During a speech a couple of weeks ago, I characterized the crawl on the bottom of CNN as “news delivered at 4 mph.” I made up the speed, but it seemed like a reasonable approximation, since it seems to go at about walking speed.

This morning I was watching a news channel on the little TV in our bedroom: It took about four seconds to go across a screen about 15″ wide. If I were watching it on, say, a 60″ wide TV, it would have taken four seconds to cover four times the distance and thus would be traveling four times as fast. If it were a 4 mile wide screen, it’d be travelling at a mile per second.

So, how fast does a news crawl (if a news crawl could crawl news)? And why doesn’t it look faster on a big set?

I know it’s so elementary that it’s embarrassing, but I’m sick, ok? Slightly feverish. Really. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Paul English blogs a plausible theory about why Microsoft drastically changed the placement of controls in the IE7 tool bar:

…maybe Microsoft is trying to quickly (even if painfully) retrain its large market share to use control layout of IE7, so that when that mass-market first tries Firefox (and they will), they will find Firefox the one with the “odd layout”, and thus be more likely to stay with IE7

Is it a conspiracy or just canny marketing? And why is it so often so hard to tell those two apart?

If I had to guess — and I don’t have to but I’m going to anyway — I’d guess that Microsoft did usability studies that favored the new design (once we unlearn the old way, as Paul points out), and they were aware that it’s an opportunity to de-train us on the Firefox UI.

(Yes, someone could and probably has done a Firefox skin that makes it look like IE7. But Microsoft’s ploy — if that’s what it is — is aimed at people downloading the out-of-the-box version of Firefox.) [Tags: microsoft ie7 firefox markeing browsers]

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Rev. Lou Sheldon and Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition spammed me with a warning that the House is considering a bill that “begins to lay the legal framework to persecute and prosecute those who refuse, for moral and religious reasons, to agree or teach their children that certain unbiblical behaviors are normal and desirable.” A look at their flyer makes it clear that “unbiblical behaviors” means “being gay.” HR 1592 is a “serious threat to free speech and freedom of religion,” the email warns. The headline of the flyer takes it up several notches:

“Ultimately, a pastor’s sermon concerning homosexuality could be considered an incitement to violence and punished with a fine or prison,” it concludes.

You can read HR 1592, “Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007.” It provides federal technical, forensic, and prosecutorial assistance to local authorities when it comes to hate crimes. Does it extend hate crimes to include pastors condemning gay marriage? Nah. It says anyone who “willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of any person” can be sentenced to up to ten years, or more if the victim dies.

It makes me wonder: Am I this wrong about the things that I care about this strongly?

Yikes. [Tags: politics gay_rights self_doubt]

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CNN just interviewed me for a 3 minute segment they’re doing on cyberbullying. Why me? Because they called the Berkman Center and I was around. They’re likely to take a few seconds from the 15 minute interview, and use it as something like color commentary. It’ll air on Monday morning.

I told the producer in the pre-interview yesterday that I wouldn’t comment on the awful specifics of the bullying of Kathy Sierra— the case that’s prompted them to do a “Dark Side of the Net” piece — because I know people involved in it. Also, (I told the producer) I’m not a good resource for telling the story of what happened because I didn’t know what was going on until Kathy posted about it. But the producer apparently liked what I said about the lack of norms of behavior on the Web. So, they asked me to do the interview anyway. And, true to their word, they didn’t ask me directly about Kathy, although several times in context I said how badly she was treated.

I agreed to the interview because I wanted to try to counter the fear-mongering story I’m pretty sure CNN wants to produce about the Web. So, I tried to simultaneously acknowledge the seriousness of the bullying that happens (including the reprehensible battering of Kathy, of course), and dispute the idea that the Net is all bullying all the time. But, in trying to steer them from their Fear Mongering story, I ran the risk of minimizing the awfulness of being bullied, so I tried to keep interjecting how serioius and unacceptable it is. It’s all up to how they edit it. And also how well I put it, of course.

They asked me about anonymity (me: we shouldn’t remove it just because it’s abused by some cowards), the need for regulation (me: real world laws apply, and the Web is constantly evolving ways to manage bullying and obnoxiousness…although none works perfectly), and whether this is a gender issue (me: that accords with expectations and intuition, but we need actual data). I also talked about the fact that we don’t yet have well-developed norms guiding behavior on the Web, and the Web brings people together from different backgrounds, although death threats and bullying are never ok; I’m afraid I’ll come off as sounding like I believe that bullying is really just a difference of opinion about acceptable levels of aggression. Ack.

Afterwards I realized that I should have made clear that I was talking about adults bullying adults. I have no idea what the level of bullying is among children online. Also, in talking about the ability to steer clear of sites that are nastier than you’re comfortable with, I should have appended something about it being different when the bullies are coming to your site. Damn.

The producer interviewed me over a speaker phone, but they had me face forward and talk to an intern seated in front of me, to give the illusion that the producer was in the room with us. After the interview was over but the camera was still rolling (foolish me), I turned sideways to face the speaker phone so they couldn’t use the footage, because I wanted to have a meta-discussion with the producer. (The producer promised me that he wouldn’t use it, and he seems to be a straightforward and honest guy.) I told him that I thought the CNN story was seizing on one case — a nasty, disturbing case without doubt — and using it to generalize without further evidence or research, because the media likes conflict and likes to raise fears about the Net. A serious piece would do some serious research about just how prevalent bullying is: It might be quite widespread, it might be unevenly distributed, it might indeed be usually gender-based. All that would be truly interesting and important to know. But I don’t think that’s the story they’re doing. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.

I left feeling crappy, afraid that as I tried to maintain two positions — bullying when it happens is shameful and wrong, but it’d be wrong to characterize the Web as dominated by bullying — the editors will use the juiciest quote from just one of those two points. It’s no fun to lose control of your words, although I knew that going in. [Tags: bullying media cnn ]

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I’m at [well, I was yesterday when I wrote this] a session at Harvard’s Lamoint Library (one of the 90+ libraries here) about Web 2.0 and social tagging. I just gave a 20 minute opener on why tagging matters.

Michael Hemment, the host, begins by showing tag clouds from 50 students who were asked to tag some particular resources. The group quickly guesses that the first tag cloud refers to the libraries, the next is Google, and the next is Jon Stewart. Very amusing,

Michael talks about why slocial tagging matters to libraries. He mentions some initiatives, including PennTags , Stanford IC, and the Steve Museum. Harvard has the CRT (Collaborative Research Tool) and EdTags initiatives. He also mentions iCommons (exploring iSites metadata and tagging) and ARTStor .

He takes a closer look at LibraryThing.com, showing how easy it is to enter titles, organize them, tag them, and get suggestions.

PennTags was created by the U Penn library to enable university members to tag books. (The site is open to anyone, but only U Penn members can add tags.) It begins with a tag cloud of tags used at least 58 times, Users can also create folders to organize bookmarks into projects. [I blogged about it here.]

The Stanford Library Information Center combines tags, blogs and wikis. It includes tagging by librarians who organize resources in a somewhat more orderly way.

Harvard could, Michael says, enable tagging of the libraries’ resources, and the Lib-X tool (a browser add-in that gives you access to Harvard’s onloine resources) could be used to tag sites, adding to what Harvard knows.

Carla Lillvik, Research and Distance Services Librarian at the Gutman Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looks at “social tagging and bibliographic management.” She says you want not only to find resources and organize them, but also to cite them.

She uses as her example the site Five Weeks to a Social Library. She adds it to her page at Connotea and tags it. She could also post it to EdTags.org. But what about resources she finds in research databases, e.g. EBSCO Host? She could add it to Connotea, even though the URL doesn’t look persistent. But Connotea doesn’t pick up any of the bibliographic info from the database. (Connotea has agreements with a long list of such systems, including BioMed Central, PLoS, Nature.com, and arXiv.org, but not with all of them.) She can instead make a folder in EBSCO, which does indeed pick up all the info. [Sounds like we need a standard API for university e-research systems.] Harvard’s RefWorks has the advantage, Carla says, of enabling batch tagging [LibraryThing does too] and enables output in a variety of bibliographic styles [yay!] RefWorks folders can be shared, even with people who don’t have an account; they can be shared as an RSS feed, too. (RefWorks works with Google Scholar — you can set a preference so that results can be imported into RefWorks.)

Michael Hemment presents Prof. Dan Smail’s Collaborative Research Tool (CRT), a social tagging tool that works within Harvard’s e-environment. In Smail’s course on Medieval Europe (History 1122) , students are put onto teams (e.g., “France, Germany and italy”) and are assigned sources. They create virtual note cards that are tagged, annotated and entered nto a database. Class discussions, lectures, and final papers are based on these cards.

The cards tend to include the passage, comment, related links, and tags. It’s easy to navigate by tag.

Pedagogical implications, according to Michael: Students have to reflect on their tagging schemes. [meta learning] They cards “form the basis of complex intertextual discourse on a broad range of medieval topics.” E.g., you could see how Ulysses appears through multiple literatures. Also, tagging develops a personal relationship to the source material.

[Excellent. But we still need a way to write a document based on cards, so that adding info from the card automatically creates the right footnote and bibliographic entry in the document, and notes where the card has been used. I blogged about this here.]

Adam Seldow, a grad student at the Harvard School of Education, works on EDTags.org. It’s a social network to connect people who share interests in education. It’s open to anyone. You can tag a site, vote on bookmarks, email them, blog them, or find related blog postings. You can upload your papers, photos, presentations, etc.

Q: How does tagging fit with scholarly resource? Is there a way to cite where and how a resource is tagged?
A: (Michael) Not in the major tagging sites, e.g., del.icio.us. The lack of rules has been one of the advantages of these sites.The noise introduced can often be negated at least in part by the good rising to the top.

Q: How about privacy?
A: (Adam) EdTags lets you set the level of privacy. And it’s an actively managed site.

Q: What types of resources does EdTags tag?
A: (Adam) Mainly “gray literature” — blog posts, preprints, Web sites, course-generated papers.

Q: (me) What do we do about the fragmentation of the tagging space? I can tag in del.icio.us, Connotea, EdTags…
A: (Adam) A condition when we built EdTags was that it has to be able to talk wth del.icio.us or export to an XML file. Personally, I use different tagging sites for different types of research.

Q: What are the patterns of use at EdTags?
A: EdTags has been live for a little over a year. (It started as TeacherShare.) First year doctoral students, who were trained on it, use it. It’s being used in some specific courses and teacher education programs, plus a community of faculty members interested in emerging trends in education technology. The person who uploads the most bookmarks is a woman from Slovenia. There are about 400 users. About 100,000 hits/month.

Q: Did you build it from scratch?
A: It’s a mashup of Scuttle, an open source platform, with lots of custom work.

Q: HW and SW behind it? How did you finance it?
A: (Adam) A Harvard Provost Innovation Grant financed it.

Q: How to encourage the use of social tagging at a library?
A: (Michael) I don’t know that we want to encourage it. We’re exploring. [Tags: libraries tagging social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

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Death of a President bills itself as a thriller, but it got known first as the movie that shows George Bush being killed. No, no, the producers declared as some in the media protested before the movie was released. It’s not some cheap, sensationalistic revenge movie for rage-addled Liberals, said the producers. It’s about bigger issues.

Too bad, because it’s got nothing interesting to say about the bigger issues.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

It is certainly true that the movie doesn’t dwell on the actual shooting of Bush. Since the entire movie pretends to be a documentary made a few years after the event, you see some chaotic video of “Bush” crumpling as he’s shaking hands in a crowd. That’s all. And yet, the movie’s premise is that Bush is an awful president who has brought us to the brink of totalitarianism. Nothing good comes from the assassination, so it clearly isn’t a call to arms. But it is an anti-Bush movie. That makes the fantasy of Bush’s death disturbing in the wrong way.

After Bush is killed, we learn that the Patriot III Act was quickly passed, further limiting our rights. But, unlike the underrated movie The Siege, the movie’s not interested in following the consequences of those limitations. In fact, we barely learn what they are. And a Syrian is arrested and falsely accused of the crime. The movie makes it clear that the system was stacked against him because he was a Syrian. Except that this is a Syrian living in America who, a few years earlier, accidentally (!) happened to go for terrorist training in Pakistan…which vitiates the theme that we’d take any Arab as the bad guy.

It took me three nights of viewing to get through the movie, so I guess that doesn’t make it much of a thriller. My favorite part were the interviews with the filmmakers in which we learn that the Chicago demonstration consisted of footage of a real protest march and some staged scenes.

I have to say that I was also bothered by the fact that although this is told entirely as a documentary, with interviews with “participants” and news reelish footage of the “events,” it is not a documentary that actually would have been made after the assassination, for it explains things that wouldn’t have needed explaining, and relies on a sense of suspense that no one would have had. It’s as if a documentary were made after JFK’s assassination that depended on viewers not knowing if he’d be assassinated while addressing the crowd or driving in the car.

I’ve seen worse movies for sure. But I’ve seen a lot better. (Disclosure: The film’s publicists sent me a free copy of the DVD. Thanks.)

[Tags: movies film reviews bush documentaries]

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Andy Carvin has had two good ideas. First, he’s set up a site to talk about the cyberbullying issue.

Second, he suggests that Friday be “Stop CyberBullying Day.” (Let me save you writing the first comment: Of course every day should be Stop CyberBullying Day.)

This is an important issue that stretches messily from free speech to etiquette to gender issues to assault. There are cases where bullying is too gentle a word and cases where it is the wrong word. But, unless we want to spend our time arguing about the word, it’ll do.

FWIW, I’d be willing to post a “No bullying” sign on my sites, announcing that I will remove comments that I deem (yes, my judgment) to be out of line. It’d be good to have some semi-standardized language to use to express what the line is; not everyone will agree, so a pick list would be helpful. (Ack. I have to run to an event.) [Tags: cyberbullying ethics ]

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Here’s a YouTube of Katie Couric’s negative questions in her interview of John and Elizabeth Edwards, including her cowardly use of the “Some would say…” locution. Take some responsibility, Couric!

On the other hand, Couric’s husband died of colon cancer at age 42. Who knows what’s going through her mind.
Here’s a six-minute clip of the interview; I found it moving. Here’s Elizabeth answering Couric’s question about “staring death in the face.” Here’s Couric saying she was moved by the Edwards’ initial announcement of the return of Elizabeth’s cancer. (Disclosure: I’m doing a little volunteer work for the Edwards’ campaign.) [Tags: media john_edwards elizabeth_edwards katie_couric politics]

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I’ve been using Google Docs to write documents that are collaborative. It’s a good first gen product, and I enjoy using it, but it would take a giant step forward if it let me apply a CSS style sheet to the docs I’m composing.

This is such an obvious idea that there must be something obviously wrong with it. [Tags: google css wrong_in_public_again]

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Newt Gingrich is calling for nominees to agree to holding an open, 1.5-hour conversation once a week from Labor Day 2008 until the election.

Great idea. Of course they won’t do it…unless some of them just start and it goes YouTubular and then there’s pressure on the front-runners to drop in, and the front-runners look all pat and programmed, and we end up electing someone actually good.

Why wait until Labor Day 2008?

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Chris RageBoy Locke — whom, btw, has posted a knockout portfolio of his Web design work — points out in an email that pages Google translates automatically now let any reader suggest a better translation. So, if you go about a third of the way down this page and look for the first book cover, you’ll see a work by Alan De Benoist, titled “On Being a Floyd.” Hover over the title and you’ll see “On Being a Pagan” in a popup, with a button for you to suggest your own alternative translation. RageBoy is the one who suggested “On Being a Pagan.” Chris refers to Google’s approach as “wide area knowledge acquisition.”

If evil-ass spammers start translating Rilke’s poetry into Viagra ads, then Google will have to come up with some social way of monitoring the reader-contributed translations. But this is another instance of the 1% rule: A tiny percentage of people can make the world better for all the rest. And it’s pretty darn cool. [Tags: ragrboy translation google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Elliot Noss of Tucows has blogged a list of questions to ask of Internet domain name registrars before registering a domain name with them. This is in light of ICANN’s revoking of RegisterFly as an accredited registrar.

Since some points on Elliot’s list are difficult to ascertain, what we really need is a wiki spreadsheet — paging Dan Bricklin! — with those questions (and more to come, undoubtedly) so that knowledgeable customers can fill in the blanks.

(Disclosure: Elliot’s company, Tucows, is a registrar. But Elliot, who is a friend, relentlessly works for the best interests of the Net and us users.) [Tags: icann registry domain_names registerfly tucows elliot_noss wikicalc dan_bricklin]

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I woke up yesterday morning with this cartoon in mind. I didn’t dream it. I just woke up with it.

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I’ve googled until I’m gaga, but I can’t find the javascript code that will refresh an iframe from the server without refreshing the rest of the page. For this app I am using — forgive me — IE 7.0. Yes, I know iframes are not In, but I don’t know of another way to do picture-in-picture, so to speak, where the page being displayed is scrollable.

The iframe itself looks like this:

<iframe id=”browse” src=”http://www.JohoTheBlog.com” width=’100%’ height=’600px’ style=”display:block;”></iframe>

To refresh it, I’ve tried the following (and many variations of each):

var fr=document.getElementById(’browse’);

fr.src=fr.src;

document.frames["browse"].location.href=fr.src;
window.frames['browse'].reload(true);
window.fr.location.reload(true);

top.frames['browse'].location.reload(true);

top.frames['browse'].location.href=fr.src;
window.location.reload(true);
fr.reload(true);
fr.refresh.dammit.you.bastard(true);
fr.i.will.hurt.you.i.mean.it(true);

Some of these do nothing. Some refresh the entire page, including the iframe. None refreshes only the iframe, forcing a reload from the server. Although nothing hangs on the project, I’ve now spent several hours trying to solve this little problem. Ack.

What is the vector of my particular dumbness this time? I’m sure it’s something embarrassing. But it’ll be worth displaying my ignorance yet again if someone knows the magic incantation that will end my misery… [Tags: programming javascript iframes refresh]

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Jessica Duda blogs the Politics Online Conference. Good overview. [Tags: politics politics_online_conference jessica_duda]

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Ethan Zuckerman has the story of a 24-year-old American from New Jersey being detained in Ethiopia. Our State Department is not demanding Amir Mohamed Meshal’s release from a prison system known for its brutality, even though our own investigation cleared him of any connection to Al Qaeda. In explaining the situation, Ethan provides the context regarding our involvement in Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia; no one explains this stuff better than Ethan.

Meshal could easily disappear into Ethiopia’s prison system. His government — our government — should not be letting that happen.

Ethan also links to a great story in the Christian Science Monitor by Stephanie Hanes about a radio show in the Congo that lets the Congolese ask questions — via phone and SMS — about the 1998-2003 war in which 4 million people died. The participants are kept anonymous because it’s still too dangerous to talk openly about it. [Tags: ethiopia kenya somalia amir_mohamed_meshal ethan_zuckerman congo ]

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Great post by EthanZ about Pittsfield, MA (and about more than that). [Tags: pittsfield towns ethan_zuckerman ]

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Tumblr is a microblog. A nanoblog. A nonce-blog.

Cycle faster, Web crazes, faster damn it! [Tags: tumblr twitter everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I quite like Yahoo Local, and use it frequently. But try searching for “bargain department store” in “toronto, ontario, canada” (without the quotes). The site tells you that it couldn’t find any stores in Toronto (because it only knows about the US), but perhaps I’d be interested in Kohl’s Department Store near Marion, KS.

If you zoom out on the map, it becomes clear what’s guiding this seemingly random choice: Marion appears to be dead center in the US. Thus, it is statistically most likely to be near any randomly chosen point in the country.

While this may make probabilistic sense (Or maybe not: I was a Humanities major), it makes no common sense. Yahoo would satisfy more query-ers if it picked an area dense with population. Or it could just say, “Yo, moron! Toronto isn’t in the US…at least not yet, bwahahaha!!” Although I have to say, I find something charming about being redirected to a small town of geometric significance.

(Disclosure: Years ago I was on a little Yahoo Local advisory board that met once.) [Tags: yahoo local marketing maps]

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I’m starting to blog for the HuffingtonPost. It’s way cool to be a reader of something and then get to write for it. Maybe I’m supposed to be blasé about it, but I’m totally not.

The piece is an appreciation of Elizabeth Edwards’ understanding of the Internet, but it’s really just a way to say that I love her. I’ve never met her, but I sure feel like I know her through her book and blogging. I am so sad today.

It just got posted. [Tags: elizabeth_edwards huffington_post politics ]

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Jon Udell suggests the government have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund (to complement the already-existing Presidential Campaign Fund) to pay for the aggregation and tagging of raw video footage of the candidates so that citizens can “slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis.” Every question and every answer ought to be tagged, as Jon suggests elsewhere.

I of course like the prospect of having a huge pile of well-tagged candidate videos — it’s so miscellaneous! — but I think there’s zero prospect of this coming through the government. Nor should it. We’ve got the pile, thanks to YouTube and the candidate’s own sites. If we get it tagged well enough, someone will build a site that lets us search through them and cluster them. And if someone builds a site, we’ll tag ‘em well enough. It could be a citizen group, a media site, or YouTube or Technorati. One way or another, this is likely to happen no check-off boxes required. [Tags: elections politics campaigns jon_udell everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The totally brilliant Hillary 1984 ad is so effective because it highlights the gap between her calculated rhetoric about her campaign being “a conversation” and the tight top-down control the campaign exerts. Her campaign is no more controlled than every other campaign in the past 50 years — since TV became the single best way to reach voters — but that level of control is no longer acceptable, thanks to the Web. This ad marks the day that the old style of campaigning looks its age.

But her response today was good. She made a self-deprecating joke: “I’m just happy if it is taking attention from me singing,” she said at a press conference…thus, of course, diverting attention to her singing. Which is to her benefit. The fact that Hillary can’t carry a tune only makes her more fallible and thus more likable. The Internet will expose every foible. Candidates that can’t deal with that are doomed.

From now on, we will never elect a president who is not at least a little bit goofy.

[Disclosures: I will happily vote for Hillary if she's the nominee. There's lots I like about her. At this point, I'd more happily vote for Edwards or Obama. And I'm doing a little volunteer advising to the Edwards campaign on some policy stuff. End o' disclosures.] [Tags: hillary_clinton politics fallibility 1984 barack_obama]

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Mary Wong of the Franklin Pierce Law Center is giving a Berkman talk titled “Copyright & Access to Knowledge: Rights/Rhetoric, Openness/Opacity, Future/Fears.” [As always, I'm typing too quickly, missing stuff, getting stuff wrong, paraphrasing wildly...If you want verisimilitude, the event itself is webcast and recorded in multiple ways.] She’s going to talk about copyright policy and the a2k (access to knowledge) movement and how some important terms that, in their use in rhetoric, have been misunderstood.

She points to the simultaneous increase in openness and opacity. The “existing regimes” have put up roadblocks. “What is the future if we have rights battling rhetoric, openness fighting opacity?”

Copyright began as a tool of censorship used by the Crown, became a type of trade regulation, and then was established as a private property right, Mary says. The tropes we use to talk about it derive from that history. These tropes have been deconstructed by people like Foucault and Barthes. Mary says that she’s not going to examine today deconstructionist issues such as whether the author is a myth.

She says she’s not going to suggest stopping treating copyright as a private property right because she’s trying to come up with workable solutions. Rather, what can we do about the expansion of copyright in order to increase access to knowledge? “Reconize the spectrum of alternative property rights?” E.g., the commons, the public domain. “Establish balance through ‘user rights’”? E.g., elevate and reconfigure Fair Use, and treat it as a right. “Create flexible mechanisms within property?” E.g., Creative Commons.

On alternative property rights: We can all agree that a we need a robust public domain for democracy and for cultural, social and economic development. [No one here exclaims in shocked outrage :)] But how do you turn that into a concrete policy proposal? We don’t even have good definitions of public domain and the commons in a way that would let them serve as alternatives to copyright. Usually the public domain is defined more in terms of what it is not than what it is. Are the commons something unowned or owned by a group of people? Is it owned by society in generally? All of these uses are used in the law, and sometimes they’re used interchangeably with “the public domain.” We don’t have a consensus on a definition for either of these terms, but both have gained currency in the copyright debate, she says. “While they’re useful hooks and very important direction indicators, they’re not necessarily at this stage…the solution.” “How can the current discourse be refocused?” (Mary is encouraged by the fact that NGOs and civil society groups are participating in this debate, worldwide, rather than confining it merely to lawyers.)

Our traditional conception of the author is Romantic and has been affecting copyright law for a couple of hundred years. But this is “inadequate to deal with collaborative, communal and social forms of creativity.” The term “author” shows up all over the Berne convention. But it’s a one-size-fits-all notion that doesn’t work in many of the newer forms of creativity that involve “sharing, collaboration and openness.” “Can we at least try to reconfigure or manipulate the notion of the author to better serve the understanding of what it means to create something?”

She suggests considering this in terms of human rights rather than property rights. She points to Art. 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. UDHR says that if you create something, you have rights over it. But in a case in the UK, the court decided that that property right needs to be balanced with the rights of users and readers. Canada has also talked about “users’ rights.”

She is not saying that copyrightaccess [whoops] is a human right. She is suggesting (she says) adopting the human rights framework to bring in more broad and flexible considerations, to give a foundation to users’ claims. Even within the US’s utilitarian claims (i.e. copyright enables the advancement of the arts and sciences) there is room for natural law claims. And she points to WIPO’s acknowledgement of the special needs of developing countries.

Q: (Charlie Nesson ): I’m completely taken by your initial approach. Asking what we can do rather than just talk about it, and the idea of user rights resonate. The user I’m most interested in at the moment is the university. What would be thread that we can pull to effect change? Right now, the burden of proof of Fair Use is on the user, which is tremendously constraining. How about if we (universities) got behind a law putting the burden of proof on the copyright holder? It doesn’t require changing the basis of copyright law. It could be a focal point…
A: I’m with you on that totally. To do this, we need to change the mindset. Maybe have the university focus on the human rights frameworks.

Q: If we focus on the users, how do we do it? Do we list things you can’t do, or the things you can?
A: We talk about Fair Use as an exception to copyright. What do we do with the existing language?

Q: (J Palfrey ) I love the idea of the university as the user and focal point. But suppose we think of the user as a re-user. Could rethinking who the author is help? Creating isn’t just standing on the shoulders of giants but standing on the shoulders of everyone. [Nice.]
A: The reconfiguring of authorship fits in this paradigm, and fortifies it.

Q: (me) How would this play out when it comes to making the world’s books available on line?
A: Prof. Nesson’s idea of changing the burden of proof would work well here. It would be an opt-out scheme, rather than opt-in, for the publishers. We’ll see a battle between the copyright right holder and another right holder.

Q: (Doc Searls) Terms like “user” implies subordinate status. We’re still using real estate metaphors, e.g., sites. This stipulates the Web as a series of places, and places are owned. So we have to change our metaphors.
A: Copyright came from literal property. We do need to move past that.

Q: (ethanz): I like reframing it, but I worry about doing it on human rights, which is one of the shakiest of foundations. The Declaration of Human Rights is a huge intellectual battlegrounds, with a number of Islamic nations saying it’s incompatible with their views, conservatives in the US objecting, etc. You’re building it on one of the most disputed and least binding of “law.”
A: I’m trying to distance my suggestion from wading wholeheartedly wading into that particular fray. I’m not saying it should be a full-fledged human right. But that framework provides a good “hook,” Article 27 gives us ammunition because it recognizes both the rights holder and the user. .And then maybe tap into WIPO’s new interest in copyright for developing companies.

Q: (ethanz): You’re being aspirational, and the UDHR is the paradigm of aspirational thinking. A different approach is to ask what we’re actually doing as users, and then figure out the legislation we need. E.g., in universities we photocopy chunks of text (”No we don’t!” yell several of the law professors, who are also chuckling) and hand them out to students.
A: Yes, it’s aspirational. I’m hoping that if you change mindsets, you can change policy. Lawyers like starting points that are definable, neat and can be generalized. But if you have fair use for universities, you end up with various laws for various domains.

Q: how do you get people to see rights as community based?
A: It’s a challenge.

[Tags: copyright copyleft digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]

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From Ranganathan, the founder of library science:

“Since multiplicity of helpful order among specific subjects is a fact independent of library classification – a fact to be reckoned with in arrangement – how are we to provide for it? It is a case of arranging concrete materials – books and other kindred materials – in such a way that one kind of arrangement presents itself to one person and another kind to another person. To secure this by pressing a button is obviously possible only in the world of fancy; it is not possible in the world of reality.”

Ranganathan, Philosophy of Library Classification (1951)

Via Tim Spalding via Jacob Glenn [Tags: ranganathan taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Usually the first economic argument presented for the importance of the Long Tail is that the area underneath the tail is far greater than the area underneath the Short Head. And since that area represents people with whom the point on the curve communicates, the Long Tail represents a far greater economic opportunity. But, that argument thinks of the points as mini-broadcasters and markets as homogeneous aggregations of consumers. Such a simplistic vew misses the knotty nature of the Long Tail. The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too.

Britt Blaser puts this differently and quite nicely in his most recent post: The People Law trumps the Power Law. Here’s how it begins:

There are five principles I’m playing with lately:

1. The size of your audience confers limited power 2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)

3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose 4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes

5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

He goes on from there…and ends it with a nice motto:

Where there’s folk, there’s fire.

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Dear Logitech:

I’m looking forward to using your “cordless presenter,” especially because of its willingness to vibrate in my hand five or ten minutes before my allotted time. I’ve liked your other pointing devices as well, and over the years have bought dozens of ‘em. It’s true.

But it’s going to take me a while to buy another because you seem so determined to keep me from using them.

I just cut my thumb opening the clear plastic Fortress of Solitude in which you’ve packed the cordless presenter. The presenter is a wee bit of electronics, not much bigger than, say, my middle finger, but you’ve got it wrapped in a plastic package that neither scissors nor Xacto can penetrate. You forced me into stabbing your product with a carving knife. Is that really the sort of “initial user experience” you were hoping for? And once you have managed to slice it open, the plastic separates into twin sharpened blades designed to un-man intruders.

Here are things that are easier to open than your packaging:

An unripe, fused pistachio shell

A coconut on a nude beach

A new CD

A space-time portal

A delicious vegan fast-food place

Please remove the pitbulls and razor wire from around your products. And if you don’t believe me, do us all a favor: Have your CEO try to open one of your packages. (No executive assistants allowed!)

Thank you.

A Bandaged Customer [Tags: marketing packaging logitech]

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On March 21, at 6:30, I’m holding a Berkman “Web of Ideas” discussion of whether and how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. The discussion is open to all. (The Berkman Center is at 23 Everett in Cambridge: Map.)

It’s not obvious that just because we’re participating in our culture more, our democracy will also change. Certainly, politics and culture are not distinct realms, so our expectations in one should affect the other. But not necessarily. Take some prototypical objects of cultural participation. What would you choose? Wikipedia? Blogosphere? File sharing? Second Life? Delicious.com? AssignmentZero ? What is our participation in those and what does that participation teach us? How much of that is political? And do the lessons transfer? For example, Wikipedia teaches us — well, those of us who think Wikipedia is awesome — that credentialed authorities are not the only ones who can be trusted. But does that apply beyond building encyclopedias? Does it affect our view of, say, policy experts in the government? What are we learning and does it apply?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m not coming in with an hypothesis. I’m hoping you’ll come and remind us of what Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler have to say on the topic. And who else?

So, let’s talk. [Tags: culture politics participatory_culture participatory_democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Co-produced by Chat the Planet (NY) and Iraqi filmmakers in Baghdad, the movie series Hometown Baghdad shows Iraqis in Baghdad talking to a camera in their homes, schools and places of business. Simple films of everyday life. A scientific sampling? Nah. But in its ordinariness it’s some of what we’re not otherwise seeing.

The first three episodes are here. [Tags: iraq peace ]

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My book Small Pieces Loosely Joined is now a part of Google Books. Because the publisher owns the copyright, you can only see a few pages of it, but I think it’s very cool — you can search for a term and read the pages it’s on, for example — and I wish more of it were on line. In fact, given that it has virtually stopped selling, I wish all of it were on line. That doesn’t quite align with the publisher’s interests, but someone’s going to figure out a way to make this work. What a boon!

For example, for $100 a year, I’d subscribe to Google Books as a research tool, with some reasonable restrictions (no massive print outs? relatively few complete book read-throughs?) and let Google divvy up the royalties. Or you can come up with a better idea. Please! [Tags: google books libraries copyright publishing]

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Drew Townson replies point-by-point to Mercenary’s explanation of why he was fired.

Here’s Drew’s original post, my original blog post (with a message from Fletcher at Mercenary in the comments), and my post about another reply from Mercenary. [Tags: blogosphere drew_townson mercenary]

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I hereby make zero commitment to keep on twittering, but I’ve found it oddly enjoyable for the past 24 hours.

Yes, yes, I know how unlikely it is, and why should anyone care about the nano-activities of people you only know marginally if at all, and let’s all sneer, etc. etc. etc. But, besides what may turn out to be the short-lived attraction of what Twitter was designed for (and for some it will be long-lived), it is a fascinating platform for lord-knows-what to develop.

Connection hates a vacuum. Or is it that connection constructs the distance it overcomes? Before we could Twitter, we didn’t need to. Now that we can… [Tags: twitter ]

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Andy and Susanne Carvin are videoblogging what their learning as first-time parents: How to breastfeed in public, diaper bag essentials…

I can’t wait to see what the videoblogs look like on their second time around…and especially the diff. The story in our family is about how my sister (who was and is a wonderful mom) carefully bathed her first born in the special little tubby, with the special little towel and wash cloth. With the second one, it was just a dip under the kitchen faucet and a pat down with paper towels. (Actually, I made up the part about the paper towels.) [Tags: babies parents videoblogs andy_carvin susanne_carvin]

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The public radio show “Whad’ya Know” is wrapping up it’s American Idol-style hunt for a new song, and Oliver Brown — ukelele laureate, Wikipedian, and someone I’ve known since he was in fuzzy baseball-themed jammies — is a finalist. Listen to his song, The Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair, and immediately vote for him (ignore those other finalists, worthy though I’m sure they are), by sending a message to whadyaknow@wpr.org with the subject line ” VOTE FOR SONG #2, “Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair” by OLIVER BROWN.”

Act now! The contest ends soon! Well, March 23. Oliver is funny, eccentric, a high school teacher…what’s not to like? [Tags: oliver_brown ukelele npr music]

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As pointed out in the current WordWays, if Brad and Angelina’s daughter, Shiloh, adopts Brad’s last name… [Tags: spoonerism brangelina wordplay wordways humor]

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John Cass spoke with Mercenary Audio and got their side of the story about why they fired Drew Townson . Drew has been asked by his lawyer not to respond, but says (through our mutual friend) that he strongly disputes the company’s account. [Tags: blogging drew_townson mercenary_audio digital_rights blogosphere]

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Salim Ismail, a founder of PubSub and then of Confabb.com has joined Flickr’s Caterina Fake running Yahoo’s Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous unit that’s supposed to innovate, innovate, innovate. (You can read about it in the blog of Bradley Horowitz, Salim’s new boss, among other places.)

Salim is going to stay at Confabb as chairman. (Disclosure: I’m on Confabb’s board of advisors.) But clearly his focus will be on Brickhouse, the type of fun enterprise companies like Yahoo are very smart to start up. And Salim is a great choice for it. (Brickhouse is behind Yahoo Pipes.) [Tags: salim_ismail yahoo confabb brickhouse business caterina_fake pubsub]

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You know you’re late to the party when you’re trying out a technology after the Wall Street Journal has reported on it, but I finally enrolled in Twitter.com.

For one day, it’s been fun, although if I can’t get it to work with IM, I can’t imagine I’ll remember to continue. (I still don’t do SMS texting. Over the legal age limit.)

It does raise the question of how granular our self-presentation is going to be. Where does it end? Synaptic RSS feeds? “I’m extending my triceps. Vesicles filling with acethylcholine…reaching action potential…Extension achieved!..More in 0.015 seconds…” [Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Drew Townson started a blog. Two weeks in, his fifth post was an announcement of the birth of his baby son, along with an adorable photo. (Mazel Tov, Drew!)

Then he was fired. For blogging.

He had asked his employer, Mercenary Audio, if he could blog on the store’s web site. Nope, said Mercenary, even though Drew has over the course of 25 years created a name for himself as an audio engineer and producer. (Check Google and the AMG All Music Guide.)

So, Drew started his own personal blog. On it he did not mention Mercenary, did not link to Mercenary, did not sell or offer any products or services that might be construed as competing with Mercenary. It just wasn’t about Mercenary. He didn’t even use his own name.

His boss learned about the blog when coworkers passed around the posting with the adorable photo of his newborn son. His boss then fired Drew by leaving him a voicemail that Drew picked up when he got home from the hospital.

From this we may conclude several things:

1. Mercenary wouldn’t know good marketing if it drove by with “Good Marketing” vanity plates.

2. The first amendment has been rescinded at Mercenary Audio.

3. The reports of a douche bag sighting at Mercenary seem quite plausible.

(This post is based on email correspondence with Drew, who is a friend of a friend.) [Tags: digital_rights blogosphere ]

Some of my colleagues at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center (did I mention it’s Harvard Law) point out that the First Amendment doesn’t actually cover this case. Details details! (I actually did know that, but was being all rhetoricalish. With this note I’m being accuratitious.)

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At EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com, I’ve posted about the joy of reading an edition of Hamlet that surfaces hundreds of years of scholarly disputes about the meaning of Shakespeare’s words, disputes that often are without resolution. We don’t know what the old bird/bard meant, but that’s all the more reason to love him! [Tags: shakespeare everything_is_miscellaneous hamlet hermeneutics ]

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The FTC has posted comments on its workshop on Net neutrality held on Feb. 13 and 14. Here is a pdf of Jay Sulzberger’s lucid explanation of how the Net works — ports ‘n’ protocols — and exactly why the Net is essentially different from cable TV. (The PDF is 280 pages long, but Jay’s comments are are a mere 12 pages of typescript — easy and fun reading.)

Also of special interest: eBay’s comments and joint comments by Senators Dorgan and Snowe [Tags: net_neutrality jay_sulzberger ftc ]

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