More of my interviews of Supernova attendees have been posted, including:

Michael Copps, an FCC Commissioner, talks about whether the four Internet principles have been weakened and his hope for Network neutrality.

Robert Levitan of Pando Networks talks about the role of peer-to-peer in the spread of user-generated video.

Michael Goff of Megalomedia talks about the terrain between blogs and sites.

Axel Schmiegelow of the Denkwerk Group has an early claim to the invention of social bookmarks and tagging. The site is still active: OneView.com

Stan Joosten (part 1 part 2) is a marketing guy at Procter and Gamble who believes the customers are in charge. His issue: How do you have a conversation with 2 billion of them?

Mary Hodder, the founder and CEO of Dabble talks about what we’re doing with video and what the network needs to be like to support it.

Dan Shine (part1 part 2) is in charge of AMD’s 50×15 program, trying to connect 50% of the world by 2015.

Doug Kaye of Conversations Network has a grand vision in which more and more of public speech is saved in a public place.

Dan Gillmor, the journalist who is now a citizens media advocate, is in a fired-up mood, grabs the mike, and…

Kevin Werbach, Mr. Supernova, talks briefly about how the conference is going, and then ducks away to moderate the last panel.

[Tags: supernova vlogs]

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Gerry Blackwell writes about Dewayne Hendricks’ initiative to deliver one gigabit per second to every citizen wirelessly.Very cool stuff, and way past what we’ve been led to expect. [Tags: wifi dewayne_hendricks]

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…and brings it to a point: The people formerly known as the audience aren’t just facing forward on the couch any more. [Tags: media jay_rosen]

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Not only should English be declared the official language of the United States, we ought to make the official language English without an accent. That’s how much of an American patriot I am!

(Please check out what “modest proposal” means before flaming me. Thank you.) [Tags: humor immigration]

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Christopher Lydon had me on in the final segment of Open Source Radio to talk with Jaron Lanier about his article, “Digital Maoism.” I came on after James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds argued with Jaron about whether crowds are ever wise, although there was more agreement than argument. Suroweicki made one of the right points: Jaron focuses on a few examples that Jaron considers to be negative, slighting the importance of collective thinking in top down environments.

Then Ze Frank , the comedian, came on to talk about his experience letting readers write comedy for him on a wiki. He was the most serious and thoughtful of us all, I thought. Damn comedians. (I’m a big Ze Frank fan.)

Then I came on. I’m not happy with how I did. I tried to say that Jaron is warning us of something, but his examples of the danger don’t hold up and, even if they did, they are exceptions, not a trend. The article focuses heavily on Wikipedia. But the Web isn’t really becoming like Wikipedia, and Wikipedia isn’t the result of “hive mind,” which I take to mean people who all believe the same thing, just as Maoists supposedly all chant out of the Little Red Book. In truth, Wikipedia results from vigorous conversation (and some rigorous administration, but I left that out), the opposite of hive mind. Not to mention, I don’t agree that Wikipedia is an example of what’s wrong with the Web. Yes, it’s voiceless, but that’s appropriate for an encyclopedia, and it is definitely not typical of the Web. Jaron denied that he meant “hive mind” as anything negative — then what is his article about? — and repeatedly went back to his unsupported assertion that anonymity dehumanizes discussions. (I have a cheap suspicion that his animosity towards anonymity has something to do with the fact that Jaron is a highly visible public personality and thus thinks we all should be equally comfortable speaking strongly in public. But we’re not all like that.)

BTW, Jaron claimed on-air that his research shows that the more edited a Wikipedia article is, the less accurate it is. I wish I’d said that that research should have been included in “Digital Maoism.” It would have made the piece much stronger. I hope he publishes that research now.

And since this is my blog, I’m going to take the opportunity to dispute Jaron’s on-air denial that his article is mainly negative about blogging. Here is the substantive paragraph about blogging:

…it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

If you’re going to lob handgrenades, you ought not later claim that the handgrenades were meant only in the best sense.

Clay Shirky’s excellent response to Jaron’s article is here. You can listen to the Radio Open Source show in its entirety here. I’m afraid to. [Tags: jaron_lanier open_source_radio wikipedia digital_culture ze_frank james_surowiecki]

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The Journal writes up LibraryThing — Del.icio.us for your books — and makes the article available online. [Tags: librarything taxonomy tagging everything_is_miscellaneous]

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It’s a big news day for Fon. (Disclosure: I’m on its board of advisors because I favor Fon’s social goal of spreading wifi, particularly in areas that can’t afford it; advisors get some stock options.)

Fon is going to heavily subsidize a million routers: You pay $5 and agree to share your wireless connection for a year. If you don’t, you keep the router and are charged $45. The new routers are smaller and cuter than most I’ve seen. Giving them away is a big financial risk, but Fon has to get over the chicken-egg problem somehow. If it works, people will have a good reason to sign up with Fon and to start sharing wifi. If it doesn’t, Fon will have gone through a lot of the money it raised a few months ago. (Both Google and Skype invested.)

Other news:

You can now be a “Bill,” i.e., someone who shares her Fon connection and receives half of the $3 (or €3) per day charged to those who aren’t Linuses, i.e., people who share their Fon connection in exchange for free roaming. A five-day pass is $10. (Bills get half of the $3 after taxes and payment service charges are subtracted.)

There are a whole bunch of new features, some of which are pretty cool, including the ability to see a travel log of where you’ve been based on the Fon routers you’ve accessed, and the ability to add personal information to the page that others see; you can also allow people to go to a couple of sites of your choice for free. (I still hope Fon includes mesh networking in the routers because of the potentially transformative effect that could have, overlaying local communities with local Web communities. Maybe someday.)

There’s also a South-Parky video of Martin Varsavsky, Fon’s founder, explaining Fon.

[Tags: fon wifi]

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1. Supernova attracts a great set of folks. In addition to the usual Web enthusiasts, Supernova gets people in traditional companies genuinely trying to figure out how to apply all this. And we get to hear from them how it’s working out, what’s just webby hot air and what’s truly transformative. I like that a lot, although it means that some ideas you’ve treasured come out sounding odd. For example, what we create on the Internet comes out as “user-generated content.” Ok. It’s still thrilling to see companies that five years ago would have thought the idea ridiculous now believe it’s going to change the way they build products and talk with their markets.

2. Judging from the line-up of speakers, one of the secret messages of Supernova was that the online organizations that blow the roof off of expectations are the ones that are devoted entirely to their users. I don’t mean this in the “We have to focus on our customers” sort of way. I mean it in the CraigsList way. CraigsList doesn’t focus on its “customers.” It is its customers. Now, not every company can be CraigsList. But every company can be a hell of a lot more like CraigsList.

3. The thing I like least about Supernova is its devotion to the panel format. Panels are how you make interesting people boring. It works like magic! Some panels were better than others, of course, but Supernova would be better if panels, with occasional lectures, were not the only format. E.g., the Wharton workshops day the day before allowed for more interaction and learning.

4. The backchannel (= the IRC) was well attended (see #3) — over 50 people at times — and was flipping hilarious. Omigod there were some funny people on it. It tended more towards humor than the supplementing of knowledge that we like to pretend is the backchannel’s point, but there was some of that too. We laughed, we linked, we fell in love, and we made potty jokes.

By the way, I do not like it when backchannel transcripts are published. I say some things that sound way meaner out of the context of the racing river of real time conversation. The rhetoric of a ringing, zinging IRC chat can be that of a roast, and the “all in good fun” spirit gets lost when read after the fact. In other words, I’m sorry, [Tags: supernova]

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The Atom feed standard now has an extension that lets an item point to what it’s a reply to and what has replied to it. From that metadata an application can reconstruct the thread of a discussion. This is helpful because so far the Internet has not had a good, standard way of capturing its basic molecules of conversation.

This is what ThreadsML tried to do a few years ago when Steve Yost proposed it. ThreadsML wasn’t supposed to be tied to a particular feed format, but ThreadsML wasn’t going anywhere, and the Atom feed standard will. So: Hooray! (Thanks to Jay Fienberg for the link.) [Tags: threadsml conversations standards steve_yost feeds atom]

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This morning I admired a front page article, by Bryan Bender, in the Boston Globe:

…a 12-person office to develop quick strategies for combating homemade bombs in Iraq — has quietly expanded into a $3 billion-per-year arm of the Pentagon, with more than 300 employees and thousands of contract workers, according to Pentagon data analyzed by the Globe.

Also on the front page is an article about people who have gone from PDAs back to pen and paper. The article cites the popularity of two sites that offer templates for notepaper (but we don’t know how many of the readers ever owned a PDA), an increase in popularity of a particular paper little black book (but not for the black book market overall), and the drop in PDA sales, (which the article correctly attributes to the rise in smartphone sales). “Three people start carrying paper notebooks and blog about it: Unknown number of PDA users appreciate cool paper templates” isn’t news; it’s just the Globe’s paper-based nostalgia. Get used to it. Paper is going the way of the legitimate theater.

So, I was wondering this morning how we’re going to keep getting excellent reporting like the first article as newspapers continue their scary economic decline. And along comes Dan Gillmor blogging about News21, a multi-year project involving five universities looking into “the intersection of security and liberty.” One piece is a group blog, US Military Abroad, about the group’s investigation of the shift in our military presence. There are also project blogs about privacy, immigration, and homeland security’s “money trail.”

Is this the future of journalism? I don’t know. But something is.

[Tags: media newspapers dan_gillmor boston_globe pdas]

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