Yale’s Yochai Benkler , whose The Wealth of Networks is the seminal work on the new economics of collaboration, is joining Harvard and the Berkman Center.

This is fantastic news. What an addition to our community! And not just because Yochai is brilliant. He is also kind in discussion, and that matters a lot.

[Tags: yochai_benkler berkman]

1 Comment »

Wired has posted the latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I’ve been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired. This one is an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. We talk about the role of rules in building knowledge socially as oppopsed to just letting things work out. How important is consistency in the rules as opposed to making decisions that are highly sensitive to the particularities of the case?

We also talk about the effect of slicing topics up into lots of linked pieces. And how Wikipedia looks from the point of view of a Muppet. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous wikipedia jimmy_wales knowledge ]

Be the first to comment »

I’m really excited about this, so pardon me if I run the press release from the Edwards campaign:

EDWARDS CALLS ON FCC TO MAKE INTERNET MORE AVAILABLE AND AFFORDABLE

Mountain View, California - Today, Senator John Edwards sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to use the upcoming auction of the 700 megahertz slice of the broadband spectrum to make the Internet more affordable and more accessible to all Americans, regardless of where they live or how much money they have. Edwards is visiting California today to attend a town hall meeting with Google employees where he will discuss this issue among others.

“In recent years, the Internet has grown to touch everything and transform much of what it touches,” wrote Edwards. “It’s not the answer to everything, but it can powerfully accelerate the best of America. It improves our democracy by making quiet voices loud, improves our economy by making small markets big, and improves opportunity by making unlikely dreams possible.”

Edwards called on the FCC to set bidding and service rules for the upcoming auction to ensure that the public airwaves benefit everyone, not just big companies. Edwards asked the FCC to:

· Set aside as much as half of the spectrum for wholesalers who can lease access to smaller start-ups, which would improve service in rural and underserved areas.

· Require anyone who wins rights to this valuable public resource not to discriminate among data and services and to allow any device to be attached to their service.

· Make bidding anonymous to avoid collusion and retaliatory bids.

The full text of the letter is below.

Dear Chairman Martin:

The upcoming 700 megahertz spectrum auction presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the next generation of American technology.

In recent years, the Internet has grown to touch everything and transform much of what it touches. It’s not the answer to everything, but it can powerfully accelerate the best of America. It improves our democracy by making quiet voices loud, improves our economy by making small markets big, and improves opportunity by making unlikely dreams possible.

As you know, the Federal Communications Commission is now preparing to auction the 700 megahertz slice of the spectrum. This “beachfront” band is particularly well suited to wireless broadband because it has wide coverage and can easily pass through walls.

By setting bid and service rules that unleash the potential of smaller new entrants, you can transform information opportunity for people across America — rural and urban, wealthy and not. As much as half of the spectrum should be set aside for wholesalers who can lease access to smaller start-ups, which has the potential to improve service to rural and underserved areas. Additionally, anyone winning rights to this valuable public resource should be required not to discriminate among data and services and to allow any device to be attached to their service. Finally, bidding should be anonymous to avoid collusion and retaliatory bids.

I urge you to seize this chance to transform the Internet and the future.

Sincerely,

John Edwards

The 700 megahertz slice is coming available because analog TV is being moved off of it. The incumbent carriers would like to scarf it up. But even with a requirement that the winners of the auction build the network out to rural and poor areas, the carriers have shown they will drag their feet forever. In fact, the FCC’s use-it-or-lose-it proposal could (as far as I understand it, and I may not) delay delivery to those areas as they are stripped from the carriers and then re-auctioned. We need to get this right the first time. Our best hope, imo, is to enable local businesses to make decent profits by providing Net access to their local rural and poor areas. And to do that, we should make big hunks of 700 mH spectrum available to wholesalers who provide spectrum to hungry smaller carriers. (See the Frontline plan.)

This band is not the final answer. But it’s an opportunity to get some more of the public airwaves working for the public good.

(Disclosure: I am a volunteer advisor to the Edwards campaign. I was involved in the discussions of this issue.) [Tags: john_edwards spectrum net_neutrality fcc internet ]

Here’s Harold Feld’s take. Harold knows this stuff inside out.

1 Comment »

My book is the subject of a discussion at the Well, with me as the interviewee.

Here’s the RSS feed. The site is here, but only has the first nine posts up.

You can read it for free. Only subscribers can comment. [Tags: the_well everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging ]

1 Comment »

Save The Internet has a new posting up, asking the FCC to make sure the chunk of the airwaves about to become available stays open for public and market innovation.

David Isenberg, meanwhile, in an important piece writes that we won’t get Net neutrality if we rely on policy to achieve it. The carriers are structurally incapable of being Net neutral. So, David argues for structurally separating those who provide Net connectivity from those who sell content and services over the Net. [Tags: net_neutrality savetheinternet david_isenberg telecommunications spectrum fcc ]

1 Comment »

Harvard Business Review has started posting its “Forethought” articles — the op-ed style columns at the beginning of the issue. That means the one of mine they published this month — If You Love Your Information, Set It Free — is available online. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous hbr ]

2 Comments »

Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn’t truth what’s really at stake, he asks.

Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We’ve always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there’s a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we’ve wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or “essential”…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

[Tags: truth categories philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonmy episteomology]

3 Comments »

Open Source Radio, which has been a great resource for us all as well as a model I very much hope works, needs bucks…

1 Comment »

My brother and I bought a used boat this winter — fifteen feet of leaky fiberglass, with a 90 horsepower motor that assumes that 15 of the horses in harness are dead and being dragged by the others — so I went downtown to register it with the authorities. If you have assembled the right set of treasure hunt collectibles, including a hand-rubbing of the vehicle identification plate, it all goes smoothly. But…

One of the checkboxes on the registration form asks if I’m “retarded.” I thought we were done lumping the various ways our intelligences fail us into that particular bucket, but I also wondered whether the state had minimum intelligence requirements for boat ownership. No, said the state employee on the other side of the counter. They also provide hunting licenses at the boat registration offices, and to get a permit that lets you carry a gun, the state does want to know if you’re “retarded.” They only have the one form, so they have collect the information for boat owners as well.

Inevitably, we read backwards from the metadata that’s asked of us. Had the form asked for prior felony convictions, known allergies or political party affiliation, we would have tried to make sense of the intentions behind the form. Requests for metadata are expressive. Which is one good reason you should bother to print up separate damn forms for boat owners and hunters.

What do the two have in common anyway, except that they both show up jutting their manly jaws forward in outdoor-wear catalogs? [Tags: metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

7 Comments »

Tom Matrullo’s got a helpful post about opening up JSTOR, a digitized archive of scholarlship. Tom registers “puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge — knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.”

Damn right it’s frustrating. And there’s lot’s going on trying to free the knowledge. On the one hand, we have the economic hurdles, which Tom’s post explains. On the other, we have at least a sense of how much smarter our species could become if enabled open acess to scholarship. Someday…

(Thanks to Frank Paynter for the pointer.) [Tags: open_access knowledge universities tom_matrullo berkman jstor everything_is_miscellaneous]

Be the first to comment »

Pidgin (nee Gaim) is an instant messaging client that lets you combine AIM, Yahoo and Google messages. I spent too long this morning trying to get it to recognize Gtalk.

Google has a page describing how to do it. That may work for you. It doesn’t work for everyone, including me.

Next step: Read the “troubleshooting” paragraph at Manast’s post on the topic.

At this point I started getting SSL error messages. But, after installing OpenSSL, it’s now working.

Yay for Open Source! [Tags: pidgin gtalk instant_messaging googletalk]

3 Comments »

It’s Linnaeus’ 300th birthday today, and Wired.com is celebrating with a terrific article by Kristen Philipkoski.

The article also has a sidebar I wrote about Linnaeus, as well as 4-5 pages about Linnaeus from my book [Tags: linnaeus taxonomy wired everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Be the first to comment »

Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and the author of Dreaming in Code, has posted at Salon an interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous.

At his blog, Scott adds some “out-takes” from the interview, and recommends the book. [Tags: salon scott_rosenberg everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy tagging ]

3 Comments »

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. I saw an advance version of the changes, but otherwise had no direct influence. Also, although at some point I conceivably could make some indeterminate amount of money from Technorati, the fact that Dave Sifry is a friend influences my judgment more.)

Technorati has just done a major re-shaping of itself, which is interesting as a response to the increasing need for both pinpoint accuracy and broad context. Dave Sifry, the ceo, blogs about it here.

Technorati is driving down both roads simultaneously, which I think makes sense. On the one hand, if you want to do an old fashioned text search through blogs, the site has improved its engine and pared down the experience. If, on the other hand, you want to see information in context (and on the Web that of course means being able to explore that context further), the site has taken several steps:

1. The default search now is for tags, not for text in blogs. Tags are expressions of what the readers think a post is about, so some types of searches should return more accurate, relevant and interesting results. Of course, we also use tags in idiosyncratic ways, so only experience will tell whether and when tag searching is more satisfying than text searching. In any case, Technorati lets you click to search through text, if that’s what you want. (You can go straight to the text search page via s.technorati.com.)

2. Technorati continues to include more sources and more types of information. In fact, the home page no longer positions Technorati as a blog search engine. “Include everything” is one of the key recommendations of Everything is Miscellaneous, so I like its continuing inclusiveness :)

3. These changes seem to move Technorati towards embracing topics as a basic unit of meaning. For example, if you search for “ron paul,” you are taken to a page that assembles blog posts, videos and photos about the controversial Republican. There are tabs for music and events as well, although in this case Technorati didn’t find any. There’s also a “WTF” post, an explanation of the topic generated and voted on by users. (It’s displaying the WTF by siegheilneocon, which only got 27 votes, instead of the one by beckychr007, which got 61 votes, seeming to prefer the most recent to the most popular, which is either a bug or I’m not understanding it.)

Topics are an important way to cluster ideas. At the moment, Technorati has no concept of a topic apart from a tag, however. The infrastructure to do more is in place, because the site already displays a list of related tags. The results pages don’t bring in the content from those tags, though. For example, if “john mccain” were a related tag, it might make sense to bring some of that tagged material into the “ron paul” topic page. That would give us a broader view of the topic. Conflating topics with tags can increase the precision of results — but not for highly ambiguous tags such as “shot” — but can also reduce the context and thus our understanding. Granted, figuring out algorithmically what’s relevant and how it’s relevant is no small challenge. (Maybe if some topic pages were marked as especially worthwhile and stable, not all of the clean up and construction would have to be done algorithmically.)

Likewise, at some point it’d be good to start relating topics, so that the system knows that “ron paul” is (in some sense) contained by “republicans” and republicans are related to “politics.” This sort of information can eventually be gleaned folksonomically from the tags. Of course there’d be nothing wrong with using existing taxonomies and ontologies to help further refine the relationships among topics. It’s always going to be a messy, overlapping, shifting mass of connections, but, well, so are we.

This is not a criticism of what Technorati has done. In fact, I mean it as a way of expressing my excitement about where it goes from here. [Tags: technorati folksonomy tagging search blogs everything_is_miscellaneous]

I just heard about TagAndFacet, a tool that lets you tag Web sites, Outlook messages, and Windows files for easy re-finding. It also lets you declare “facets” — metadata categories of continuing use — so you can do faceted, tree-like browsing. A version is available for free with a limit on how many items you can tag; a for-pay version should be available soon. (I haven’t yet tried it.)

1 Comment »

In the 4th in the Harvard-Wired “Miscellaneous” podcast series I get to interview Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and author of Death by Black Hole. We talk about our culture’s insistence on thinking there is one preferred way of ordering the cosmos. [Tags: neil_degrasse_tyson berkman astrophysics pluto planets taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

1 Comment »

Ethan has yet another great post, this one on using Twitter.com and even e-cards as tools of political organization. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman twitter politics]

Be the first to comment »

On one of the few beautiful days of the spring so far, Gene Koo is talking to a packed house at the Berkman Center. He’s talking about his research into how tech is affecting how lawyers practice and teach. He interviewed many people and surveyed 142 LexisNexis users with fewer than 7 years experience. [As always, I'm taking notes, missing stuff, getting things wrong, etc.]

Background trends: Legal practice and education are bifurcating. Megapractices are arising. Torrential amounts of data. The minimal amount of tech lawyers need is rising.

New skills: Data dieting, techno-social skills, neta-lawyering, and basic tech management.

Data dieting. Finding high-quality data, efficiently. Knowledge Management has a role here, reusing knowledge assets. But, when it’s easier to see the attachments at EDGAR than to hunt down what the lawyers in your own firm have written, the knowledge landscape has changed.

Techno-social. His survey showed that a good chunk of practicing lawyers are on 6 or more teams at any one time. And typically over half the people on a team are not in your office. There is, however, an attitude that collaborating “drags you down.”

Meta-lawyering. Developing systems of practice, e.g., scanning in docs, automating doc development, case management and evaluation. Meta-lawyering fomralizes tacit knowledge, requiring some wisdom about the patterns one needs to look for.

Basic tech skills. Small practices lag in their tech infrastructure. (The majority of lawyers are solo practitioneers or in small firms.)

So, who should be teaching? Very few are teaching practice skills. The schools generally don’t teach them, but the firms don’t either, especially the small and mid-size ones. Maybe this could be done by a network of law schools. E.g., Harvard has a good program on the practice of negotiations, wihle Brigham Young teaches the skill of interviewing and counseling.

How to learn? It’s easier to add courses, but harder to integrate practice into the existing legal curriculum. E.g., you could add practice in writing contracts to a course on contracts. Law schools, however, say they don’t want to become “trade schools.” Gene recommends thinking of the practical part as “labs.” Also, it could be taught through simulations.

Gene points to the possibility of taking FaceBook as a model of groupware for study groups. Perhaps clinical students could use — or develop — a case management system, or expert legal systems.

Q: Are there core skills that would be worth teaching to all lawyers?
A: The MacCrate report has a list, starting with knowing how to talk with clients.

Gene would like to set up a SecondLife space where law students could get property, a set of rules, and try to live together.

[Tags: berkman gene_koo law_school law education]

1 Comment »

Thunderbird v.2.0.0.0 has decided to stop storing preferences such as which columns I want displayed and what I want shown in the tool bar. I have tried changing the permissions on the files in Docs & Settings > App Data > Thunderbird (in XP), but that does not seem to be the problem.

Any suggestions?

Got an answer at MozillaZine. Window display preferences seem to be stored in localstore.rdf, which is in the particular profile folder (e.g., in Windows, it’d be C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\
Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\WEIRDNUMBEREDPROFILE\localstore.rdf. (Adjust the all caps parts to your particular environment.) Close Thunderbird and delete (or rename) localstore.rdf. Open Thunderbird, and make your changes. A new copy of localstore.rdf will be automatically generated. Ta-da!

Be the first to comment »

Viacom sends YouTube a list of 100,000 videos that Viacom claims violate copyright, and under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube has no practical choice except to take them down. Viacom did not look at all 100,000. Some certainly did not violate copyright. For this violation of First Amendment free speech rights, Viacom was penalized, um, wait, let me get out my calculator…yeah, nothing.

We need to stop giving the world’s Viacoms business incentives for violating our right to speak freely.

So, let me get a little more precise. The DMCA says that if Viacom sends a notice to YouTube that Carla’s “I love Jon Stewart” video violates copyright, YouTube can either take the video down, or leave it up and risk being held liable for copyright infringement. (Viacom need not offer any evidence.) So, of course YouTube takes it down. Carla gets a notification of this. If she files a counter-notification, YouTube has to put the video back up. (Carla can go to ChillingEffects.org to find an online form she can fill in to file her counter-notification.) Viacom thus has no reason not to sweep wide in its takedown demands.

The DMCA does have a provision (17 U.S.C. Section 512(f)) for filing false takedown notices or counter-notices:

(f) Misrepresentations.- Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section-

(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,

shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

Carla could therefore sue Viacom, but since the damage done to her by having her video unavailable for a couple of days is negligible, it’s not worth it to her.

But the damage done to free speech by giving over-lawyered corporations license to take down free expressions of ideas without even viewing them is considerable.

So, why don’t we ask Congress to make the penalties for violating the First Amendment rights of citizens as painful as the penalties for sharing an mp3 of Metallica’s “Don’t Tread on Me”?

Here are the penalties for violating copyright (as paraphrased in an email from Wendy Seltzer):

Statutory damages for copyright infringement range up to $150,000 per copyrighted work. The statute gives three ranges, $750-30,000 for ordinary infringement; up to $150,000 for willful infringement, and down to $200 for “innocent” infringement where the work was unmarked with copyright notice and the person had no reason to know his activity infringed. [source]

None of these quite cover the Viacom case, which is more like reckless infringement than innocent infringement; Viacom had to know it would catch some non-violating videos in its algorithmic sweep. So, we could do something like $150,000 for the first false takedown (since the company was willing to violate free speech) and $750 for each subsequent false takedown on the list.

Ouch? I hope so. Protecting free speech ought to be at least as important as protecting the rights of copyright holders.

[Tags: copyright dmca copyleft youtube viacom digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]

Cory Doctorow points out in an email that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has been suing over bogus takedowns, and the courts have been awarding damages and fees. This, Cory points out, lays the groundwork for lawyers to take these cases on a contingency basis, making them feasible for people without a lot of resources.

Way to go, EFF! But I’d like to see the law acknowledge that infringing free speech is at least as bad as infringing copyright. Establishing statutory penalties such as those for copyright infringement would make that point at least symbolically.

6 Comments »

Since we’re all getting tired of hearing Wikipedia used as an example of this or that — although I’m sure you’ll find the discussion of Wikipedia in Everything Is Miscellaneous to minty fresh! — here’s a reminder that before the estimable Wikipedia, we were making knowledge social using humbler forms.

Knowledge has always been social, even though our metaphysics has led us …

More at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com [Tags: knowledge epistemology wikipedia listserv everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Be the first to comment »

The show followed up its interview with Christopher Hitchens with one with AKMA. Support Radio Open Source! [Tags: akma christopher_hitchens radio_open_source christopher_lydon ]

Be the first to comment »

The Knight Foundation News Challenge has spoken to the tune of $12M in grants, and two — count ‘em, two — projects sponsored by the Berkman Center are among the winners. Global Voices got a $244,000 two year grant to support its outreach program, and the Citizen Media Law Project got funded to help citizens do better journalism. Ethan’s got some excellent bloggage about all this, as does Doc.

Hearty congratulations to all the winners. Lots of good projects now will be able to advance. [Tags: knight globalvoices gv berkman citizen_media journalism dan_gillmor]

Be the first to comment »

Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, has intensely practical notes on how to get your Word Press 2.2 upgrade to go relatively smoothly.

Number one on her list: “If your ISP offers “one-click upgrade,” STOP. Don’t just press that button! Read the WordPress upgrade instructions end-to-end and then proceed with caution.”

Thank you, Karen.

[Tags: wordpress karen_schneider]

2 Comments »

Here’s how tired I am of being on the road: I’m actually looking forward to jogging tomorrow.

(I’m writing this while sitting in a broken seat on a US Air plane waiting on the tarmac for the Zodiac to wheel appropriately so that we are allowed to take off. I can’t tell the attendants about the broken seat - the frame has unwelded - because the flight is full and they’d probably kick me off. So I’ll mention it on the way out.)

1 Comment »

The World Association of Newspapers says that the circulation of paid-for newspapers went u[p 1.9% last year, and is up 8.7% over the past five years. More than 1.4 billion people read a newspaper daily. 29.4% of the world's advertising dollars went to newspapers, and ad revenues grew 4% over the past year and 15.6% over the past five years. (TV had 37.7% share, and the Net had 5.7%.)

The circulation growth (for paid-for newspapers) is coming not just from India and China. In fact, the biggest percentage growth is in South America. Circulation is down 1.9% in North America and is basically flat in Europe. Free dailies are growing rapidly — 65% growth in Europe, 17% in N. America.

The presentation is here. (Thanks to Center for Media Research brief for the link.) [Tags: media newspapers ]

3 Comments »

HelpALot.org helps you find charities using your social network, and uses social networking tools to figure out which charities you want to support and which ones you trust. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much, but I like the concept and the implementation initially seems promising. [Tags: philanthropy charity everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1 Comment »

The latest in my Everything Is Miscellaneous series of interviews, sponsored by the Harvard Berkman Center and Wired, has been posted. I talk with Arianna Huffington about whether the Huffington Post is what the news is going to look like as reporting itself enters the swirl of the miscellaneous. (Along the way I learn not to use the word “revenge” even in a light way with Ms. Huffington.) (Disclosure: I sometimes write for HuffingtonPost; I don’t get paid for it.) [Tags: arianna_huffington huffingtonpost podcast media newspaper politics revenge]

6 Comments »

RU Sirius interviewed me about the book. I thought he asked good questions. I haven’t had a chance to listen (still on the book tour), but he tells me there were some technical problems with the Skype connection :( [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ru_sirius ]

1 Comment »

At long last, and overdue, I’ve posted the prologue and first chapter of Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Rob Paterson has posted a thoughtful review, focusing on the the themes of power and meaning, which are indeed central to the book. Also, he says he was unable to stop reading it, which purely on writerly grounds, I love to hear. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous rob_paterson]

2 Comments »