As part of my working vacation, I’ve started reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I read it about 25 years ago and remember liking it. I’m liking it even more this time.

In the opening chapters AM tries to make the case that to understand philosophy’s current moral predicament, we have to see its history. This is (was?) a novel notion within the Anglo philosophical tradition that sees the history of ideas as relevant to modern thought as Aristotelian physics is to quantum mechanics. AM looks at one of the more popular and pervasive moral philosophies, emotivism, which is the belief that saying “X is morally good” is the same as “I approve of X. Please do X,” or, more succinctly, “Yay X!” AM takes this notion apart analytically — for instance, emotivism’s approval is a moral approval, so it fails as an explanation of morality — but more importantly wonders why it caught on. He shows, rather brilliantly, that emotivism was dreamed up by philosophers reacting against G.E. Moore’s claim that the moral good is an objective primitive that cannot be further explained. But, says AM, Moore’s philosophy was attractive to people who wanted there to be an objective good to support their subjective views of what’s right and wrong. The emotivists saw that this was the case and concluded that therefore all assertions of moral goodness are merely disguised expressions of subjective approval.

AM does not yet conclude that all moral philosophy must therefore be understood historically. But he’s working toward that, for he wants to understand how philosophical ethics has gone so wrong. Then he’s going to set it right. Brilliant. And fun.

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Faced with the prospect of not having any children in the house for most of July, my wife and I decided to go someplace fun in a twosome fashion. But we both feel the burden of having a good time, so we took the pressure off by deciding to work on vacation.

That means we loaded up the car with books and have headed off to my family’s summer cottage, having checked with my siblings to make sure we have it to ourselves for a few days. So, I’m sitting here reading, and writing some stuff I’ve meant to write. At night we’ll eat food we like, and see some plays at Shakespeare & Co. It is exceedingly pleasant.

On the other hand, for the next few days, I’m on dialup. (It also means that I’m using AOL. If you have a better way for me to use dialup very occasionally, let me know.) Thank goodness there are usually parking spaces outside the public library within reach of its wifi signal early in the morning when I go into town to buy groceries, newspapers, and the best sourdough bread in the country.

And now I must get back to work!

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The Supreme Court today followed the logic of its decision throwing out attempts to diversify public schools by throwing out all welfare programs. “In this country, we do not discriminate based upon your economic class,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts for the majority. “Next up: providing the poor with public defenders,” he promised in a footnote.

In the wake of this latest blow, the Democratic leadership of the Senate consulted actuarial tables to see when they are likely to have “a chance to replace one of these motherf*ckers,” and then committed mass suicide. “It was the only honorable thing to do,” said Harry Reid in his note. [Tags: politics supreme_court satire]

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Fred Thompson, the actor slated to be appointed vice president after Cheney resigns because of health issues later this summer, says Americans are ready for some common sense policies.

Sure, who isn’t. But that’s the sort of thing a candidate says to postpone our discovering we disagree with him. Likewise, Obama talks about coming together around our shared American values.

But the fact is that we don’t hold our sense in common. And, while we can come up with values we Americans generally share, they’re too broad to guide implementation. We disagree with one another. On some issues, we really really disagree. Really really really.

Now, Fred Thompson is just a manly actor who takes Reagan as his role model, which is aiming pretty low. Obama, on the other hand, I find inspiring and has unlimited potential; I’d be thrilled to have him as our candidate. Obama has, of course, been filling in the details of his policies, because appeals to common sense and shared values can only put off disagreement for so long. [Tags: politics fred_thompson barack_obama]

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No, the title of this post makes no sense. But it sounds clever, and that’s what counts, right?

Anyway, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur , and I have been debating, once at WSJ.com and once at Supernova. But neither of those have been posted yet. But the Supernova after-debate debate is available now. It’s less structured than the actual Supernova on-stage conversation, and is less detailed than our rather long WSJ.com exchange (which the WSJ is editing down). I think it’s the weakest of the three encounters — we had just come off the stage — but at least it’s up. (The on-stage debate should be up soon.) [Tags: cult_of_the_amateur andrew_keen supernova2007 supernova07 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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People seem to like the Speck case for the MacBook, but there are some worrisome reviews at Amazon about dust getting trapped and scratching the MB, and about the difficulty of removing the case without scratching the MB.

Granted that there are bigger problems in the world: Nevertheless, do you have a recommendation for a shell for the MB to protect it from the harsh winds of time?

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Micah Sifry, trenchant as always, in The Nation says Bloomberg can influence the election just by looking like he might run. Says Micah:

Merely by toying with a run, Bloomberg—who registered between 10 and 15 percent in the polls after he announced his change of party—can force the major candidates to pay attention to issues dear to his heart. Fortunately, many of them are sensible, like gun control, progressive immigration reform, reducing carbon emissions, trying new ways to break the poverty cycle and transparency in government. Even though he trampled civil rights when the Republican convention was held in New York City, and his police force continues to take an authoritarian approach toward free speech and assembly, Bloomberg has tried to calm, not fan, fears of terrorism. We could do a lot worse, given how many megalomaniacal billionaires this country seems to produce.

Despite some alignment on the issues, Micah regrets that Bloomberg is ignoring the “sideways-up” organizing:

Yes, the blogs are talking about Bloomberg today, but he’s talking at us, not with us. He may have made his money selling high-priced computer terminals and data, but his approach to technology and the Internet is all top-down. His vaunted “311″ universal phone number has indeed improved city services, but the communication is all one way. In 2001 Bloomberg capped his $74 million campaign by mailing a videotape of his final campaign commercial to every household; in 2005 his re-election campaign had the best micro-targeting database services that money could buy. If anything, his entry onto the edge of the playing field will further accelerate the presidential money chase, giving an advantage to buckmeisters like Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney over other contenders, putting serious pressure on Obama and draining funds from down-ballot candidates as a side effect.

[Tags: michael_bloomberg micah_sifry the_nation politics democracy campaigns]

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I feel bad giving any more electrons to Ann Coulter. But I love Elizabeth Edwards so much, that I’m doing it anyway. You see, to quote Elizabeth’s fund-raising letter, “On Monday, Ann announced that instead of using more homophobic slurs to attack John, she will just wish that John had been ‘killed in a terrorist assassination plot.’” What Coulter says to stay in the headlines strikes me as about as important as the announcement that Paris Hilton found her jumpsuit chafing.

But I can see why Elizabeth Edwards would find this worth calling into to “Hardball” about it. Coulter responded by pretending that Elizabeth was asking her never to say anything again. She also tried to say that calling Edwards a “fag” and wishing he were assassinated is ok because she strongly disagrees with his politics and thinks he’s hypocritical. Elizabeth Edwards is right.

The quarter ends June 30. Feel free to give to Edwards if only to keep a serious candidate and a decent person in the game. [Disclosure: I've been doing some volunteer consulting to the Edwards campaign on Internet policy.] [Tags: politics elizabeth_edwards ann_coulter media]

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When talking with Brad Templeton at Supernova, he put perfectly the misgivings about even the best of the digital ID systems that I’ve been trying to express for years. In The Paradox of Identity Management, Brad says, “If you make something easy to do, it will be done more often.” Thus:

The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.

Because it’s easier, more merchants will ask it of us. We will thus give away more and more personal information.

Brad goes on to connect this with fears about how this technology might be (= will be) used by tyrannies.

I continue to believe that we are best off addressing the identity problems locally, at the edges, rather than by putting in place a new layer or infrastructure. Let sites continue to design their own solutions to their own problems. If the credit card companies need stronger authentication, then let them handle it. If you want single sign-in, then get yourself a password manager like RoboForm. There are just too many unintended consequences of monkeying with something as basic as identity. And we should be especially concerned that the demand for identity management is coming mainly top down, not bottom up.

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Doc responds to Brad. Doc hopes that VRM (vendor relationship management) can overcome the “market power asymmetries” that are at the heart of Brad’s (and my) concerns. Doc writes:

In a VRM system, IDM (identity management) provides (perhaps even defaults) to the choice not to provide data the customer would rather keep private, including names, addresses and every other piece of information not required to do business at hand. And let’s face it, in many (if not most) retail transactions there is no reason to give the vendor anything more than our money.

First, I’m surprised that defaulting to keeping info private merits only a “perhaps even.” I think this may have been a slip o’ the pen on Doc’s part.

Even so, Doc is ignoring the existing asymmetry. If Amazon is your favorite place to buy books, if Amazon requires more info than you think you want to give, you may be willing to pay the price. If it asks for personal info in order to “improve your shopping experience,” you may give it even if you don’t see its relevance. And if every bookstore on the Web decides it wants to ask for more info than it did before, you will start to take that as the norm. I believe that’s a predictable result — as per Brad’s paradox — of making it easy to give out personal information.

In fact, it seems to be a requirement for VRM to succeed. As Doc concludes: “VRM cannot succeed unless it overcomes Brad’s Paradox. If it makes that jump, it will bring IDM systems along for the ride.” But, since VRM is all about letting vendors know more about your preferences and intentions, it really doesn’t overcome the paradox. It depends on making it easier to give out personal info so that it can be done more often.

Doc makes the case for the benefits of keeping vendors well-informed. It would mean, for example, that we aren’t subjected to pointless, annoying ads for stuff we wouldn’t want anyway. And I may well be willing to trade my biography for that. (Of course, I would also want to be able to control how much sharing a merchant does of the information I’ve entrusted with it.)

I am more concerned about the effect of Brad’s paradox on social and political forums where anonymity is currently, and thankfully, the default.

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Here’s the much less elegant and clear way I put it just about a year ago when arguing for keeping anonymity as the default:

My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear.

…

I have confidence that the people designing these systems are going to create the right software defaults. The people I know firsthand in this are privacy fanatics and insistent that individuals be in control of their data. This is a huge and welcome shift from where digital ID was headed just a few years ago. We all ought to sigh in relief that these folks are on the job.

But, once these systems are in place, vendors of every sort will of course require strong ID from us. If I want to buy from, say, Amazon, they are likely to require me to register with some ID system and authenticate myself to them…far more strongly and securely than I do when I pay with a credit card in my local bookstore. Of course, I don’t have to shop at Amazon. But why won’t B&N make the same demand? And Powells? And then will come the blogs that demand I join an ID system in order to leave a comment. How long before I say, “Oh, to hell with it,” and give in? And then I’ve flipped my default. Rather than being relatively anonymous, I will assume I’m relatively identified.

[Tags: anonymity digital_id brad_templeton doc_searls vrm digital_rights ]

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Harold Feld, who knows more about this in his little finger than 100 of the smartest little fingers you care to pile up, thinks AT&T’s “tepid expression of possible interest in a Frontline ‘E Block’ license” is big news, “on par with support from Senator John Kerry and Presidential candidate John Edwards.” Says Harold:

That looks pretty tame, until one considers the speaker and the context. In spectrum lobbying terms, this is roughly the equivalent of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying that, under the right circumstances, he would accept an invitation to visit Israel and meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Frontline is bidding for some of the 700mH spectrum so it can act as a wholesaler, opening up the band to whatever businesses want to participate. This is a gazillion times preferable to selling it all to the incumbents who will continue to freeze out competitors and thus freeze out all innovations that are not theirs and that do not support their particular business model. AT&T now says it’d consider bidding for a spread of spectrum even if it were required to act as a wholesaler and open it up to all comers.

Harold speculates that AT&T sees this as a way of getting the national coverage it wants. It would rather have coverage at the price of openness than cede it to cable.

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David Isenberg has created a transcript of the snippet available of John Kneuer — Bush policy guy — at Supernova. The bit David had available started immediately after I asked him the first question. Since he posted it, the entire video has gone up on the Supernova site.

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Meanwhile, the Washington Post has run a scary op-ed opposing open access from two guys who have taken money from the the telecom trade association. I know two industry insiders who are going to be receiving some very expensive single malt whiskey from some powerful friends! [Tags: 700mh telecom net_neutrality john_kneuer supernova2007 supernova harold_feld at&t david_isenberg wapo]

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Tim Spalding of LibraryThing posts the intro to a talk he gave at the ALA in which he takes on Michael Gorman’s trashing of Knowledge 2.0. Tim challenges Gorman’s starting point. Herewith that starting point:

“Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do.”

No, says Tim, we also learn by conversation…

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Tim in a footnote takes me to task for not acknowledging in Everything Is Miscellaneous that, while digitization has “kicked things up a notch,” the lessons are old ones. In general, I think that’s right. I do tend to believe that the Web touches us so deeply because it more clearly expresses what we’ve known all along. That was the point of Small Pieces Loosely Joined . [Tags: librarything tim_spalding michael_gorman ala knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mark Gibbs recounts yet another experience in which the presence of DRM would have deterred any normal, sane person from buying digital content. (Fortunately, Mark is either not normal or not sane, so he persevered.) [Tags: mark_gibbs drm cmopyright copyleft ]

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Jesse Lange totally schools Bill O’Reilly. I have to say it’s sort of fun watching O’Reilly dismiss Jesse as a “pinhead” as his only response to Jesse’s reading of the transcript O’Reilly was misquoting. But it’s more fun watching this articulate, put-together kid stand up to a bully.

(Thanks to Radar for the link.) [Tags: bill_oreilly jesse_lange ]

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Thomas Mann (no, not that one) has a fascinating and important article about why tagging, folksonomies, and the rest of the hip Web 2.0 stuff is inadequate to meet the needs of scholars looking for information. It is, at least informally, a response to the Calhoun Report.

His example of trying to find information about “tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War” is classic and utterly convincing: Finding what the scholar needs requires smart human guides and the smart guides that humans have created for scholars.

But, of course that doesn’t scale…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

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At some point we noticed a crack in the windshield of our car. It’s a single line, about 8 inches long, not the spider web fracture typical of a pebble or assassination attempt. We don’t know exactly when it happened or how.

Our insurance covers it. But when I went to file the claim through SafeLight, the person on the phone insisted that I give a reason why the glass broke. The fact is that I don’t know. But that is not an acceptable answer. Rain? Hail? Pebble? Collision? Branch? Vandalism? Collision? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. So I said it was vandalism.

I wonder how many of our national statistics are skewed by a failure to provide an “I don’t know” or “Other” box… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous statistics ]

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Kathleen Gilroy has posted a podcast interview with me on the topic of Web 2.0 and – guess what! – everything perhaps being in some sense miscellaneous. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 kathleen_gilroy]

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Samuel Wantman, who works on Wikipedia’s category strategy, has suggested that every hyperlinked word in every Wikipedia article be treated as a tag.

What a cool idea! It’d frequently give you so many articles that it wouldn’t be worth it, but especially if we were able to do intersections of the hyperlinked words, there are times when it’d be worth its weight in bits.

Apparently, however, this would require so much processing power that the lights on the Eastern seaboard would dim every time someone used it. So, perhaps it’s a project that a third party could undertake? Or refine? [Tags: wikipedia samuel_wantman tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Sfphil has posted photos of the old Berkman Center house being picked up and moved. (We’ve been in a newer building this entire academic year.) [Tags: berkman]

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I have been getting this error for a few weeks. The error shows up in the XP Event Viewer, which you can get to by choosing Run off the Start menu, entering “cmd” and then typing “%SystemRoot%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s” into the Command Prompt box (omitting the quotation marks). Choose “System” to see the errors. I was getting the error message about every 40 seconds.

Harddisk 4 is in my case an external, USB hard drive. The problem turned out not to be the hard drive. Check your USB cable. Mine was ok, so I got a new enclosure for the drive — the macally PHR 100AC — and hooked it up to a firewire port. So far, it seems to be working perfectly. And the case is a solid piece of work. [Tags: errors]

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The eighth and last in my series of Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is up. I talk with Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and blogger. We talk not so much about citizens as journalists as about citizens as those who exercise editorial judgment. How will the BBC compete in a world where we’re busily telling one another what we ought to read…especially as content gets pulled out of the sites themselves? [Tags: richard_sambrook bbc news journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired]

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[supernova] Nicholas Carr and Chris Meyer

Nicholas Carr is working on a book on what all these changes mean economically. In the 19th century, factories to produce their own power. Producing it more economically could be an important competitive advantage. Then independent power suppliers supplied it far more economically. In 1910, only 40% of electricity was generated by independent utilities, and most of that went to lighting. Just 20 years later, 80% was coming from utilities. This unleashed network innovation. But the real change came when sockets were everywhere. Now there was huge innovation in the appliances that plug into them, from assembly lines to televisions to computers.

Now we can have rich computing services served over the network, services that could not be matched at the local level. When we have computer sockets the way we have power sockets, all sorts of things will change.

The challenge is to begin to break free from the Web 2.0 world and the narrow innovation we see there.

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“Organization: The Fourth Factor of Production” is Chris Meyer ’s talk’s title. What isn’t going to change, he asks. Technology drives organizational innovation. But traditionally the response has been to create departments to manage change.In 1937, Ronald Coase wrote “The Nature of the Firm.”. What wil lbe the next answer in the information economy? Traversal of the boundaries. Web 2.0 collaborative tools. Chris recommends Neal Stephenson’s vision in The Diamond Age as a social vision for business…

In the Q&A, Nick says that the electrical network only supplied electricity, whereas the future computing network will supply services as a commodity. Chris points out that industrialization happened within one legal system, while this change is happening internationally.

Chris predicts that they’ll be a bifurcation, with some big centralized corporations, and then a swarm outside.

Q: (brad templeton) The real difference isn’t bandwidth but control…
A: (nick) Rich applications over the Net empowers the user, even if they don’t own and control it.
(Chris) You should only bother controlling things that are choice. But in Nick’s world, bandwidth is not scarce.

Q: (Shannon Clark) Your pronouns of yours and ours are inappropriate…

A: (John Hagel) What happens to competitive strategy in this world you’re sketching?
Q: (Nick) It depends on the industry.
A (chris) Strategic advantage? Who needs it. It’s for firms in the old sense. [Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 nicholars_carr chris_meyer ]

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John M.R. Kneuer Acting Assistant Secretary Communications and Information gives a talk. He begins by talking about the value of the 700mH spectrum. It’s becoming available as “leapfrog” technologies are becoming available, he says. “What we really have is an opportunity for a game-changing opportunity against the first movers and incumbents.” [I think I garbled that, but so did he.]

“Net neutrality sounds very open, but it rapidly comes down to the government setting rate terms and rules for access.” “I firmly believe that market forces are going to provide an open network much much better than what we would get” through regulation. He refers to our current “great success.”

I ask the first question. I say something like: The great success has us at #19 in broadband access because there is no open market. I wonder what great innovation is going to come from the incumbents. We have proof that it doesn’t work because we’ve been trying it for about a decade [depending on how you count]. He says we’re asking for the government to set rates. I ask if anyone in this audience is asking for that.

Doc points out that wifi has succeeded because the spectrum was left open, not auctioned.

David Isenberg says that wifi wasn’t auctioned, and isn’t owned by a carrier, yet most people in this room agree that wifi is the most innovative sector in the entire spectrum. Kneuer agrees. David says there’s no business model, no carrier, and no market.

Kneuer: Wifi is local access to get to an underlying access. It doesn’t lend itself to building out broad networks.

David I: Same for last mile for fiber, DSL…these aren’t networks either. So they should be treated the same way…

K: They are nodes of a DSL network, etc. If I want to build out a 5mH wifi cloud, you won’t be able to scale it. Wifi’s authoriziation was for local area networks. It does not lend itself to the competing interests that need to be resolved in an efficient way. When you have lots of people trying to enter a commercial space and the gov’t is the bottleneck, the best way to handle it is in a transparent way by letting people bid for it.

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KC Claffy from CAIDA kicks butt explaining how much bogus information there is — stats supporting the interests of the incumbents, based on bad research, without review or transparency. Fantastic presentation, but too fast for me to blog.

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Now a panel on “Does the Internet need an upgrade?”

The first guy (I can’t tell who is who) says the Internet is us. The applications we’re using and the way we’re using them is radically changing. E.g., video vs. text. What we’re using it for now is different from what we originally designed it. And it will continue to change. The Net does need to expand and grow, but it’s up to each of us to determine how we’re going to effect that upgrade because we are the Internet.

Next guy says that when the End-to-End principle was created, every end point was trusted. Now we violate it all the time. So, we do need to look at the architecture, he says, if only to raise our collective consciousness. How do we get the balance right.

Van Jacobson from Cisco says the network has done pretty well. He says we’ve made only three architectural changes, yet it’s scaled incredibly. That’s because we’ve kept the network simple and moved the innovation to the edge. We solve the problems on the edges. We can do secure email by using encrypted messages. SSL, on the other hand, signs the envelope, not the message, which doesn’t guarantee very much,

David Isenberg agrees with 95% of what Van has said, but challenges his analogy. David says that all four panelists respect the end-to-end principle. The Internet grows, enables innovation, runs on any system, because of end-to-end. David wants to know why Van thinks security violates end-to-end.

Van says that SSL puts someone in the middle securing the envelopes, which violates end-to-end.

Van describes an attack where the man in the middle was fraudulent.

Isenberg: What’s the cost of fixing these genuine security issues? Everyone in this room knows there are security issues, but we still use the Internet. There are 40,000 traffic fatalities per year, but we treat it as a network externality. We still get into our little packets and get on our end-to-end highways…

Van: Vint Cerf said the middle can be arbitrarily untrustworthy, but we’ll fix it up on the ends. If the ends reject packets that aren’t answers to questions they asked, then the senders will learn to put enough in to let the recipients trust the packets. But that’s not our security model. Our security model is “Let’s make the center more secure.” That won’t work.

Isenberg: The incumbents would certainly say that the Net needs an upgrade because their business models are disrupted by the Internet. We need to beware their calls.

Q: Van, what about PKI?
A: It’s a disaster. It makes high-value targets.

Q: How do you keep the Net moving as people stream, etc.?
A: (Van) I started a company called PacketDesign a while ago that looked at the sort of data KC wants to see. We looked at the router downstream of the NBC Olympics coverage. It had 5,000 copies of the same data because the computer doesn’t know what’s in the packets. If we had a different model that saw the content propagating…As far as avoiding stutter goes, if you take every phone in the world and call up everyone in the world, it’d take 3TB, while a single fiber can carry 30TB. There’s room. There’s no incremental cost in adding more bandwidth. The incumbents act as if bandwidth is expensive as it was in the previous century.

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 commerce end-to-end net_neutrality ]

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Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? “Have a conversation.” Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don’t always do this because they fear it.

And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.

There are “potential dealbreakers” for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.

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Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it’s been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. “We get our support from a community,” Clay said, but to them it was like he’d said “We get our Thursdays from a banana.” So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn’t see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. “It’s doing fine,” but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. “No contracts are written, no money changes hands.” “We don’t often talk about love” at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters...and the fact that those two things are the same is what's most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]

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[The next day] Nick Douglas – who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat – video interviewed me right after Clay’s talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.

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Here’s my bumpersticker for structurally separating the Internet carriers, so that those who provide access to the bits do not also sell us content and services:

Delaminate the bastards!

This is the only way we’ll really get Net neutrality. As it stands, the business model – the existence – of the companies providing Internet access demands that they give preference to their own content and services over those of their competitors. They therefore have a business imperative to turn the open Internet into something much more like cable TV. (See Susan Crawford and David Isenberg.)

As for my slogan? Yes, it’s the Worst. Bumpersticker. Ever. [Tags: fcc net_neutrality ]

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Tim Karr reports on progress in keeping some of the 700mH swath of spectrum open for innovation by you, me, and that really smart kid next door.

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As my Thinkpad X40 starts to fall apart — it’s 18 months old, which is about how long my laptops last, and already has bits held on by duct tape — I’m thinking about getting either a MacBook or a 15″ MacBook Pro. The Pro has the power I crave, but it’s sooo much bigger than the X40. Since I use my laptop purely for travel, if you own a Pro, do you find you can use it on a plane (in coach)? Or do you end up doing the inverted paw flip so that you end up typing by drumming on your stomach?

In short, isn’t the Pro just too damn big for airplane travel?

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Doc and I did a panel, led by Jerry Michalski, on the state of markets as conversations. Most of the discussion was around Doc’s Vendor Relationship Management model. Interesting dicsussion with the audience.

(The Supernova “conversation hub” is here. And Isabel Walcott’s thorough bloggage of the session with Doc and me — with Isabel’s commentary — is here. BTW, this is part of the Wharton day, and this track is sponsored by Cisco. )

Now I’m in a session about people doing cool things in the nonprofit domain.

Maria Daniels of WGBH’s American Experience series talks about the Citizen Storytellers Project enables citizens to do video via cell phones. It’s an unfunded add-on to the series.

Howard Greenstein introduces a video of Farouk Olu Aregbe who created One Million Strong for Barack on FaceBook, from outside the Obama campaign. Then we get Farouk on the phone. What has he learned about creating social networks around candidates? One thing is that the regulatory environment is tough. And there are scaling issues. Q: Is your software available for other candidates? A: It’s Facebook and third party software.howard then introduces a video inteview with Rolando H. Brown of the non-profit Hip-Hop Association promoting hiphop as a way to support community values and social awareness. The foundation runs a film festival and educational conferences.

Susan [missed the last name] of TechSoup talks about the Nonprofit Commons Project . The Commons was donated by Anshe Chung, the first SL millionaire. It’s an island for nonprofits. Hundreds of member organizations get free space.One of the 1,300 Wikipedia administrators talks a bit about how its governed. [Again, sorry, couldn't hear his name.] He’s working on categorization policy. He says that the policy to break categories up into smaller ones was based on the fact that a page can only display 200 linked articles. But, he says, that’s an unnatural limitation. So, he started experimenting with making tables of contents for large topics. Within a week, it was on over a thousand categories. Within a month, it was “accepted as gospel” that large categories ought to have a table of contents. It impressed him that good ideas were accepted so quickly. “Innovation takes small steps. Each has to be an improvement. That’s natural selection. That’s what wikis do.” [Tags: supernova2007 nonprofits npg]

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You know the people who wander through airline terminals, looking at the bases of walls, hunting for a previous power outlet into which they can sink their electric teeth?

Perhaps we should call them ampires. [Tags: neologisms]

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Susan Crawford has posted the op-ed that ought to be read and adopted by every candidate for president who cares about the Internet. She slaps down the FCC for asking the wrong questions and puts forward the right change that we’ve generally been too timid (exception: David Isenberg) to put forward: Require the carriers to open themselves up to genuine competition, and confine carriers of bits to carrying bits:

The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras.

The solution? Require

that all providers sell unfettered transport services at wholesale rates into a competitive market for retail transport. Even better, Congress should take the reins and demand that the duopolies divest themselves of their transport services so that they aren’t tempted to try to monetize internet access in favor of their own movies and phone services.

This piece is a great expression of the real problem and a call to arms for the real solution.

It is also further evidence that Susan ought to be our next FCC Commissioner. [Tags: susan_crawford fcc net_neutrality ]

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I was just on a panel at the Endeca user conference where the co-founder, Pete Bell, asked: “Resolved, tag clouds are the mullet of the Internet.” I enjoyed it, and it started a good conversation.

My view: Sure, they’re sometimes used just because they’re “in.” But they can also serve a real purpose. Jim from Buzzillions pointed out that a tag cloud, when users understand it(as most don’t, apparently) implicitly says “This is your data.” And, of course, there are places where tag clouds are just plain useful.

Still, it was an amusing way of posing the question.

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Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason, has posted a podcast interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous. (Fortunately, he doesn’t ask me anything that requires my knowing anything about economics.)

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Nature magazine has set up a site — Precedings — where scientists can post their papers before those papers are reviewed and accepted. This a big deal. As Nature’s Timo Hannay puts it in a broadcast email:

The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren’teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can’t formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).

Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there’s no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).

Timo goes on to acknowledge that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines.

This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal. [Tags: nature science research everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge arxiv precedings cc ]

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Microsoft has been circulating the changes it wants made to a NY State election law so that e-voting machines can continue to use Windows as their operating system. According to Bo Lipari’s blog:

Microsoft’s proposed change to state law would effectively render our current requirements for escrow and the ability for independent review of source code in the event of disputes completely meaningless – and with it the protections the public fought so hard for.

Adding insult to injury, these changes are being slipped into a bill that may be voted on Monday or Tuesday, June 18 or 19. That bill’s stated purpose is to make “technical changes” to the recent law moving the date of New York’s presidential primary to February. Because this bill involving the new primary date must be passed next week before the Legislative session ends (New York has jumped on the bandwagon to be part of the super presidential primary in February 2008) this grave weakening of the public’s right to review software would come along part and parcel with the primary date change.

If you live in NY, now might be a good time to call your state senator and assemblyperson. Not sure who those critters are? Bo points to lookups for the senate and the assembly. [Tags: evoting microsoft democracy ny ]

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Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used “deconstruct” twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.

Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: “The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective.” I think so, too, although I’m not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.

FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning…

(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]

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Joe Andrieu has an excellent post explaining Doc’s Vendor Relationship Management meme (vrm blog). Provocative in the best sense: Stimulating lots of thoughts and questions. For instance, how does VRM (or Joe’s vision of it) differ from federated identity schemes in which the user has control over her personal info? [Tags: vrm joe_andrieu doc_searls id ]

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Zack Exley, who knows a thing or two about Internet campaigning, has a post titled “Don’t hire an Internet person.” No, he’s not suggesting tha campaigns give up on the Internet. On the contrary. Every day, he says, he gets calls asking for recommendations for an Internet person for a campaign.

“No, don’t hire an Internet guy,” I say. “You need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they’re responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have—so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you’ll just stick in a closet anyways?”

He concludes: “Everybody knows it’s time for a changing of the guard. To stop thinking of yourself as an Internet person is one way to help make it happen.”

Of course, campaigns still need people with Internet-specific skills, from the technical to the politcal-organizational. The Internet is different and requires people who understand it deeply. But Zack’s right to insist that the Net not be treated organizationally as a silo. And that’s as true for many businesses as it is for politics. [Tags: zack_exley politics ]

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I was a guest on Dennis Prager’s conservative radio talk show yesterday. I was supposed to be talking about Everything is Miscellaneous, but the conversation, not surprisingly, turned to whether the Net’s end run around authority is good for the left, right, or both. I thought Prager conducted a very good interview; I’m less happy with my responses.

I’m having trouble telling exactly what the permalink is for the podcast, but try here. If not, look for the June 14, 2007 show. I start at 10:20 and go to 23:36. (By the way, he introduces me as an “Internet advisor to Howard Dean.” Because time was short, I didn’t correct him to say that I was a volunteer Internet advisor to the Dean campaign, which is closer to the truth. I doubt very much that Dean would remember me.)

Supernova, a conference I’m going to and will be speaking at (debating Andrew Keen, among other things), is posting brief videos of people answering the question “What is the new network.” My response and Andrew Rasiej’s are here.

[Tags: dennis_prager supernova2007 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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David Isenberg tells a story about how a wine’s story makes it taste better. It’s a good reminder that the only products that are only products are products we don’t care much about.

Let me put that differently.

I came to like wine late in life, mainly because for most of my life I had only had really bad wine. Grape juice gone bad. Wine one pucker away from vinegar. Wine that made you appreciate the fine taste of Lavoris. Then, I had a client in the mid 1990s who wined and dined customers, ordering from the bottom of the wine list. The light bulb in the wine cellar went on. I still can’t tell identify a wine’s type without reading the bottle (although I usually can distinguish red from white), and my tastes are in the $10-$15/bottle range. But I like it. A lot. And it’s for one basic reason: The taste of wine is so damn complex. Drinking a good glass of wine is like thinking.

So, David’s story about the taste of a bottle being enhanced by the narrative around it pleases me. [Tags: wine david_isenberg everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The other day, “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine on the value of digital messiness. [Tags: npr everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy]

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AT&T is going to start policing its network to prevent the distribution of materials it considers to violate copyright. (Um, Fair Use?) It’s doing this so it can strike special deals with content companies to offer their products exclusively.

Putting a cop in the middle of the network and making available content not accessible by other networks means that if the AT&T says it’s offering Internet connectivity, it’s lying. The Internet is a set of protocols that ensure that bits will be moved across networks (inter-networking) without giving special privileges or control to the carriers.

And forget the definitional violation. This is a big step toward turning the Internet into cable TV — a proprietary network that makes money by selling its users content. [Tags: net_neutrality att berkman copyright copyleft digital_rights]

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