Dan Bricklin blogs about a company he’s been advising that’s launched a system that lets people track multiple symptoms on a PDA. Dan says the symptom has been customized for “ADHD, anxiety, Asperger’s syndrome, autism, cancer treatment, depression and bipolar disorder, postpartum or menopausal issues, stress, headache, and neurological conditions such as epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease.” Sounds really useful. [Tags: medicine dan_bricklin symtrend]

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Omigod, the Republicans are stumbling around like Democrats when it comes to Hispanic issues.

The immigration bill has turned into a fiasco, leaving the Republicans as the party that would build a wall between two countries — a wall! — and forcing the President to have to clarify his party’s position by saying that, no, putting 12 million people on deportation trains probably isn’t such a practical idea.

Then our President is forced to take a stand on a symbolic, wedge issue: Does the national anthem have the same value if sung in Spanish? Karl Rove would not have let the President get backed into that corner. And once in the corner, he would not have let Bush snarl his way out of it. How can the president of country of immigrants find our national song less beautiful sung in the language of those citizens who have chosen to come here? Why does it make him frightened — I do believe fear is behind this reaction — instead of bring a lump to his throat?

Countries worried about preserving their “purity” are rarely on a good path. [Tags: bush rove politics]

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In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson has a hilarious set piece that denounces books using the same logic followed by those who denounce video games. Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, a new biography by Leo Damrosch I’m greatly enjoying, provides some grist for that mill, quoting Rousseau on the effect of his discovery of the world of fiction:

This love of imaginary objects, and this facility for occupying myself with them, ended by disgusting me with everything that surrounded me, and determined that taste for solitude that has remained with me ever since. (p. 39)

Yes, reading makes one disgusted with the world and with others. So, stop reading, you kids and go play some video games!

Steven has an appreciation of Jane Jacobs, author of the clearly thought, beautifully written and deeply human Death and Life of Great American Cities. Plus he writes about baseball stats in a way that even I, who cares about neither baseball nor stats, enjoyed. [Tags: reading games rousseau steven_johnson baseball jane_jacobs cities]

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I have am undoubtedly dumb question about the Semantic Web.

Let’s say I want to express in an RDF triple not simply that A relates to B, but the degree of A’s relationship to B. E.g.:

Bill is 85% committed to Mary The tint of paint called Purple Dawn is 30% red

Frenchie is 75% likely to beat Lefty Niagara Falls is 80% in Canada

Other than making up a set of 100 different relationships (e.g., “is in 1%,” “is in 2%,” etc.), how can that crucial bit of metadata about the relationship be captured in RDF?

Note that I am not asking for practical reasons. I have a theoretical interest in the topic. [Tags: semantic_web rdf dumb_questions]

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Siderean , one of the interesting faceted classification companies, has announced some new capabilities that aim at automating the generation of metadata and that integrate tagging with facets.

The automation comes from entity extraction tools (plus the ability to integrate third party tools, because, frankly, Siderean is not in the entity extraction business) that isolate names of people, places, organizations, dates, etc. from a collection of pages. This addresses one of the real inhibitors of the use of faceted classification: The data has to already be well structured and well tagged. That makes it great for browsing databases but not as good for browsing big piles of unstructured data (= documents).

The system integrates tags in a useful way. Users can tag items and then use tags to further specify searches through the faceted interface. In fact, the tags can be “bucketed” and treated as facets. The tags can be marked as personal or public, and can be associated with groups and other contexts. Yes, the system does integrate with del.icio.us. (Siderean fooled around with this in a beta project called — wonderfully — fac.etio.us.

Siderean also announced that it’s now using the faceted information to drive analytics. This is really “just” another way of displaying the faceted information. But it can be quite useful because a faceted system has so much data built into it. For example, a library system might know that (and this is a made-up example) there were fifteen times as many books about Iraq published in the past two years than in the past twenty; it has to know this if it’s going to let users browse for books by subject and then by year (or vice versa). Siderean’s analytics offering follows that of Endeca.

Faceted classification is young. It’s exciting watching imaginative companies like Siderean invent new twists and turns right under our eyes. [Tags: taxonomy faceted_classification facets siderean tags]

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I’m talking on Sunday morning at my brother and sister-in-law’s local Ethical Culture chapter in Maplewood, NJ. My topic is “Is the Internet moral?” My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, posted a notice on the local community bulletin board, immediately drawing a bunch of well-earned contemptuous comments. Lively, to say the least.

I gave a talk at DAMA on Wednesday where someone reminded me about a piece I wrote in 2000. It lays out what I plan on saying on Sunday (skipping the non-moral metaphysics parts). I also realized how much it lays out what became Small Pieces Loosely Joined. (I hate the beginning of the piece. Bad bad writing.) [Tags: internet morality meredith_sue_willis]

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Neil Young is promoting his anti-war protest album by allowing us to stream it today only. [Tags: neil_young music iraq]

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Susan Crawford updates us on the Senate amendment on Net neutrality, now that the House has decided the carriers really need to control what we get to do and see on the Internet. [Tags: net_neutrality susan_crawford digital_rights]

Tom Evslin and Jeff Pulver filed a petition suggesting ways to improve communications during disasters. Tom reports the industry responded uniformly negatively because, after all, things went so, um, swimmingly during Katrina. Jeez. What will it take? I don’t even want to think about it! [Tags: tom_evslin]

Jean-Baptiste Soufron has a backgrounder on the DRM bill before the French High House of Parliament.

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You probably Valdis Krebs for the insightful maps he draws of various social networks. Now his company has an interesting blog. (I just wrote about Valdis in the draft of Chapter 8 of the book I’m working on.) [Tags: social_networks valdis_krebs everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The Sunlight Foundation has gone live. It aims at letting citizens know just where their lobbying dollars are going. Congresspedia, an associated project, is also up and running. Can you guessapedia what Congresspedia isapedia? (The Washington Post has a story on the launch.) [Tags: sunlight politics congresspedia corruption congress]

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Attendees at the AOL Web lounge at the Milken Global Conference. (Click on the photo for the bigger, clearer Flickr version.) [Tags: milken businessmen photos]

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John Kruper of Cardean moderates. (I’m live blogging while I’m on the panel.)

Will Richardson, who teaches in the K-12 system, thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas…”I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They’re learning places.” His 6 and 8 yr old children have blogs and engage with other kids their age.

Liz Lawley says she uses blogs to get info out to her classes. She also sets up a class blog where students can talk about the assignments, comment on each other’s activities, post results of research and other projects. They look at one another’s posts and comment on them. “It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can’t do when you only have four hours a week in class.” She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.

George Siemens explains his term “connectivism.” The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it’s becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can’t keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.

Adrian Chan says that different social software apps are organized to support different themes: Dating, career networking, etc. He looks at the social practices in the use of the software, including in the educational environment. What matters is how technology is embedded in the process. In the case of edu, many of the students already have practices set up: They already IM, chat, etc. How do these technologies change conversation? Is there a type we can identify as learning? If you integrate technologies, would you lose some of those learning opportunites.

I talk about lessons from Wikipedia ,but I can’t blog and talk at the same time.

Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he’s concerned that we’re training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they’re not on the test. “Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum.” MMORPGs are one way to do that. They’re not just games; they’re synthetic worlds. (He says the average age of WOW players is 28.) Because you can imagine liberating things in the game, you imagine liberating things outside the game. E.g., a mgr at Yahoo approaches every task as if setting out on a quest. Doug shows the famous video of the Star War Galaxies emergent party – 100 players learning choreography, etc. He taught a course with a heavy mmorpg component and learned he had to get himself out of the way. They learned from experience. E.g., it’s hard to lecture about ethics, but if you can put them into a situation where they have to make a choice…

Q: It’s all so basically new. Are people basically good or bad in this environment?
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn’t the center of the experience.

Liz: Content isn’t irrelevant. If we’re going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it’s not a matter of pouring content into people.

Q: Companies access MySpace of potential employees. Should your 6 and 8 year olds be worried?
Liz: This is a huge issue. We can’t tell our kids not to blog. We have to teach them to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 yrs.
George: We have to teach them how to handle the freedom.
Will: This is a literacy we’re not teaching our kids. And enabling kids in MySpace to link to Old Spice is what’s really bad.
Me: And we need a culture of forgiveness. Maybe our kids will figure it out.

Q: You’re creating a generation of Borgs that play games.
(We didn’t really answer this.)

Q: We get it. How do we get there? E.g., not everyone can afford a laptop.
Liz: You have to start with the teachers. The technology has to be part of the day to day environment.

George: The problem is a lack of will, not of resources.

Q: With 50,000 blog posts an hour, the problem is one of discovery. How do we know whom to trust?
Doug: Scale counts. E.g., at Second Life a group looks for copyright infringement. When it gets really big, they can’t police it. Community governance arises.

Me: These are issues we can only solve by working through them. The change is too deep.

Q: In Shanghai, you can go into a Net cafe where people are playing mmorpgs that put them into medieval China. And I blog and get hate mail. What about the dystopian aspects?
Doug: It’s both/and. People probably said about the first cave paintings: “Oh no, the kids will spend all day on line and won’t hunt.” People miss the subtleties of what’s going on.

Liz: In part it’s because you’re writing for Huffington Post.

Q: We still have the old leadership style.
Liz: People react by banning laptops. It puts a burden on the professors when they have to actually hold students’ attention. We’re performers at heart but that’s not what professors will need to be.

Will: The control issue is at every level. There’s a district in Texas that’s banned the word “MySpace” — not the site but the word.George: Same issues for corporate education.

Doug: Scaffolding knowledge is different than experiential knowledge. Some ways are not taught well in an exploratory fashion. [Tags: milken education blogs]

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Paul Gigot of the WSJ moderates a panel on the future of the world economy.

First to speak: Václav Klaus, the Czech president. He was reluctant to accept the invitation to talk about topics as indefinable as the global economy because it is a distraction from the real problems and from actually doing anything. He focuses on Europe. It is an tightly interconnected world, he says. Some in Europe have proposed establishing a fund to compensate the “victims of globalization,” by which they mean Europeans. Instead, they should create a fund for the African victims of European protectionism. The real problems, he says, are in the realm of ideas, e.g., government intervention, paternalistic income redistribution, political correctness, those who think they’re better than us and would regulate us…

David Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group (see this), speaks. He begins by trashing the Carter administration, in which he served. [I'd take Carter-style incompetence over Bush's any day.] He says the US used to be the economic driver. Now what happens outside the US is more important to our economy than what happens inside. We have to change if we’re going to join a vibrant global economy. We need to encourage investing overseas and let non-US investments here. If we don’t change, we’ll become second class citizens.

Nobelist Gary Becker (blog). Factors that have driven this amazing global economy: 1. Remarkable productivity growth, particularly in the US. Productivity determines whether people are better off. It will continue unless policies intrude. (Gigot nods vigorously.) 2. Developing economies (China, India) where governments have gotten out of the way.

Risks: Not oil prices or inflation rates. Not low savings. The danger is geo-political and government involvement. The risk is that the governments will try to do things they can’t really do, such as provide full employment. Overall, he says, the economies look good.

Gigot: We have a world of liquidity. [Is that like Water World?] It hasn’t been this liquid since inflation was high. Should we be worried?

Becker: Relative prices change, but that doesn’t mean the price level will rise. Inflation is mainly determined by monetary policy, and central banks are providing stability.

Rubinstein: Fuel prices went up faster during the oil shock of the ’70s. We’re better at managing the change now.

Gigot: We have a new Fed chairman. How’s he doing so far?

Rubinstein: Until there’s a crisis, we won’t know if he’s up to the job.

Becker: I agree. But it doesn’t all rest on the individual. The tools are in place…

Klaus: I share the optimism. I wrote my doctoral dissertation 40 yrs ago on “The Problem of Inflation in the Capitalist Countries,” so I know something about inflation. (Laughter).

Rubinstein: Central bankers aren’t as important as they were 50 yrs ago. Markets drive them. (Klaus rocks his head in considered disagreement.)

Gigot: Mr. President, you’re pessimistic about Europe. Eastern Europe has been adopting the flat tax…

Klaus: The longer term statistics show that EU growth rates have been going down decade by decade, from 5% in the 1950s to less than 1% now. As far as the flat tax, I campaigned for it 10 yrs ago but didn’t win. It’s on the ballot in 5 wks. I’m in favor of it, but I don’t think it’s a panacea.

Rubinstein: The 15% capital gains tax hasn’t been given the credit it deserves. And, everyone is an investor now. [Well, except the huge number of people who are in debt.]

Becker: Flat taxes aren’t flat; the poor don’t pay anything. What you really want is a low tax rate; it doesn’t have to be flat.

Gigot: If Congress doesn’t extend the capital gains rate, will the damage be immediate?

Rubinstein: It won’t help.

Becker: Barriers will continue to fall.

Klaus: Tariffs will continue to come down, but non-tariff barriers will continue to be erected.

Gigot: The Carlyle Group invests in China. What’s up there?

Rubinstein: We’ve invested in life insurance there; only 8% of the China have life insurance. We’re buying the Catepillar of China. Each deal took about 3 yrs. I kept going to what were billed as closing dinners. If you think you’re going to make a quick dollar in a year or two, that’s not the place for you. You have to make it clear that you’re going to help China, and not just help yourself. They don’t see Western capital as essential to their economy, although they’re glad to have it. [Tags: milken economics]

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A site promoting Net neutrality has launched: DontMessWithTheNet.com (blog). Amazon, eBay, Google, IAC, Microsoft and Yahoo! all support it. [Tags: net_neutrality]

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[milken] Turning education into a global mill

I’m at a session called “Changing Post-Secondary Education to Meet the Needs of a Global Economy” with Greg Cappelli of Credit Suisse, Edward Guiliano, Pres of the NY Institute of Tech; Ted Sanders, chairman of the Cardean Learning Group; moderated by Ted Mitchell, CEO of New Schools Venture Fund. (As Liz points out, the room is full of people in black suits…including her!)

Overall: The panel said stuff everyone in the room already knows: Americans don’t know nuthin’ about them furren countries. And China is so cool! Sorry, but I don’t know anything about this topic and I still didn’t learn anything.

Greg talks about education in China. China’s GDP is growing rapidly, he says. Over 10% of total world foreign direct investment goes into China and Hong Kong. Plus, he points out that there are a heck of a lot of Chinese folks. (I missed the actual number.) They’re spending a lot on education. The population is enthusiastic because getting a degree vastly increases one’s income.

Ted says that the demand of higher eductiona will exceed capacity in many countries as well as in some states in the USA. People studying outside their country will go from 1.2M now to 7+M in 2025. So, the biggest opportunities in higher ed will take place outside the US.

Edward presents a list of dismal statistics about how stupid Americans are about the rest of the world. China is becoming the largest English-speaking nation in the world, and it’s doing it through policy. We need to be teaching our kids a second language when they’re young. We should be enticing more international students here.

Ted: The educational innovators will not be found at the Harvards and Sanfords. It won’t be at the public universities because they won’t spend tax dollars. We need to think global but serve local populations. We need consortia.

[First The World is Flat reference at 32 minutes in.]

Ted: “There are 10,000 Chinese students studying in British Columbia because they can’t get into the US.” [Maybe they landed there and had the good sense not to leave.]

Q: Where will the next generation of faculty come from?
A: (Ted) They won’t be Americans. We graduated 50,000 engineers last year while China graduated 300,000 engineers.

Q: What’s in place to help people get jobs, etc. People are still using resumes.
A: Nothing in K-12.

[Liz tells me I may have misidentified the speakers. Sorry.] [Tags: milken education]

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BTW, we’ve set up a tiny IRC chat so we can pretend to be taking notes when in fact we’re making fun of people: irc.freenode.net #milken. Um, I mean we’re using it to share ideas and communicate with one another. (There are only three of us at the conference using it.) [Tags: milken irc]

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I’m on a panel at the Milken conference today. Apparently, it’s like the West Coast Davos. All I know is that the conference stipulates that I have to be dressed in business attire. Not even “business casual.” Ok, I’ll put on my sports coat and tie, but they can’t make me wear clean underwear. Oh yeah, stickin’ it to The Man!

The panel is called “Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education.” I am in awe of my panel mates.

Because it’s an actual panel, not a sequence of PowerPoint decks, no one knows where the conversation will turn. But here are some of the things I might end up saying:

What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they’re learning that they can’t be passive recipients of knowledge. But they’re also learning that authority doesn’t come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.

Knowing has been primarily a way of seeing the simplicity behind the world’s apparent complexity. But now as a culture we’re busy complexifying everything we can. E.g., blogs take a simple idea and turn it over and over in their hands, poking at it, trying it this way and that, connecting it to that other thing over there.

I don’t know what will happen to the basic structure of education, the course, but topics have exploded. This makes it harder than ever for us to listen to educators tell us what’s important for us to know…but we need to listen.

Textbooks are and always have been boring and self-satisfied. The basic problem is structural: They exist between covers. I don’t know what to do about this, but someone will figure it out.

The endless decentralized distraction that is the Internet certainly raises questions about our ability to hold our culture together (and if that is even a good thing), but we should at the very least rejoice that we are learning what education has always tried to teach us: The world is endlessly interesting. [Tags: education milken wikipedia]

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Brad (who totally does not suck) has posted a demo of a song, the first in what he promises will be a new set. It’s posted at his forum where everyone has ideas about how to make it better. My big idea about how to make it better is for people to listen to it…and to support the webbiest musician on the Web.

Yes, I know I am too old to be a BradSucks fanboy. But I am nonethelss. [Tags: music bradsucks]

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No, not Jakob Nielsen. The Nielsen ratings.

I along with n million other holders of an email address have received an invitation to join the Nielsen Net Ratings “family.” All I have to do is install monitoring software that reports on every site I visit and every transaction I do on any site. But, according to their privacy policy, no one sees this personally identified information except for Nielsen, um, an for unnamed partners, and, oh yeah, the police if Nielsen thinks I’m doing anything illegal or posibly illegal depending on who’s doing the asking. Also, if I’m caught typing with one hand, they tell my mommy.

So, Nielsen’s ratings are going to report with statistically significant accuracy on the browsing behavior of patsies. [Tags: nielsen]

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Dan Klyn has some practical suggestions for retailers thinking about letting users tag merchandise. Why not pre-populate your catalog with tags drawn from the item descriptions? Why not rank tags higher based on the popularity of the page or item? What do you do about a product that’s tagged “crappy” or “over-priced”? (I think Dan’s answer that last one is that you surface tags based in part on how popular they are.) The result is not a pure folksonomy, but purity isn’t always what we — merchants and shoppers — need.

He also points to Etsy.com as an example of a merchant using tags well. [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous dan_klyn ia tagging ]

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The Boston Globe reports today that Cingular is entirely unable to back up its heavily-advertised claim that it has the fewest dropped calls. Cingular referred the reporter, Bruce Mohl, to a research company called Telephia, and Telephia refused to provide any information about the study. So, it seems to be based on a statistically significant steaming pile of horse crap.

My own study certainly backs up the horse crap hypothesis. My Cingular phone only works if I actually climb a Cingular antenna tower, of which there seem to be a total of nine in the continental United States. Fortunately, the towers are only 11 inches tall.

I exaggerate. My Cingular phone also works if my phone is within shouting distance of yours. In fact, I’d like a rebate for the total minutes I spend yelling “Can you hear me now?” into my phone. If the terrorists were smart they’d use variations of “Can you hear me now? How about now?” as code, thus slipping by any covert government eavesdropping programs.

Plus, how about pain and suffering damages for the hours of sleep I’ve lost because my stupid !#@$%-ing phone — which has an automatically-set, atomic-quality clock in it — insists on beep-booping in the middle of the night to tell me that it’s lower on power.

And I shouldn’t pick on Cingular. Yesterday I went to the local Sprint store to check on how much they charge to use one of their phones as a modem. The brochure the clerk showed me contradicted itself in every line: The $39.99 “unlimited data” plan actually gives you 40MB before it starts charging on top of the $39.99. But, you can get a “special offer” of unlimited data for $59.99, except in the fine print it turns out to be unlimited up until 40MB. When I asked the clerk about it, he claimed to be entering a tunnel, and made static-y noises.

Is there a single person in the US who does not HATE her cellular company? [Tags: cingular cellphones advertising horse_crap]

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I’m pretty happen with my switch from Quicken to Microsoft Money. I’m not sure it’s any better, but the switch enabled me to clean up lots of crud that had accreted over the past 15-20 yrs of Quickening. And Money’s phone support has been tremendous.

But…

Money’s UI designers should invest in a dictionary. When the menu choice says “Change account details > Close or reopen accounts,” what it actually means is “Show or hide accounts.” Closing an account is a big deal. Hiding the display of an account is not.

And when it forces you to say that the amount of a bill you’re paying is either a “fixed” amount or an “estimate,” what it really means by “estimate” is that you’ve entered in precisely the amount you want to pay as stated on your paper bill.

Jeez. Don’t they do usability testing? [Tags: quicken microsoft_money usability]

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danah boyd posts brilliantly (of course) about how Wikipedia’s guidelines and reliance on mainstream verification kept the entry about her wrong. Ack! Wikipedia’s processes generally result in reliable entries, but not this time. Modify the process and guidelines? Enable better exception handling? (Burningbird picks up the thread.) [Tags: danah_boyd wikipedia]

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Net neutrality (formerly known as the end-to-end principle) means that the people who provide connections to the Internet don’t get to favor some bits over others. This principle is not only under attack, it’s about to be regulated out of existence. Here’s why it matters:

Innovation. Innovation on the Internet happens in Internet time because bits flow freely. A good idea can compete even if it comes from a kid in a garage because the kid doesn’t have to ask permission and doesn’t have to raise enough capital to make sure his bits are moving as quickly and reliably as everyone else’s. If the carriers are allowed to charge for speedy and reliable delivery, the people most affected will be the beginners and the garage shops.

Open markets. In a non-neutral environment, carriers can provide incentives for using one service and disincentives for using others. For example, Shaw (a major Canadian cableco) offers its own Internet telephone service, but charges users $10/month to use anyone else’s. The dominant — and frequently monopolistic — market positions held by carriers therefore gets extended into the market for online services.

Free speech. AOL recently “accidentally” blocked email critical of it. Canada’s version of AT&T, Telus, blocked access to a site supporting workers with whom it was negotiating. How long before providers routinely block access to sites they deem inappropriate for their customers, for their customers’ own good, of course?

Creativity. Net neutrality is being legislated away in part to make the Internet safe for Hollywood content. Carriers already block users from being full-fledged creators on the Internet by providing paltry upload capacity. Why allow the carriers to give fast-lane preference to Hollywood’s content? And why give them the power to restrict content they think may rile the copyright totalitarians?

Democracy. Remember when democracy had something to do with all people being equal? With ensuring that our institutions don’t get too powerful? Net neutrality has made the Internet a great equalizer, not just for Americans but for voices around the world. The end of Net neutrality puts control over the flow of bits in the hands of powers that are literally entrenched.

Net neutrality counts. Check SaveTheInternet.com to see how you can help. [Tags: net_neutrality digital_rights]

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SaveTheInternet.com is a coalition site about preserving Net neutrality, which we are on the verge of losing.

The end of Net neutrality means that you will see the Internet as the company that sells you a connection cares to show it to you. It could make a little difference where you live. It could make a big difference. But it shouldn’t be allowed to make any difference. [Tags: net_neutrality digital_rights]

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At the Taxocop wiki you can read a fascinating discussion of how tagging systems can and are being used internally by corporations. Christine Connors explains, for example, that at Raytheon, librarians moderate user suggestions for sites and keywords. “We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission,” Christine says. [Tags: taxonomy tagging everything_is_miscellaneous raytheon christine_connors]

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I pine for Al. He’s grown. He’s learned from his unfair defeat. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s experienced, he’s honest (and always was), he’s fiery on the topics that need fire, he understands the connected world better than any other plausible presidential candidate, he has become, yes, likable. The race would be better with him in it.

Does he get into the race if Hillary falters? If Hillary doesn’t falter but looks like she’s going to run a campaign as strangulated and phony as Kerry’s? If we all get together and ask him politely? [Tags: al_gore politics]

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The Economist has a terrific article by Andreas Kluth on the rise of “user-generated content” (which I prefer to think of as “us-generated”) that quotes Jerry Michalski on “media mogul” Barry Diller’s attitude:

“What an ignoramus!” says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. “Look around and there’s tons of great stuff from rank amateurs,” he says. “Diller is assuming that there’s a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He’s completely wrong.” Not everything in the “blogosphere” is poetry, not every audio “podcast” is a symphony, not every video “vlog” would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Testify, Jerry!

(I hesitate to link to the article because it quotes me, too, so linking feels like boasting. But I’d decided to blog Jerry’s quote before I did a double-take when I saw my name there, too. Sorry.) [Tags: user-generated_content jerry_michalski economist digital_culture barry_diller]

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According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Philips Electronics has signed an agreement with Time Inc. that requires four magazines (Time, Fortune, People, Business 2.0) to put their tables of contents on the first page. A front-cover flap will announce that Philips is behind this “innovation.”

That Time has to be bribed into not hiding their way-faring page shows how little magazines respect their readers.

Meta-idea: Philips should sell space on their flap, announcing that the flap is being brought to you by… [Tags: media advertising time philips_electronics taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Know what’s a really bad idea for democracy? Have the President’s chief political advisor also be his chief policy advisor. One predictable consequence:

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

In short: Karl Rove’s resignation of his policy role is waaaaay overdue. [Tags: karl_rove bush politics]

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Jeff Pulver has started a contest to come up with a video or an ad to help save the Internet. Cool!

(To begin with, I would have called it “Save Our Internet,” a meme that continues to sweep the Internet the way a cotton swab sweeps the 128 miles of New Jersey coast.)

While you’re at it, support OneWebDay. And the EFF. And the Open Rights Group. Or whatever you think will help. The time is definitely now. [Tags: net_neutrality save_the_internet jeff_pulver contest digital_rights]

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Chris Locke has compiled his list of favorite New Age books at Amazon. If you want some context for this, check out MysticSpellingError, the site where he has been thinking through what I hope will be his next book. [Tags: chris_locke rageboy mystic_bourgeoisie new_age amazon books]

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David Kirkpatrick at Fortune.com has a fascinating inside look at the rise of Ray Ozzie at Microsoft. Ozzie was put in charge of “Webifying” Microsoft, and was given wide range to Make It So.

The question is whether this effort is going to Microsoft-ify the Web as it Webifies Microsoft. How much of the Web’s values have to be undermined to make it safe for Microsoft? [Tags: microsoft ray_ozzie]

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About five or six years ago, I started writing a novel for kids. (I think the industry calls them “young adults,” although I personally prefer “halflings” or “Hey, you, get off of my lawn!”) It’s about a kid who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery but can’t tell anyone. II finished it a few months ago and have shown it to a couple of publishers and a couple of agents, each of whom has wildly praised it as (if I may quote) “Not right for us.”

So, here’s my plan.

I’m going to post an html version of it on the Web for free, and sell a softcover version of it through Lulu.com. Sound like a good plan?

Before I put it up for general release, though, I’d love to have someone take an editing pass at it. I’m most interested in copy editing (= nit picking) at this point, primarily because it wouldn’t be fun to do a major rewrite. (Maybe I’ll post the whole thing on a wiki once I go live with it so that the wisdom of the crowds can do the next round of drafts.)

So, if you’d like to comment on it, let me know (self evident.com) and I’ll send you the current version in Word format. (It’s 63,000 words, which formats to a 220pp 6×9″ Lulu book.)

Also, I’d like to set up a discussion forum for readers once I post the book on its web site. Any suggestions for an easy way to do that? [Tags: my100milliondollarsecret books bad_writing]

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This morning my inbox is peppered with notices from Frappr that someone in my social network — a mysterious list that seems to include none of my relatives but everyone I ever said “Gezundheit!” to in public — has created a Frappr map that shows on a Google map the physical location of all their friends. It’s a cool app, but the epidemiology of Net viruses is even cooler.

(Hmm. A quick check shows that in fact I only have six people in my social network, none of whom has ever sneezed on me.) [Tags: frappr social_networks no_one_likes_me]

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Mark Federman’s daughter, a high school junior, is doing a project for her World Religions course. She’s using the Web to collect stories about how people age 12-25 have been “affected by their experiences of religion and spirituality.” Her blog is here.

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Yochai Benkler is giving a talk about his new book, the aptly named the Wealth of Networks. He asks: What can we say about the new economics and understand it as something stable, not a passing fad? What does the change mean to our core commitments to democracy, etc. [As always, these are notes and thus are not accurate, complete or reliable.]

Between 1835 and 1850, Yochai says, the cost of starting a mass circulation paper rose from $10,000 and $2.5M (in current dollars). This signalled a “stark bifurcation between producers and consumers.” Readers became passive. This lasted for 150 years.

In 2002, the fastest supercomputer was Japanese. In 2004, IBM just barely inched it out. Meanwhile, the SETI@Home project enabled 4.5M to share their spare cycles, creating a far bigger computer. “We’re seeing a radically decentralized capitalization” of computation, storage and communications capacity. “Every connected person on the planet has the physical capcity to create information, knowledge and culture.” Human creativity, intuition, experience and motivation are widely distributed. Put together the capitalization and the human capabilities, and behaviors that used to be on the edge move into the core: Commons-based production and peer-production. Commons-based production is production without exclusion: Everyone can use the product. Peer production is large scale collaborative production without price or management. Peer production obviously works, as proved by Apache’s 70% market share. Or Wikipedia. Or DMOZ…

There are new opportunities, he says, most importantly shifting from finished information and cultural goods to platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Social production is a fact, not a fad. It is “the critical long term shift caused by the Internet.” But it is a threat to, and threatened by, incumbent business models.

Why should we care about the outcome of this political debate, he asks? Because of our core commitments to autonomy, democracy, and justice & development.

Autonomy: In shifting from consumers to users, we have to do more for ourselves and in looser association with others. But we get pages such as the lead hit on “viking ships” at Google, which is produced by a 5th grade teacher in GreenlandGander, Newfoundland. Or you get Project Gutenberg.

Democracy: Our democracy is a mass mediated public sphere. What do you get when you have peer production in such a democracy? You used to get The Pentagon Papers, which required several newspapers and the Supreme Court to get published. Now you get Bev Harris at BlackBoxVoting.org exposing Diebold. The Diebold code is opened up to public inspection. By the time Diebold sues the various places it’s been posted, it’s been distributed widely via email and Freenet and Overnet…

Does the Internet democratize or fragment? The first generation critique (Cass Sunstein) is that the Internet “Babel-izes” culture. The second generation (Clay Shirky) says that power laws mean that only a tiny number of sites actually get read; it’s the same as with broadcast. But, the claim needs to be assessed not against the utopia but against the access provided by mass media. And the claims are empirical and need to be examined. Yes, there are topical clusters. But thereare many entry points for discussion, there is something like “peer review” of claims, and some superstars who are known across clusters. The Internet, Yochai concludes, is indeed more democratic than what we’ve had.

He sees the re-emergence of a new form of folk culture based on active participation. This he views as a return to norms of the pre-broadcast world.

Justice: Much of what makes for human welfare depends on information, knowledge and culture. Commons-based and peer production can help. E.g., open source, open academic publishing, open source agricultural innovation, bio informatics, open source biomedical innovation, etc. He gives three quick examples: Free High School Science Text. The International HapMap Project. Biological Innovation for an Open Society.

We’re in a battle of institutional ecology, he says: DMCA, Net Neutrality, “trusted” computing, etc. Law is pushing in favor of the incumbents, he says. But that doesn’t mean they’ll win. E.g., the market doesn’t want “trusted” machines. (He says they’re trusted in that the content creators can create it not to do what customers want.) The sharing culture is increasing. The battle has begun and is worth waging. [Fantastic talk.] [Tags: yochai_benkler digital_rights berkman]

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Bill McGeveran, a fellow at the Berkman Center, points to how education is spreading all over, including online syllabi, non-traditional resources (e.g., www.RedHotJazz.com), open source education (e.g., Wikipedia.org, the Samuel Pepys diary), etc. But, e.g., the Center for History and New Media has had to constrain what they can share because, while teachers are permitted to use some copyrighted materials, they can’t share them. And academic access to music is restricted.

Bill’s group found four general categories of problems: 1. The law is unclear. 2. DRM. 3. It’s hard and expensive to clear rights. 4. The gatekeepers — e.g., school systems — are very cautious about digital rights, primarily because of the first three problems.

The law is not keeping up, he says.

Jackie Harlow, a Harvard Law student who works on the project, talks about the problems DRM — the unprecedented ability to locked content down (and lock users out) — raises when it comes to education using legitimate materials. Stuff gets locked in inadvertantly or to avoid litgation. E.g., Blackboard software locks content to others who use that software. (And just about every school uses Blackboard.)

Bill says that it can be very difficult to obtain a license. You have to figure out if it’s covered by Fair Use. You have to track down the license owner. The fees can be high. Key intermediaries are often ignorant and/or “chicken.”

Jackie says the “paths toward reform” include advancing the educational use exception to DMCA, educating educational users about DRM and promoting the adoption of open tools, working with content providers to develop educational-usable content, and changing gatekeeper attitudes. Bill says there are “interesting moves” toward automated copyright clearance. [Tags: education digital_rights berkman bill_mcgeveran jackie_harlow]

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Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC has a fascinating article on what the long tail means for libraries. For example, 10% of titles in libraries account for 90% of loans. But, users of services such as Netflix go deep into the catalog. What can libraries do, Lorcan wonders, to help patrons find what they don’t know is there and they may not know they’re interested in? (I’ve put this too simply…) [Tags: libraries lorcan_dempsey long_tail oclc ranganathan everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Global Voices has announced an alliance with Reuters. Reuters has made a “major contribution” to GV via the Berkman Center, which is the home of GV. Reuters will use content created by GV editors and contributors on its Web sites.

I’m finding it hard to be cynical and pessimistic about this. GV gets funded, Reuters has no say in what GV talks about, Reuters’ stories get bottom-up context, and the global voices at Global Voices get heard more broadly. Sounds like good news for news. [Disclosure: I'm a fellow at the Berkman Center, and the founders of GV are good friends.] [Tags: media reuters gv global_voices citizen_journalism journalism]

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