HASSELBECK: Do you believe that the government had anything to do with the attack of 9/11? Do you believe in a conspiracy in terms of the attack of 9/11?

O’DONNELL: No. But I do believe the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved, World Trade Center Seven. World Trade Center one and Two got hit by planes. Seven, miraculously, for the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.

HASSELBECK: And who do you think is responsible for that?

O’DONNELL: I have no idea. But to say that we don’t know it was imploded, that there was implosion in the demolition, is beyond ignorant. Look at the film. Get a physics expert here from Yale, from Harvard. Pick the school. It defies reason. [source]

Interesting.

OAKLAND, Calif. — A gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge yesterday, creating such intense heat that a section of highway melted and collapsed. [source]

And, from Wikipedia:

…Molten steel is cast into large blocks called “blooms”…. [emphasis added]

Jeesh. [Tags: rosie_odonnell bessemer_process]

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Games for Windows magazine (formerly Computer Gaming World) has a frank article about the strengths and weaknesses of Vista as a platform for games. GFW is independent of Microsoft, yet when it comes time to give the overall rating, it pulls its punch. The article reports that many games run more slowly (albeit they didn’t compare on equivalent hardware…but why didn’t they?) and that whole bunches of games just don’t run. If any particular game had as many bugs and glitches, they’d drop the rating below 5 (out of 10). Instead, they give Vista 8 out of 10 as a gaming platform.

If you’re a gamer, ignore the rating and read the article. You will not be tempted to “upgrade” to Vista. [Tags: vista gfw games_for_windows pc_games]

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Adobe Acrobat 7 is refusing to uninstall. So, following advice on a discussion board, I downloaded the Microsoft Windows Installer CleanUp, which is designed to remove the Windows installer configuration information about selected products that may be confusing the uninstall process.

When I try to install the the Microsoft Windows Installer CleanUp, I get the following messages (click on them to see them full size).

The Boston Globe reports (here today, gone tomorrow-ish) that Carl Jablonski, president of Shaw’s Supermarkets and Star Markets, does a monthly, live, unscripted video broadcast for employees. He talks about what the company is doing well and not so well, interviews a guest, and reads customer letters. On a recent show, the guest was a manager who poked gentle fun at Carl. Said Carl to the reporter, Keith O’Brien: “You’re human. They see that human side of their president. And quite frankly, I think you work better for somebody who you understand.” Nice. But then he also said:

“A 20-minute broadcast with the right individuals generates the message quicker, faster, and more to the point,” said Jablonski.

Insofar as it’s about communicating a message, it’s still alienating. As Doc said succinctly so many years ago, “There’s no market for messages.” It’s still a broadcast, the one in charge speaking to the many who are not. Why not open it up? Let the employees speak — we’ve got lots of ways of enabling that now. [Tags: management carl_jablonski cluetrain ]

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SaveNetRadio.org is asking us in the US to call our representatives to urge them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060), introduced by Jay Inslee (D-WA). Here’s what the email I received from Live360 says:

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) recently denied webcasters’ requests for a rehearing on its ruling of unfairly high new royalty rates — a stunning 300 to 1200 percent increase — for Internet radio for period 2006-2010.

Internet radio is singled out from all other radio, burdened with fees not paid by AM or FM stations, and at rates at least 3-4 times paid by satellite and cable radio. The ruling even included absurd minimum of $500 per station per year to penalize the smallest webcasters with the highest rates.

Should this ruling stand, many of your favorite stations will be silenced. You will find Live365’s 260 genres reduced to the same meager, homogenized list carried on AM/FM radio, because the unfair rates would drive webcasters in niche genres with unique content unavailable elsewhere out of business.

You can, however, help protect your favorite tunes of your favorite DJs from being silenced.

The Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060) has been introduced in Congress by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA). A simple phone call to your Representative to ask for their support on this Bill will go a long way toward ensuring your right to diversity and choice in radio. Better yet, please also write and fax to show how serious you are. They need to know how much your music means to you.

You can find your Rep’s number here. [Tags: radio digital_rights politics ]

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The Berkman Center is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I’ll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)

You are invited. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]

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Radio Open Source has posted the mp3 of yesterday’s show about everything being miscellaneous, with me, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding. Chris being Chris, he drives it more towards than the broad and philosophical than, well, anyone else on radio. And best of all, you can hear me get the name of the author of Moby-Dick wrong! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous radio_open_source christopher_lydon karen_schneider tim_spalding media taxonomy folksonomy]

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AKMA responds at some length to Rowan William’s lecture on Biblical interpretation. Having just read (and blogged) Ethan Zuckerman’s post about the history of knowledge, I’m left this morning thinking: Good G-d almighty, I love the Internet. I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee and I’ve been given access to two brilliant, engaged minds wrestling with issues that really matter and that I would never have come across without the Linkosphere.

Now, on Akma’s response to my response to Dr. Williams (which I got to via Akma’s original recommendation)…

Williams says the Bible should be read “not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’.” As I said in my first post, understanding Scripture as more than something to be known strikes me (a Jew) as important and true. But I remain unconvinced that the Jewish more-than-that response is to see Scripture assembling a community. I may well be misinterpreting what Williams means by “community,” but I thought he meant that Scripture creates community by binding together believers listening to Scripture together. (Clearly the community goes beyond mere listening; I’m not getting the nuance right here.) I thought that was the “out of nothing” he has in mind. But (my point was), Jews aren’t Jews because of what they believe, any more than, say, Italians are. Akma’s response to me is that the Jewish “out of nothing” was the foundational event — the calling (Revelation at Sinai?) and the convenant.

This has me thinking, as Akma’s post always do. Akma’s interpretation makes the creation out of nothing an historical event. But if that’s what Williams meant, “community” is too weak a word. Jews are a people, not a community. (Of course, Jews also form communities; in fact, the religion is designed for community practice.) And, I assumed — thus making an ass out of u and med — that Williams’ reference to communities forming “out of nothing” wasn’t (just) to the historic foundational event of Christian history. but to the continuing creation of communities by hearing the Bible read in particular houses of worship at particular times.

If my interpretation of Williams is right — and I have no confidence that I’m getting any of this right, starting with what Jews believe — then Akma’s interpretation makes Williams’ lecture right for Jews but at the expense of obscuring an important difference between the two religions…a difference that comes down to the difference between being a people and being a community.

The truth is that I am spring-loaded on this topic — being ready to pounce is not a good intellectual position — because all too often, in my experience and opinion, Christians assume too much continuity with Judaism. (Akma is extraordinarily open to the possibility of difference — he defines “respect.”) So, when I read Williams, I tripped over that one little phrase of his.

In short: Let’s take the hyphen out of Judeo-Christian. [Tags: judaism christianity judeo-christian rowan_williams theology ]

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Ethanz has yet another fantastic post. This one recounts a discussion at the World Bank at which Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, talked about what knowledge looked like in the 18th century as access to it suddenly increased. Ethan also talks about the “India fallacy,” his term for the illusory belief that one’s country can become the next India economically. Jeez, you can’t open up Ethan’s blog without learning something.

(Warning: Ethan starts off by saying something gratuitously nice about my book. So, please skip the first paragraph so you won’t suspect that I’m merely reciprocating Ethan’s praise. Thank you.) [Tags: ethan_zuckerman joel_mokyr india world_bank internet ]

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My boot drive was 99% full so, I got myself a shiny new hard drive. My experience with Windows is that whenever you swap a drive, either the old or the new one dies, making the experience as painful as possible. But this time I used XXClone, a free program that clones disks. It also lets you set the new disk as your boot device (although you also need to set that in your BIOS) and swaps the drive letters so your new disk can be, for example, Drive C. For $40/year/computer, you can get the pro version that does incremental backup and can do unattended operations.

It took it something under 2 hours to clone a 120G disk. When it was done, my computer booted right up. I am having some little problems — Google Desktop can’t get a connection to localhost — but I doubt they are XXClone’s fault.

Software that works! [Tags: xxclone clone utilities]

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Larry Lessig has a great post asking us to call upon the Republican and Democratic parties to insist that all presidential debates (”at least”) be made free for use after their initial broadcast.

Abso-freaking-lutely! [Tags: politics copyright copyleft creative_commons lawrence_lessig everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Yesterday I gave a talk at the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Social Media Cluster — 30 minutes followed by 90 minutes of questions and discussion. Paul Gillin, who’d suggested me to the group (thanks Paul!), and is the author of the just-published The New Influencers, made the point (relevant in context) that traditional direct mail marketers are thrilled to get a 3% return rate. “I don’t know of any other case where a failure rate of 97% is considered a success.”

From the front of the room Dan Bricklin responded instantly. “Sperm,” Dan said. It made me laugh. But, as Dan points out, it’s a common strategy in nature.

BTW, Dan’s posted a podcast of the session. [Tags: nature direct_mail marketing sperm dan_bricklin paul_gillin mtlc everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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1. Tonight at 6pm at the Berkman Center, I’m leading an open discussion about civility, codes of conduct, and the price of making rules explicit. We serve pizza. You’re invited! [map]

2. Tomorrow night at 7pm I’m the guest on Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source, talking about Everything Is Miscellaneous. It’ll also be available as a podcast, of course, because that’s what the estimable Radio Open Source does. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous cyberbullying codes_of_conduct radio_open_source berkman]

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Rob Faris and John Palfrey are giving a talk on “The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering,” a talk about the Open Net Initiative . The ONI is a joint project by Oxford, Cambridge, U of Toronto and Berkman. About 50 people have worked on gathering this data.The new study (coming out as a book called Access Denied) reports on forty countries that block access one way or another. Countries can’t do this on their own, he says.

Over the past five years, the states doing filtering have gone for a few to dozens. East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East are the main places that filter.

How can the ONI involve more people, John asks. How can the ONI make the data more relevant? Already you can suggest sites to test and you can submit a URL and see where it’s blocked.

Rob talks about a “taxonomy of Internet content restriction strategies.” There are many ways to limit information on line. A state can take down illegal sites, remove search results, filter content, arrest and intimidate, require registration and licensing and ID, hold ISPs responsible, and monitor. There’s no filtering in Egypt, for example, but a blogger was just imprisoned. Bahrain took down access to Google Earth just as a politically uncomfortable mashup was circulating. China blocks Wikipedia. Gay and lesbian sites are blocked in many countries. The Gulf states comprehensively block gambling sites. Thailand blocks access to the book “The King Never Smiles.” Anonymizers and The Onion Router are frequently blocked. (Rob mentions the great ONI page where you can see the search results at Google.com and Google.cn for the same term.)

To comprehensively block the Internet, countries rely on software, using automatic ways of identifying offensive material, which makes lots of mistakes. “Internet filtering is inherently flawed.” You get over-blocking, underblocking and mis-categorization. Some countries are transparent about the blocking, but many do not.

“Once you put in the infrastructure for social filtering,” says Rob, you also seem to institute political blocking.

Q: [yochai benkler] This is important work. But the most important part of it is the detail your work covers. “The level of detail that goes into the country studies suggests” a different way of presenting it. E.g., transparency. How do you do as someone who respects democracy deal with the transparent process in Saudi Arabia? The Saudis say exactly what they’re doing. They say they’re protecting a cultural discourse. They let people add to it or subtract to the list of blocked sites. Mapping these differences among countries would be very helpful.
A: [jp] We’ve spent three years collecting data. That’s been our aim. Now the challenge is how to make it useful. Do we want to give an open API to all the sites that are blocked? Do we want to give this list to everyone including the censors? And how much should we write in our country studies? The first ones were very long, with lots of context, but not many people read them. So, we’ve shifted to shorter reports, more coverage, and deep dives at times. And we’ve done a book that gives straightforward data, plus a series of contextualizing chapters. We’re trying to have it all ways. [I.e., they're being miscellaneous. :) ] Also, we’re working with several companies on a code of conduct for international companies.

Q:[ethanz] People in filtered countries are often desperate just to get confirmation that they’re being blocked. It’s been tough to get rapid response out of ONI. Activists are writing their own tools, often not as good as ONI’s tools. And it’d be great if you had a handbook that others could use who are not as technical as you.

Q: There’s a lot of data to be gathered about how countries are changing their laws to achieve the aims of filtering.
A: We’ve started doing that. We’ve sent clinical students to countries to look into this.

Q: What do you do to help bloggers?
A: We’re not advocating, at least at this point. We’re just describing.

Q: ONI is done by a localized group. How do we get the average user to take part in checking on filtering, etc.?
A: We’re definitely thinking about this. Jonathan Zittrain wants to do a distributed app, like Seti@Home . We’ve started the design of this.

Q: As you’ve said, American high tech companies provide filtering technology. Corporate responsibility has been discussed forever…
A: For the past two days, a group has been meeting in London, drafting principles. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Vodaphone are there, as well as the ONI.

Q: How can you release the information listing the censored applications?
A: We have a tool under development that lets you see which countries block a site. We’re struggling with making it available because we are reluctant to give this information to censors. [The demo shows that Technorati is blocked in China and Iran and BoingBoing is blocked in Iran, Saudia Arabia, Sudan and Tunisia.]

Q: How has filtering changed since you started monitoring it in 2002?
A: We haven’t collected enough data. When we started we only looked at a few countries.

Q: [catherine bracy] How do you know what countries want to join the filtering club?
A: They’re debating legislation. There are a half dozen in Latin America. A bill is floating in Norway that’s breathtaking in its breadth…

Q: [ethan] Should you be helping people filter better? Thailand blocks all of YouTube to get rid of one offensive video. You could help them out…
A: [jp] I had a frank conversation with the Thai censor. Fascinating. I see us doing more of that.

A: [rob] That is remarkably close to The Google Question.

[Conclusion: Not only can the Internet be blocked, it's way easier than we'd thought. There are so many ways to do it. And it can be done at multiple levels, from tech to legislation. Hence, is there no single way to unblock it?]

Seth Finkelstein figured out why BoingBoing got banned from Boston’s free wifi. Omigod. Censorship shouldn’t be this stupid. Unfortunately, it just about always is.

[Tags: oni censorship digital_rights berkman]

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On the second day of NPR’s annual meeting, Andy Carvin reports on a discussion about how NPR can enhance our democracy. [Tags: npr democracy politics andy_carvin media ]

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Dave Winer writes, “I want a checkbox that tells MSNBC that I don’t want any more Virginia Tech stories.” Exactly. (He’s making a point about checkboxes, not about Virginia Tech.)

In fact, for the past few weeks, as a part of my “stump” speech, I’ ve been showing a screen capture of USA Today’s redesigned site. It includes a button you can click on to give a Digg-like thumbs up to an article. Great, except, um, where’s the thumb down? We want to be able to say to the Britney or Justin or We-Should-Teach-Our-Students-Judo article “No no no no no no no no.” We want to tune our news. But we also want our revenge. [Tags: news media digg dave_winer everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, posts that free technology is usually free as in kittens: You may get it for free, but the maintenance costs are perpetual. Perfect analogy. And it’s just part of a really useful article in the ALA site about managing library IT. “Most of us are buckling under the weight of what we have to support,” Karen writes.

(Thanks to Deborah Eliz. Finn for the link.) [Tags: karen_schneider technology libraries]

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Now that she’s finished the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling is probably wondering what to write next. With all modesty, I have an idea: She should answer her email.

I’m not kidding. Rowling’s been good about fan fiction, apparently, happy that her fans are so enthusiastic. That’s a welcome break from the brand mentality authors are encouraged to adopt by the life+70 copyright term. So, with those billion dollars in royalties in her back pocket (personally, I’d have it changed into one $500M bill and five $100,000,000’s) she could spend a few years on the Web, engaging with young readers and writers in every forum and format that she’s comfortable with.

That’d be some real magic. [Tags: jk_rowling harry_potter copyright books]

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Fon (Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors and have stock options in the company) has just announced that it’s done a deal with Time-Warner. This is a big deal for Fon. And I hope it’s a step forward in providing low-cost wifi everywhere.

When you sign up for Fon, you get a wifi router from them that provides public and private access. Anyone who comes across the public signal can use it for $3/day ($2 for days after that). If you provide public access, you can use anyone else’s Fon public signal for free — free roaming. It’s a clever idea, but in the US the biggest stumbling block has been the fact that to offer public access, you have to violate most ISP’s terms and conditions. But now not Time-Warner’s. I assume also that T-W will be doing some marketing of Fon. (I also assume that Time-Warner gets a cut of the per-day fee for Fon users. As Martin Varsavsky, Fon’s founder, has been saying from the gitgo, Fon expands broadband use in ways that can benefit the broadband suppliers.)

I like open, free wifi. My own wifi router is un-WEPped. But I also like the incentive system Fon has in place to encourage people to provide public very low-cost wifi access. So, I like today’s news about the Time-Warner partnership. [Tags: fon wifi broadband]

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This Wednesday at 6pm at the Berkman Center, I’m leading a discussion about civility, codes of conduct, and the price of the explicit. I will make some conversation-opening remarks at the beginning, and then we will discuss the topic(s), presumably civilly…although the Law of Irony dictates that it’ll turn into fistacuffs.

Pizza will be served. All are welcome. [map] [Tags: civility cyberbullying ethics berkman]

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Ethanz has a terrific, honest, and unresolved post about living locally and globally.

I’ve spent summers near where Ethanz lives all of my life, and I’ve even been to Ethan’s house. So I understand the raw pull of the geography itself.

He also has a list of “great talks to watch.” I look forward to watching… [Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

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This post of mine just went up at HuffingtonPost:

John McCain singing “Bomb bomb bomb, Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” wasn’t even exactly a joke. He was clarifying a question from the audience that used euphemisms and circumlocutions to urge him to bomb Iran. Being famously quirky and ready to blurt out what he thinks, McCain not only said the words that the questioner had been afraid to utter, heturned them into a refrain.

A great moment in politics? A terrific witticism? A graceful Kennedy-esque use of humor? Nah. But in seizing on it, progressives are doing more harm than McCain’s little ditty could have done even if we take it at its worst. We are dragging the process down, legitimizing the tactic, debasing understanding, and driving nuance out of the system. Frankly, taking McCain down a peg just isn’t worth it.
more…

[Tags: politics mccain forgiveness]

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The Berkman is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I’ll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)

You are invited.

Last night the Center threw a similar affair for John Clippinger’s new book, A Crowd of One. These are really nice events. John’s talk was terrific and engendered a lively discussion, and the wine-and-cheese party at the Center embodies much of what’s best about the Center. So, I hope you’ll come. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]

John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he’s interested in how virtual worlds “allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities.”

The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is “highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged.” Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. “It’s more a reflex.” He points to our “mirror neurons,” that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but “our identities are socially embedded.” And we all have multiple selves.

How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. “But the Web was born without an identity layer.” We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. “How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc.” John refers to biological signalling theory — there’s a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That’s essential to any kind of trust network, says John.

In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They’ll want to have a persistent identity. They’ll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They’ll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they’ll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.

Over the past two years, John’s been working on a project called “Higgins,” an open source interoperable identity system. (It’s called “Higgins” because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)

We are getting “new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine.” This is a kind of “social physics”: there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for “evolutionary stable strategies.”

There’s an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China's interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]

Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems?
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn’t mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.

Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust?
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there’s another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.

Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I’m interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.

Q: Do you see a role for government?
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.

Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer?
A: The layer won’t be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.

Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it’s insecure to have a single number encode so much…
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can’t get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.

Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel.
A: They’d be persistent, not consistent. It’d be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.

Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they’ll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not?
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.

Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn’t know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it’s ham-fisted. It’s either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That’s the new generation of social technology we now need.

[Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an "identity layer." And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]

[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous I’ve posted about the Gender Genie, a tool that guesses the authors’ sex based on her/his use of innocuous keywords. ..

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Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, has joined the Edwards’ campaign.

I’ve been doing some volunteer work for that campaign. Having Trippi on board makes me very happy. If you want to know why, read Trippi’s book, The Revolution Will Not be Televised. Joe understands the transformative power of the Net, he understands that it’s about we the people connecting and taking democracy into our own hands, and he is an inspiring — and yes, sometimes maddening — leader.Trippi and the team he assembled invented a lot of what’s most important in the Internetting of politics. He’s got a ton of feet-on-the-ground experience in politics, but I’m betting he’s not anywhere near done innovating. Trippi’s an idealist who kicks butt. And that’s just what the Edwards campaign needs now, imo.

(And while you’re ordering books, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Edwards’ Saving Graces, which is heartbreakingly insightful and true about many things, including the Internet.)

I think this is a very good day for the Edwards’ campaign. And that means it’s a day in which our democracy has gotten a little more lively. [Tags: john_edwards joe_trippi politics]

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Steven Johnson just keeps getting better as a writer and as a thinker. He takes big ideas and makes them compelling by finding their connections to unexpected ideas, and then uses them to pry up the floorboards of our assumptions. Just at the level of putting words together, Steve is a master. Best of all, he’s young, so we have many more years of his writing to look forward to, if the wily universe permits.

Although the topic of The Ghost Map is the cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery that the disease is spread through contaminated water, it operates on several levels. In fact, it’s about the need to operate on several levels. So, at one level it a terrific procedural mystery with compelling real-life characters, at another it’s about the biology of bacteria, and at a third level it’s about the structure of cities. We would still be at the mercy of cholera if the hero of the tale had not been able to go up a level of abstraction to see the statistical pattern of deaths. And Johnson’s own meta-explanation requires going up to another meta-level to show how all the levels are required to tell the tale and understand the truth. It opens up a means of explanation that is rich and sometimes so surprising that it makes me laugh with delight. This fluidity with levels of abstraction also informs Steve’s books Emergence and Mind Wide Open. And with its multilayered points of view, The Ghost Map serves as further evidence for Steve’s point in Everything Bad Is Good for You that our culture is becoming more comfortable with complexity.

Steve is an intellectually sympathetic writer, which is a rare virtue. Rather than dismissing the then-prevalent theory that a “miasma” caused cholera, he is able to explain the good reasons why the miasmists held on to their theory so long. A lesser writer would have dismissed them as stupid, hide-bound, or buffoons. Steve is also able to explain why the doctor who figured it out was able to do so, tracing it to his previous work with ether, rather than claiming it was a bolt of genius lightning.

And to top it all of, The Ghost Map is a compelling, fun page-turner…a terrific read, as we say nowadays.

Steve makes my writerly cheeks burn with envy.

(Disclosure: I’m delighted to know Steve a bit. ADDED April 20 ‘07: I should also have noted that Steve blurbed my book. Nevertheless, The Ghost Map is a really good book.) [Tags: ghost_map steve_johnson books reviews ]

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The Boston Globe has a good article by Marcella Bombardieri about colleges using students to blog to give prospective students a sense of what life is like there. About 25% of colleges do this. Some pay, some don’t. Some see the blogs before they’re posted, some don’t. All say they have a high tolerance for negative or embarrassing posts.

Wouldn’t a prospective student do better to find students who are just blogging, rather than ones who are sponsored by the school admissions department? On the other hand, have you tried to find, say, MIT blogs at Technorati? Let me give you a hint: The “related tags” listed for “mit” are “technology, und, der, zu, den, das, von, ein and auch.” Who tags anything “zu” or “von,” the equivalent of tagging an English-language post as “to” or “of.”

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors.) [Tags: college conversational_marketing marketing cluetrain blogs everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Twitter limits you to 140 characters per posting. You see the postings of people in your social network. The limit encourages frequent postings of small significance.

Twitter thus sounds dumb.

In fact, Twitter is about the intimacy of details. Through it I see small events in the lives of friends about whom I otherwise might only learn the Big Events when we “catch up” after long intervals. [Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I’m at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association meeting in New Orleans where I sat a lunch table with Scott Anderson, CEO of Union Diamond, the second largest seller of diamonds over the Internet. His company’s phone policy is that if a telephone rings for twenty seconds, that’s ten seconds too long. Everyone in the company is charged with answering calls and seeing them through. I asked him how he’ll manage this as the company gets bigger. He said he’s like to continue the policy but perhaps have a set of numbers that would direct calls to the right group within the company.

BTW, Scott says that they support the Kimberly process, and only buy from suppliers who certify that they are not selling conflict diamonds.

Nice guy, good policies…I’m ready to buy! I wonder what of mine would look good studded with diamonds…

Here’s a random sampling of topics (Day 1 Day 2) at the WOMMA meeting:

JetBlue: Inside the Cockpit of their CrewBlue Brand Ambassador Network

General Mills: Using Community Outreach to Build Buzz

TheFind.com: Tapping into the Web’s Power Influencers — Women

Yahoo!: Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest with Yahoo! Video and Jumpcut

Flying Dog Brewery: Leveraging Your Brand’s Intrinsic Values

CASA: Honing Refer-A-Friend Word of Mouth Tactics in a Not-for-Profit Setting

Cold Stone Creamery: Using PR as an Integrated Marketing Tool

O, The Oprah Magazine: Driving Brand Advocacy with Special Events

Here’s the WOMMA code of ethics. They take it seriously. I talked with the group this morning about the importance of respecting not just the “consumer” (as their first principle states), but respecting the conversation as well. What would marketing look like if it took the ongoing customer conversations as paramount?

[Tags: womma marketing union_diamond ethics business ]

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Akma highly recommends Dr. Rowan Williams’ lecture on the interpretation of the Bible. If the endorsement of a non-observant Jew matters—and why should it?—I agree. The lecture is fascinating to me, although also quite foreign. I would love to hear the reaction of some learned and observant Jews.

For example, Dr. Williams says that the Bible was first heard in a community, not read in isolation. It should therefore be read (he says) “not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’.” I both recognize this as a deep summons and hear it as expressing foundational presuppositions different from mine and my people’s. Although non-Jews often don’t give this full credence, Jews are a people. You are a Jew by birth, not by belief. (It’s more complex than that, but what isn’t?) Thus, the community isn’t created “out of nothing.” And the community with which one hears the holy text is an historical one with which one is supposed to discuss the text. Reading the Torah, at least as I’ve watched my wife and others do it, is about conversing with the tradition of great commentators on it. I think that is a different type of community and different experience than Dr. Williams is discussing. And yet, of course, there are elements of Jewish community that are much like what he describes.

Anyway, I find myself useful provoked by the lecture. [Tags: rowan_williams bible hermeneutics akma judaism torah ]

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Wendy Seltzer is a founder of ChillingEffects.org. She talks about her “run in” with the National Football League.

Wendy waits for the room to fill by running a very funny YouTube clip of the Daily Show segment about Viacom vs. YouTube. (The room is now packed.)

She was watching the Super Bowl and saw the notice: “This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent, is prohibited.” She took the clip off her MythTV and posted it to YouTube under the title “Super Bowl Highlights,” with a caption that said: “The NFL’s overreaching copyright claim.” That was on Feb. 8. Five says later, she got a notification from YouTube saying that they had taken the clip down because the NFL claimed it was infringing under the DMCA .

YouTube had received a list of 158 clips the NFL claimed was infringing. It’s likely that the NFL had a robot search for anything that was titled or tagged as NFL. Wendy asked to see the list and received it.

Wendy believes her clip was Fair Use of copyrighted material. That copyright doesn’t protect people from giving accounts of the game or describing the game. It doesn’t even prevent people from making some pictures from the telecast. Wendy’s clip was Fair Use because:

My use is for nonprofit educational purposes; the copyright in the telecast is thin; the portion of football that follows the copyright warning is a minute portion of the whole, with no significant action or commentary, useful to show people what it was the NFL claimed its copyright covered; and the effect on the market for or value of the work is non-existent.

At ChillingEffects, there is a counter-notification generator form that requires the claimant to get specific about why the piece is infringing. Wendy filled it in. This gives YouTube the ability to re-post the material without penalty; the poster now takes the heat if the complainant still complains. Wendy says this isn’t quite an even balance because YouTube’s terms of service protect it from complaints by users anyway, so while Viacom can sue YouTube for not taking a clip down, users can’t really sue YouTube if it doesn’t put the clips back up upon receipt of a counter-claim.

YouTube put Wendy’s clip back up.

Then, on March 18, YouTube once again removed it because the NFL again complained. Wendy says that the DMCA has no explicit mention of a second take-down notice. If a company doesn’t like a counter-notification, it can sue.

This time, it was clear that an individual from the NFL had actually watched the clip. But, Wendy thinks they were falling foul of 512f of the DMCA, which makes a person liable for damages (including lawyers’ fees) for knowingly misrepresenting that a clip is infringing. YouTube was required to pass along Wendy’s original counter-notification, so the NFL knew that Wendy was saying that the clip was for educational purposes.

Wendy sent back the same counter-notification. The Wall Street Journal blog and the Newark Star Ledger covered it, resulting in a letter from the NFL saying that Wendy clearly “doesn’t understand” the DMCA. They objected to the fact that Wendy included 20 seconds of game play around the ten-second copyright notice. But, the letter said, she has their permission to use just the copyright notice. (She included the 20 seconds as context. It does not show a complete play.)

Wendy wrote back, saying that she thinks the clip in its entirety is covered under Fair Use.

They replied with an email, saying that “there is a substantial difference of opinion us on this matter that cannot be reconciled.” So, the clip is still on line. But the NFL says it can offer no assurance they won’t complain again.

YouTube is built on the DMCA safe harbor (512c) that says that it doesn’t have to screen or filter content, or check the copyright of each piece posted. Instead, YouTube has to reply to claims of infringement. No one has alleged that YouTube has not responded. It’s followed the DMCA to the letter. Instead, Viacom et al. say that it’s “too hard” to send YouTube all these notices, so they want to shift the burden to YouTube. Even if YouTube could manage to do all that work, the next startup would find that too high a hurdle; it’d badly hurt innovation…a chilling effect. “I think they’re trying to renege on the deal that was struck with the DMCA.” Wendy would like to see the DMCA reformed “to address some of the burdens on speech” but not thrown out.

Q: (catherine bracy) Why do you think the NFL is “materially misrepresenting”?
A: They know that this is non-infringing. The second notification makes it harder to claim it was a good faith mistake.

Q: (bracy) Can I take a camera into the stadium, tape it, and put it onto YouTube?
A: The guards frisk you and say that your ticket is a contract that prevents you from using a camera. You could look on from a rooftop and tape it from there.

Q: Could you sell it?
A: There’s no copyright in the game itself, so yes. But if you tape a concert you can hear from your house, there’s copyright in the music itself. And “Super Bowl” is trademarked, which is why ads for, say, chips say things like “Stock up for the big game.”

The “knowingly misrepresents” phrase, Wendy says, was added by the entertainment industry to make it harder to sue complainants.

Q: (john palfrey) What’s their strongest case against your Fair Use claim?
A: Their strongest claim against the 20 seconds of football is that I haven’t transformed it or added educational material into the clip itself. They’ll say the announcers describing the plays is a creative work. And there are markets for licensing virtually everything, they’ll say. If they want phone companies to continue paying them to stream clips to cellphones, this is a market into which I’m intruding.

Q: What might your damages be under 512f?
A: It’s hard to quantify damages from speech. I didn’t lose money from students not attending class because I couldn’t talk about the clip, etc.

Q: (gene koo) How long can this take-down and put-back dance go on?
A: California recognizes that legal process can be used to squelch legitimate speech, so if this process continued, I might have a claim.

Q: (me) Someone posted an aggregation of Couric’s questions of the Edwards. It was taken down. Was that fair use? And if this had been done by Jon Stewart, would it be protected the same way it was for the amateur who posted it.
A: Yes, it sounds like fair use, and Stewart and the poster are protected by the same law. But there is no DMCA coverage for broadcast. I don’t know if Stewart licenses his clips or just asserts they’re fair use.

[Tags: berkman fair_use copyleft copyright nfl youtube dmca]