net cafe. I don’t even have any guidebooks with me in which I can look up spellings…

We wandered around Florence again today, this time in the general direction of the synagogue. It’s nice-looking on the outside, but pretty dark and unattractive inside. The museum upstairs is small and is so poorly labeled that if you don’t happen to go with an orthodox Jew who is your spouse, little of it would mean much. One of the exhibits does helpfully explain that Florence has had on and off relationships with Jews over the past 800 years, going through times of acceptance and times of not-so-acceptance. There are currently about 1,000 Jews in the city. The one kosher market doesn’t seem big enough to support them all.

We had lunch in a kosher vegetarian restaurant, Ruth’s, that serves pretty good Italian and Israeli food. The cous-cous was good.

We walked to a church, the name of which I won’t get right, that has an exhibit in its bowels featuring Michelangelo’s Medici tombs and lots of reliquaries. I have to say that exhibiting the bones of dead saints seems a tad pagan, but who am I to judge? But it does make you wonder if there’s a respectful way of cutting up a saint for display.

This evening we go to Venice by train…

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Research fellows at Harvard are pretty removed from faculty politics, but I was nonetheless surprised that the Board voted Summers out since it meant admitting they made a mistake in hiring him.

Sure he was smart. But he was also a ham-fisted egoist with a petulant CEO’s sense of collaboration.

Bad fit. Good bye.

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We took a 9:10am bus to Siena today and wandered around all day in the rain. The Fort was closed and the Duomo (”Duomo” means ca thedral, not “dome” as we cognate whores assume) was covered with a giant billboard showing what it will look like after it’s refurbished, but so what? The old part of Siena retains is medieval shape and a lot of its medieval stones. The streets are wider and not as warren-y as those in other medieval towns I’ve visited. Well worth the beautiful ride and the rainy day.

We came back in time to sneak a visit to the inside of Florence’s Duomo. It’s a huge empty space; the one euro audio kiosk did not explain why it’s sparsely decorated and furnished. In fact, the audio kiosk didn’t explain much. The inside of the dome depicts what heaven might look like – remarkable ( especially the foreshortening), but it pales compared to Michelangelo’s vision of the last day in the Sistine Chapel – the Duomo’s seems static compared to it. Of course, that’s a pretty tough act to follow.

Time’s up at this Net cafe…

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We got a slightly late start in Florence and then spent the day enjoyably strolling the city aimlessly with our daughter as our guide. We s tuck our heads in here and there, but other than going through the Dante house museum – some information about Dante but nothing original from the period – we just strolled in the rain. Across from Dante’s hosue is the church where Beeatrice is buried. It is dark, old and moving. We did some grocery shopping in the indoor market next door to our daughter’s shared apartment; it doesn’t get much more charming than that. We had an excellent dinner at Otorino, a restaurant we’d enjoyed the last time we were here; it was as close as we’ve come to ordering a first course and a second course for dinner. Where do the Italians fit it?

We did run into one confounding scam. As we were walking away from one of the outdoor markets, someone ran up to us claiming to be a vendor from whom our daughter and her roommate stole sunglasses this morning. And, he added belatedly, they stole a Gucci watch as well. This theft supposedly happened this morning, when it turns out our daughter was with us. The best we can figure is that I was supposed to be intimidated and pay him for the watch and glasses to get rid of him. I told him to go to hell. Weird.

We went to the bus station, bought tickets for Siena tomorrow, and went back to the hotel to sleeeeeep.

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I feel stuffed. It’s as if we did nothing but eat color yesterday.

We got a late start and didn’t get to the Vatican until 9:45. It’s a good thing we weren’t fifteen minutees later because the line doubled. Even so, we had a twenty minute wait to make it to the security checkpoint. (I wish I’d been taking photos of all the checkpoints we’ve encountered at ancient and religious sites.)

I hadn’t been in St. Peter’s for 35 years in which time it outran my memory. This is what you get if you want to turn stone into spirit and have all the money in the world.

When we left and asked directions to the Sistene Chapel, we were told that it closes in 30 minutes — the cut off is 12:20 or 12:30, depending on whom you ask. So, we hobble-ran the kilometer (our son is on crutches, recovering from knee surgery) and joined the back of the line, six blocks from the entrance. In desperation, we accepted a guide’s offer to get us in their special way. The tour turned out to be surprisingly good, and I feel only extremely elitist at having bought our way in; my pretend consolation is that we didn’t keep non-guide-payers out.

Unlike St. Peter’s, the Chapel has changed since I saw it in 1971. It’s been entirely cleaned, and the colors now are not shy. (A hint if you go: Start at the back end because that way the paintings aren’t upside down.)

It is odd coming as a Jew to the Vatican. While we understand some of the symbolism, we are reading it, not living it. It is as hard for us to get a grasp of the spirituality that chooses to express itself that way as it is for Christians to understand why my wife and son won’t carry an umbrella on the Sabbath.

We walked back from the Vatican, checked out of our hotel, and took a train to Florence where we met up with our daughter who is studying here this semester. (Excellent restaurant: I Tuscano.) We walked a little bit last night: Straight streets, single-file sidewalks, quiet enough at 10:30pm that our son’s crutching banged out loud. [Tags: italy rome travel florence]

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Emanuele Quintarelli suggests that we go further than Peter Van Dijck’s mefeedia that provides a few broad facets by which tags can be organized. Why not create a wiki at which users can create a much more detailed, hierarchical taxonomy that would know, for example, that Venice is not just a place but that it’s a place in Italy (as well as a place in the US)?

It might work, but it raises three key questions when it comes to tags and taxonomies:

1. Tags have succeeded because they require so little thought and can used without regard for their meaning beyond oneself. (I suspect many of us do consider social meanings, but one doesn’t have to.) Would a wiki that requires us to think about metadata work? Would enough people participate?

2. If enough people participate, could we come up with a universal taxonomy specific enough to be useful? Do we think about things in sufficiently the same ways?

3. If such a taxonomy existed, would we use it? It would be a bottom-up controlled vocabulary, but it’d still be a controlled vocabulary that requires people to look things up.

I suspect that having reduced the problem of metadata to its most elemental form — type in a word or two that will remind us of what a page or photo is about — we will now complexify it usefully to the point at which the complexity gets in the way. It’s impossible to predict where those various points will be. (Complexity reaches its own level of misunderstanding.) I thus don’t think we can predict where Emanuele’s suggestion falls, although I worry that it’s more appealing to information architects than to “normal” people. (Yeah yeah, info architects are normal people. Except not when it comes to information. Besides, have you ever hung out with information architects??? :) [Tags: everything-is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous information_architecture ia folksonomies taxonomy]

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Yesterday we walked an itinerary sketched by Gianluca the night before. And it was a wonderful day.

My family went to the Great Synagogue for services. My son’s knee was hurting, so they came back to the hotel for a rest. We then walked to the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuele II and the tomb of the unknown soldier. One of the guards approached us and asked if we were Jewish; our son wears a yarmulke, so he was either a Jew or has bad taste in headgear. The guard was also a Jew and told us about his injuries in the first Gulf War. Throughout the day, strangers came up to us and identifyied themselves as Jews; this is not an experience we have in Boston, and it felt pretty good.

We then walked to the Trevi Fountain, which was more interesting than I’d remembered. Those of us who handle money on the Sabbath threw coins in, thus guaranteeing – according to the legend – that we would feel like gullible tourists. We ate in a random pizza place to everyone’s satisfaction, and then walked to the Pantheon, a beautiful building. It’s been a Christian church for about 1500 years, but it still feels like a pagan boast.

From there we went to the Piazza Navona, the shape of the chariot race track that once was there. The buskers were entertaining, and the coffee at the sidewalk cafe was priced, let’s say, enthusiastically. The piazza was yet another in a day of glorious public spaces.

We walked a little more, made it to the piazza where they burned Bruno (O burn, Bruno!) and then we pooped out and took the #8 home. We rested a bit and had a delicious Indian meal near the hotel in Trastavere.

Today we wandered through the Sunday morning flea market for about an hour. It is one gigantic, crowded market. (Interesting taxonomic item: Things people leave a flea market with. In our case, it was a toothbrush and two hair clips.)

We then went to the Colliseum. Being there forces you into multiple perspectives, none of which you can manage: What was it like to be a spectator? A victim? In another culture 2,000 years ago? (Note to tourists: When the guides outside tell you that for 8 euros per person they can skip you over the 45-minute wait, what they actually mean is that they can skip you over the 7-minute wait. Surprisingly, we didn’t fall for it.)

The Palatine is next door. You approach it by going up a walk at the crest of which is Titus’ Arch, a memorial to his victory over the Jews. “People like him were not allowed to go through it,” a guide said to the large crowd surrounding him, pointing to our son. Jews were barred from the gate until the Allies liberated Italy in 1945. Pretty amazing. But, the Roman Empire crumbled and the Jews are still here. So, now what does the arch memorialize, eh? In your face, Titus!

The vista then opens on a field of ruins in various states of repair. One can almost imagine what the scene must have looked like when the Empire was in flower and committed to being magnificent in public. Fascinating, moving, eerie.

We had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant that had been recommended to us: Marguta (Via Marguta, 118). It was fancier and more expensive than we’d expected, but it was also delicious.

From there we wandered through the Piazza del Popolo (all spellings approximate). The exhibit of models of Leonardo’s inventions was actually not the rip-off I anticipated, although I’m really not convinced he invented the bicycle. We wandered a bit more and came back to the hotel, only to find some open wifi. Woohoo! Gotta love the open wifi. (Thank you, Belkin54g!)

The weather has been perfect and the city is continuously surprising. What a great use of 2,000 years. [Tags: italy rome travel]

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The ancient Romans were small in stature, so I realized today that I could totally have kicked Caesar’s ass.

Yeah, baby! America! #1!

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Time is running out at the Internet cafe I’m typing this from, so this will be quick.

Fine flight. Little sleep. Breakfast consisted of a granola bar thrown at you from the front of the plane as first class brought their kids to watch.

Into the hotel at 12:30. Out for a walk at 1. We wandered aimlessly around Trastavere (sp?), so named because it’s across the Tiber. (Note to self: Build piazzas in Boston. The American idea – bundling all of a city’s free space into a mall or two – just doesn’t work as well.) Dinner with Gianluca B., a grad student I met here last year – great fun. Spray myself, my family, and a visiting soccer team as I try to drink from a sidewalk watering tube. Asleep at 10:30. Up at 8am. Eat the free breakfast. See my family off as they go to the Great Synagogue for services. I report to the local Internet cafe, present my papers, get the retinal scan, pass through the metal detector, and am lightly probed by the Microsoft Trusted Anus system, and log on.

Loving the trip so far.

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The little Internet cafe in Rome from which I’m writing this wouldn’t let me go online until I produced my passport, which they then dutifully photocopied. Chilling effect? You betcha.

Get used to it. This is what the digital ID totalitarians want for us. (Note: If you don’t want this type of ID control, then you are ipso facto not a digital ID totalitarian.)

PS: They have also rearranged the keyboard to confuse the enemy. I’ve been copying and pasting angle brackets, not to mention giving a three finger salute to type a @. Damn foreigners!

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David isenberg, my friend, asks for bloggage to announce the following:

I’d like offer a special deal to readers of your blog that does
not appear on the official F2C website. It is about 50% off the
standard early bird pricing, $295 (vs. regular early bird at $595).
They need to use code FOBDL when they register at
http://www.pulver.com/f2c/ Unfortunately, this deal expires on
February 28.

F2C: Freedom to Connect, will happen April 3 & 4 in Washington DC.

I am going. I am speaking there. See you there?

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Plug in your zip code and find the local gas station with the lowest prices…

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Cory gave a talk at Harvard last night that I had to miss, but I was at the little lunch the Berkman Center threw for him that afternoon. Cory held forth in that brilliant way of his about the war against the Internet. (Will someone find something that he doesn’t know…but please don’t tell him because then he’ll know that, too.)

One of the things I most like about Cory is that he looks at the likely effects of technology. I’ve had too many discussions with people I highly respect who act as if technology is neutral and that’s the end of the story. Of course tech is neutral in the sense that it can be used for good or evil. But the world in which technology exists is not neutral. So, we have to think about whether what we’re building is likely to make the world better or worse. Cory does that and has enough context to do so extraordinarily well.

I said something like this to him afterwards and he said that that’s what science fiction writers do: What would happen if this bit of tech or that were around?

Good point. Fiction overall makes choices and follows the consequences.

In the war to save our Internet, we need to enlist more fiction writers.

Cory uses the phrase “Dark Net” to denote the parts of the Net that escape from the strictures of the copyright totalitarians et al. I don’t like the term. It comes from a whitepaper by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marus Peinado and Bryan Willman.* The darkness of the Dark Net implies that the activities there are shady. Some are, but many are just users using content they own.

So, I’d like to find a different term. Open Net? Free Net? Our Net? Resistance Net? User-owned Net? Keep Your Stinking Hands Off My Computer, You Corporate Fascists, Net? [Tags: cory_doctorow berkman dark_net digital_rights]

*It’s an odd paper because it argues that DRM and trusted computing will never eliminate all illegal sharing…odd because it comes from Microsoft guys working on eliminating what they consider illegal sharing. The paper did not foresee just how totalitarian the world was going to get.

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A little bit late, I’ve run across a post from Johnnie Moore that makes the most excellent point that organizations think the path to success is to emulate thewildly successful “branding campaigns” of other organizations. So, they think about the tagline, jingle or cutesy character that has worked beyond anyone’s dreams, and then they try to come up with their own. But, as Johnnie says, why think you’re going to be the one in ten thousand who comes up with something as zippy and memorable? This strategy leads to 9,999 failures for every success.

Johnnie cites the highly successful tagline for Las Vegas — “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” — and the highly forgettable attempts by cities to come up with their own. “God forbid that we let the people who live here, and those who visit, tell the story in a million more modest, less consistent but much more credible ways?”

BTW, here’s my suggestion for a tagline for Boston: “And what did you get on your SAT’s?” [Tags: johnnie_moore marketing branding boston]

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CSOonline sent a bunch of security folks to see the movie Firewall. Is it realistic? Allow me to quote Dennis Treece on just one small point:

And he has the requisite blindingly fast and error-free typing skills, without even looking at the keyboard, which Hollywood demands of its geek heroes. Once again, nah, I don’t think so.

It’s a fun set of reviews. [Tags: movies harrison_ford security reviews]

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Our daughter Leah is spending a semester studying in Florence, Italy. Tomorrow night, we’re leaving to spend 10 days with her in Rome, Florence and Venice. Then I’m going to go to Paris, Hamburg and Milan over the course of three days, talking with businesses and some media about corporate blogging, sponsored by Edelman PR, to whom (disclosure) I consult.

Things have been busy around here so I haven’t really focused on the trip, but it should be pretty fabulous, although it’ll probably take me a good eight days to escape the psychic grip the book I’m working on has me in. I’ve been consumed by it, from morning until night. 25% of my time is devoted to fretting about it. Another 32% goes to reading stuff on the Web that I can’t remember how or why I got to. I spend 11% of my time unwriting what I wrote the day before. Then there’s the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ 8% Attention Tax. Nevertheless, the book is with me all the time.

For those who are keeping track, I am starting chapter 7 out of 9, although I am done with chapters 1-6 only in the delusional sense that the paper has passed through the platen of my typewriter. I’m not done with them until the fat lady sings, the fat lady being in this case my editor who is not fat and would surprise me by singing. (And, no, I’m not really using a typewriter.)

Chapter 7 is about the importance of the implicit in a digital world that tempts us to make everything explicit. Now I just have to figure out what that means, why anyone should care, and how to write it. But nooooo, I have to gallivant off to Italy. You’re right, I should stay home and work on chapter 7 at least until I know what it’s about. Absolutely. I don’t deserve a 10-day break, much less in Italy. You’re right. I’ll stay here and write more. Thank you for that tough love.

(Will someone please pry my fingers off the keyboard so I can pack? Please?) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous italy travel obsessive_compulsive]

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Steve Garfield RocketBooms an interview with Dan Bricklin on the alpha release of WikiCalc, which is, well, you can figure it out. [Tags: dan_bricklin wikicalc rocketboom steve_garfield wiki]

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ComputerWorld has a terrific interview with Pres Eckert, one of the inventors of ENIAC, in which he busts some myths. Very interesting. The interview is from 1989; Eckert died in 1995. [Tags: computers pres_eckert eniac]

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A group from the Sunlight are giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman center. The group here today includes Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, and Michael Klein. [As always, what follows is an inaccurate sketch. I make no claim of completeness.)

The Sunlight Foundation aims at bring transparency and accountability to Congress. The name comes from the 1913 Brandeis quotation: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." "Lawmakers will continue to do what they do," Ellen says, "so long as they can get away with it." The Foundation's goal is "real transparency about the quid pro quo": Who is giving them money? Who are they meeting with? What are they inserting into bills? Then, this information has to be put into shareable format (xml, APIs).

For this, they need citizens to do some investigation — "distributive journalism."

Congress still files bunches of disclosure information on paper. The Foundation is working with the Center for Responsive Politics on digitizing this. Ellen shows screen captures of how the government currently makes information available online: Endless lists of cryptically named files, many of which lead to single PDFs of paper forms.

Sunlight's plan: Collect new information, digitize the old, and invest in connecting the records. Find ways to involve citizens as muckrakers and reporters. Get the information out of DC and into the blogs, etc., where people are lookng for it. And galvanize a national campaign.

Micah says they'd like to have a tool to enable any blogger or journalist to put a box on any page that talks about a Congressperson. Maybe the box lists their top five donors and links to a page with all the info.

kjQ: (Bill McGeveran) Doesn't this pose a privacy threat to individual donors who have given a small amount of money to a cause that perhaps his neighbors don't like? How can we have the maximum benefit of sunlight but also not chill a private person who wants to donate $300 to some cause?
A: (Mike) That information is already there. It's already available.

A: (Ellen) If you give less than $200, it's not recorded.A: (Mike) There might be some small chilling effect, but the corrosive effect of not having sunlight is an overwhelmingly bad thing.

Q: (Amanda Michel) They key audience for Sunlight are the researchers and activists. They need timely data. Aggregating data and making it available to researchers would be a tremendous service.
A: (Mike) First the data has to be there. We'll also provide tools for using the data.

Q: (irc) Any support from Congress?
A: (Andrew Rasiej) No. Not publicly.
A: (Mike) Schwarzenegger is going to make his calendar public. And John McCain is in favor of more disclosure.

Q: How can they say no?
A: (Ellen) They say that if they post their calendars, they would be reluctant to meet with groups outside of the mainstream.
A: (Andrew) They just can't fathom it. "They're so addicted to topdown control..."

Q: (Dan Gillmor) Are there any states or municipalities that have gone part of the way that you could use as a test bed?
A: (Ellen) We're working on it.

A: (Micah) It's a fertile time for doing this.

Q: I ran a campaign for the mayor of Portland. To draw off votes from another candidate, we ran a competing candidate. With full sunlight, we couldn't have done that.

Q: Will there be an opportunity for candidates to respond?
A: (Mike) They have the world and the platform to respond. And we're just making the data available.
A: (Ellen) We're doing a blog that will use the data and people will be able to respond there.

Q: (me) Are you putting forward a Sunlight Pledge of some sort that candidates can take?
A: We're working on it. (Dan Gillmor adds: Put the draft up on your site and your readers will write it for you.)

Q: (me) Are you working on standardized data formats?
A: Yes. It's premature to talk about it. We're talking with people.
A: (Andrew) The data is in silos and the owners of it don't like the idea that their data might be put into the public.

(This could be an important service on which some killer public service apps can - and I hope will - be built.) [Tags: politics sunlight+foundation disclosure disclosure andrew+rasiej micah+sifry michael+klein ellen+miller congress]

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Martin Varsavsky, Fon’s fearless leader, and Glenn Fleishman finally got to talk together. Glenn has a long post about it. This is, from my point of view, the definitive interview, at least so far. Glenn’s take-away: “Fon today seems much more about telephony to me than it did yesterday.” (Disclosure: I’m on Fon’s board of advisors.) [Tags: fon martin_varsavsky glenn_fleishman wifi]

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If I read Dave “Technorati” Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere post correctly — and when it comes to numbers, the chances of my going right is nil — rather than being shaped like a hockey stick, the blogosphere is shaped like an alert python that’s just eaten some big bloggers.

There used to be a head of the tail that consisted of bloggers with lots of links going into them and a tail as long all get-out consisting of bloggers with a few links. Now, there’s still a head, but there are fewer bloggers and more mainstream media in it. The bloggers who used to be in the head (plus others, for more bloggers now have lots of links) have been pushed past the line’s elbow and form a bump. And the long tail has gotten longer…27M blogs long.

Here’s what I think is happening, if my understanding of the stats is correct (which it probably isn’t): As more people blog, the sites that we all read in common remain the MSM. Links to the MSM thus increase in almost a straight line as the overall size of the blogosphere increases. But as blogging spreads, interests get more diverse, so there are fewer blogs that we all read; those sites get forced into the python’s lump.

Does this mean the mainstream media are “winning”? Nah, it just means that they remain the main stream. We don’t yet know if they are a habit we’re going to overcome, an institution waiting to be Wikipedia-ed, or if they will transform themselves enough to continue being our common ground.

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. And I’m a friend of Dave Sifry’s.)

Technorati has introduced a welcome new feature in beta: A slider that lets you adjust how important blogging “authority” is to you in a particular search. As Dave says, turning up the “authority” volume is useful when doing a search in a heavily-spammed area such as “mortgage.” [Tags: technorati blogosphere]

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From Boomka:

Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity – and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest – this time drawn by Jews themselves!

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

In the incomprehensible mix of social norms, religious precepts and cultural politics, I can’t take this as anything more than Jews commenting on Jews. But I like it. (Thanks to Hanan for the link.) [Tags: cartoons jews]

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The Bush administration spent at least $1.6 billion on public relations and advertising campaigns over 30 months, said a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
—Arizona Star

I believe when the government does it, it’s called “propaganda.”

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Rebecca MacKinnon blogs about Yahoo!’s new guidelines for dealing with totalitarian states. [Tags: rebecca_mackinnon yahoo china politics]

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The Wall Street Journal aggregates the late night jokes about Cheney shooting a friend in the face. The most trenchant, not surprisingly (and in my opinion): The Daily Show. [Tags: dick_cheney jon_stewart humor]

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Paul English at GetHuman in his blog muses that we should come up with a standard phone tree, such as:

0 for operator, 1 for customer service, 2 for sales, 3 for billing questions, etc. Then I would never have to listen to the stupid “Your call is important to us” nonsense. The * key might always mean go back and the # key might always mean confirm. Or something like that.

He proposes a company that conforms to this to-be-invented phone tree could play a little musical sequence at the beginning of the call to let us know that we can just punch the standard numbers.

Cool idea. [Tags: paul_english customer_service gethuman]

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Glenn Fleishman is going to be interviewing Martin Varsavsky, the founder of Fon, tomorrow morning and is soliciting questions. This should be a helpful, vigorous and clarifying interview.(Disclosure: I’m on Fon’s board of advisors.) [Tags: glenn_fleishman martin_varsavsky fon wifi]

I think the interviewed just happened.

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WickedIndie.com, my daughter’s production company — three Emerson College students — created a humorous video for Paul English’s GetHuman project. (GetHuman lists tips ‘n’ tricks — um, I mean hacks — for reaching human beings at various companies.) Since I am one of the two Actors in it, this is a rare chance to see me exhibiting my finely honed thespian abilities, assuming one discounts the constant faking of my way through life. [Tags: leah_weinberger film gethuman paul_english]

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Global Voices runs a round-up of Syrian bloggers upset about the violent reaction to the cartoons.

As usual, there’s an amazing spread of voices and places at GV this morning, including a report from Bahrain that discusses, among other things, bloggers’ reaction to the much-televised ritual in which bloodied men march through the streets. And there’s a post called “African women’s voices this week,” voices I’m guessing a lot of us don’t hear enough of. [Tags: global_voices globalvoices syria cartoons africa bahrain]

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Remember when hackers were people who were able to circumvent the safeguards of a system to get it to do what they wanted and were sometimes played by the adolescent Angelina Jolie?

The Boston Globe today on the front page promises to show us how to “hack” our iPods and other devices. The article, by Hiawatha Bray, continues the trend of weakening the term “hack” so that it means tips ‘n’ tricks. For example, the article suggests two ways to “hack” Windows XP: Use the text-to-speech capability built into the system and manage the programs that automatically start up by using the built-in Windows’ utility designed for the job.

Q: What will we call the hacking that subverts and circumvents (for good or for evil)? Extreme hacking? X hacking? Xacking?

A: If Congress has it’s way: Terrorism. [Tags: hacking language hiawatha_bray]

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Once again, Joho has been ignored by those who choose the Netdiver Best of the Year design awards.

I am forced to conclude that Netdiver has a bias against orange. [Tags: netdiver awards design orange]

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Last night, at the end of her lecture, Miriam Udel Lambert read a sonnet by Robert Frost that I found moving and beautiful:

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent
So that in guys it gently sways at ease
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everyone on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

Jeez, that guy can write! [Tags: miriam_udel_lambert robert_frost poetry]

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