According to the Center for Media Research:

A recent survey on current attitudes towards customer ratings and reviews by Bazaarvoice and Vizu Corporation, shows that about three out of four shoppers say that it is extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase, and they prefer peer reviews over expert reviews by a 6-to-1 margin.

Of couse, Bazaarvoice provides customer review capabilities to vendors. [Tags: marketing bazaarvoice ]

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Elizabeth Edwards talked about Net Neutality, among many other things, at Blogher.
Jeez, do we need her in the White House!

Jennifer Pozner’s post
Video
John Edwards on the 700mH auction
JE YouTube on Net Neutrality
Me on E.E. and the Net
[Tags: elizabeth_edwards fcc net_neutrality john_edwards politics blogher ]

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Susan Crawford has an excellent analysis of Google’s teaming up with Sprint. In sum, Sprint is pushing for WiMax, and Google seems to be hedging its bets on the 700mH spectrum auction which it is very likely about to lose. Susan considers why Google isn’t pushing for the same degree of openness with Sprint as it is for the Internet 700. [Tags: susan_crawford google sprint wimax fcc ]

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After the tenth time in my life calling T-Mobile because I was unable to get their site to create a pay-as-you-go wifi account for me — I know how many times because I use a little numbering scheme when making up my new account name (and, no, you won’t guess it) — and after being walked through it by a very nice support person, I was in no mood to receive the ritual sign-off, “And thanks for being part of the T-Mobile family.”

Is there anyone who hears that corporate-mandated sign-off without feeling cheapened? Where I come from, joining someone’s family requires more than buying an hour of services from them.
(My plane is late, they’ve run out of the one veggie sandwich at the stand, so, yes, I am feeling a little cranky, thank you. Aaarrrgggghh.)

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Ed Cone’s published an interview with me in the Greensboro News-Record that pushes on the philosophical side harder than most. Thanks, Ed! (Note: Ed has provided a backup link in case the newspaper’s breaks.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ed_cone aristotle ]

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I was part of an hour-long discussion of the Internet and politics on KQED’s Forum program yesterday, along with Robert Bluey, of the Bluey Blog and Red State, Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones, and Christopher Rabb of BloggingWhileBlack.com. I thought the other folks were interesting. The MP3 is here. [Tags: politics christopher_rabb josh_harkinson robert_bluey kqed politics]

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Ethanz, who is in the pantheon of live bloggers, has a detailed post explaining how he does it. I think he intends to pass along the tips and tricks that will encourage others to live-blog, but it actually seems so daunting that it may have the opposite effect. And among the tools in the live bloggers kit bag that Ethan does not mention are: his rare combination of analytic and sympathetic skills, his breadth of knowledge, his awesome writing skill, and his patience.

I like live-blogging. (I do it far worse than Ethan does; you’re always better off reading Ethan’s posts than mine.) But I find it very tiring. I fairly predictably poop out after lunch.

Ethan also writes a beautiful appreciation of our friend Henok Mehari, who has just finished up his internship at the Berkman Center. All I can add to what Ethan has said is: Amen. Henok’s story is amazing, and, most hopeful of all is that he is only really at the beginning of it. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman henok_mehari berkman liveblogging blogging]

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It’s Doc Searls‘ 60th birthday in a few days.

Sixty is old. But it wouldn’t be fitting to call Doc an old man. He’s not. Durn, he’s spry for his age!

No, Doc isn’t an old man, but he is about to become an elder. He didn’t get there just by watching the years go by. He got there by working tirelessly for the public good of the Web.

Doc thus will be entitled to the perqs given to elders:

When he talks, you look up from your damn laptop.

When in an Internet cafe, Doc’s packets get sent first. You can just wait in line, sonny boy.

Before your press the “post” button on your blog, you will now spend a few seconds thinking to yourself, “What would Doc say about this?” You will then obey your inner Doc.

If Doc gets crotchety on your ass, you have to sit there and take it. (Not to worry, though. Doc is one of the least crotchety people ever.)

I don’t care if Doc keeps linking to the same YouTube video. You’ll laugh at the end as if it were the first time.

Doc is now entitled to not reply to up to six emails a day. And he doesn’t have to let us know which ones they are.

Happy birthday in a few days, and much love now, Doc!

[Tags: doc_searls village elders ]

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PC World has combed through Google Maps’ satellite images of the earth and have found some very cool ones….

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Whitehouse seeking special counsel to investigate Gonzales

So, it turns out that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is one among a group of senators calling for a special counsel.

Also in that group are Sen. Jack AlbertoGonzalesOwnMom, Sen. Ruth TheOneTrueAndVengefulGod, and Sen. Abe ByAllThatsHoly. Sen. Phil ImpeachTheBastards could not be reached for comment.

[Tags: alberto_gonzales politics humor]

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Scott Kirsner has started a new blog, Inovation Economy, as the companion to his new Sunday column in the Boston Globe. I’ve always liked the way Scott intersects business and tech… (Scott has a useful disclosure statement.) [Tags: scott_kirsner business vc boston_globe]

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Now before health care folks stick a needle in you, they say, “You’ll feel a little pinch.” That’s a pretty accurate description, and especially helpful since the action that causes it doesn’t seem to be much like a pinch at all.

But, it wasn’t always a pinch. When I was a kid, they’d say something like, “This may hurt a little,” but they didn’t try to reframe the puncture as a pinch. I wonder how and when this recategorization of sensation occurred… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous needles categorization sensation]

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The Washington Post has posted a provocative animated graphic that shows a social network with the nodes mapped to obesity. The narrated animation shows the clustering of the obese and the non-obese over time.

The animation comes from the New England Journal of Medicine, but the WaPo’s brief explanation of it seems to take a leap. They say it “demonstrates how social networks influence weight gain.” Well, the animation could just as easily be demonstrating that people cluster according to body mass index, but I haven’t read the NEJM article. [Tags: obesity social_networks washington_post nejm]

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I posted at HuffingtonPost about why I think the YouTube debate was a bigger deal than much of the media is claiming.

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Tim Spalding at LibraryThing.com has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ‘em up good. For example, “Freakonomics” has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Our daughter Leah brought back from Prague this very cool, hand-made, three-person chess board.

I haven’t tried playing it because, as a result of an ancestral genetic mutation, I am unable to visualize spatially-arrayed objects even when I am looking at them, much less three moves ahead. But it might be fun for you Normals.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t violate either of these two patents: 1 2. Of course, I also can’t figure out what the hell these patents are describing. [Tags: chess prague games]

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In 2008, Cliff Richard’s first hit, “Move It!,” will come out of copyright because the British government just refused to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years after the artist dies.

Richard’s is up in arms about this. Instead, lets help Cliff Richard celebrate the ultimate success of his work: Fifty years later, it’s touched enough people that it matters that it’s moving into the public domain.

Congratulations, Cliff! You should be very proud that you have the opportunity to see something you made become something all culture now can rely on! [Tags: copyright copyleft cliff_richard ]

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According to New Scientist, Apple’s patented a DRM system that would prevent you from charging your device with anything except a licensed charger. The charger would be locked to your device. Yes, that’d keep a thief from charging your stolen laptop, but it would also keep you from plugging your gasping laptop into a friend’s power supply, and would give Apple yet more control over the aftermarket for its products. Because if there’s one thing users are demanding, it’s that Apple have yet more control over its products. (See Dan Lockton’s post. Thanks to Hanan for the link.) [Tags: drm apple]

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I’ve used each of the Apple machines pretty much when they came out. I’ve owned several, most recently a Powerbook. Yet the Mac has never stuck with me. Now, my black MacBook is bringing me joy. I use my big honking Windows desktop machine only when I have to.

What happened?

I’ve had what I think of as legitimate reasons to find the Mac unpleasant. I don’t think of Apple as a user-friendly company. The Mac’s insistence on sticking with interface idiocies like shipping with a one-button mouse and only allowing drag-sizing from the bottom right-hand corner, strike me as explicable only as arrogance. I prefer Microsoft’s willingness to run Windows on machines manufactured in an open market, although it does result in the chaos of drivers that is the bane of Windows’ existence. The lack of software for the Mac is an issue. And then there are my idiosyncratic reasons for sticking with Windows, including the tons of utilities programs I’ve written for myself and my need to run a version of Powerpoint that has full path animation, which Mac Powerpoint lacks.

Likewise, I’ve been unpersuaded by the Mac’s case against Windows. Windows XP (Microsoft’s failed to give me to a good reason to switch to Vista) is quite robust and stable. Even when a program crashes, it doesn’t pull down the entire operating system. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get viruses. The registry is an overly-complex solution to the complexity of modern software, but it rarely gets in your way, and being able to edit it (after making a back up, of course) actually gives you some additional control over your machine. The problems Mac users rag on Windows users about generally don’t hold against sufficiently sophisticated users. I have become a sufficiently sophisticated at Windows use. I’ve had to.

So, what’s changed my mind?

Some of it has nothing to do with the Mac. In particular, I’m coming off of a Thinkpad X40, an admirably light and small laptop, which has me enjoying the MB’s larger and wider screen. That’s helping a lot.

The open source movement has now created great software in enough categories that I don’t feel like I’m downgrading. Open Office (I’m using the NeoOffice flavor of it, which uses more of the Mac’s UI and skips X11, or at least makes it invisible) now feels as good as Word; the upgrade to the spell checker, for example, has helped. Thunderbird and Firefox work just fine on the MB. The utility programs, like the text editors and FTP programs, are great, and even tend to be prettier than their Windows’ counterparts. So, even though there is far less software available for the Mac, for me there’s enough, and enough is all I need. And, the same is true for the non-open source stuff. The one category that matters to me that the Mac loses at is games. But I still have my honking Windows desktop for that.

The ability to run Windows on the same MB is comforting, especially during the transition. I have a 10gb partition for Windows, leaving about 140gb for Mac. I find I’m only using the Windows partition for working in Powerpoint and for retrieving items I forgot to port over. And, Parallels, which lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop, may not be rock solid, but it is way cool.

I do like knowing Unix is under the hood. It enables a range of tinkering that would require far deeper knowledge in Windows. (Windows API anyone?) Of course, tinkering is how people like me get in trouble.

OS X absolutely handles some core user functions better than Windows does. When I close the lid on my Thinkpad, I can never be entirely sure what state I’m going to find the machine in when I come back. It’s supposed to go into sleep mode, but it on occasion goes into either hibernation or total shutdown. And it takes way too long to come back, no matter what state it’s in. This is one of those things you’d think Microsoft and hardware manufacturers would have figured out by now. On the other hand, I can close my MB and be confident that when I open it, it’s going to blink its eyes once or twice and be fully awake. Likewise, my MB latches on to the strongest, open-est wifi signal without asking me to salute and sign some papers. Also, the Mac seems to be doing a better job of power management, although I’m not competent to judge this. (Hint: Turn on Parallels and watch your power drain, presumably as the Core 2 cpu #2 kicks in.)

Put it all together, and the MacBook feels great. It’s solid, it’s fast, the display is beautiful. Oh, I’ve had program crashes, and there’s UI stuff that seems thick-headed (how about letting me use just one finger to delete forward? Jeez!), but, well, it’s just a computer. And I’m enjoying it more than any computer since my original KayPro II.

Of course, it helped that I got it just before going on a working vacation when I could devote some serious relationship-bonding time with it. Employers ought to grant leaves of absence to users making the switch. The first couple of weeks are such an important bonding time. We ought to respect that. I hear the French give 14 days of paid leave.

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Orcinus on Bill O’Reilly’s latest abrasion of our ability to live together. We desperately need to know when to look at people at their best, and when - the rare occasion - we need to look for their worst.

BTW, when I first saw the bloggage about O’Reilly calling DailyKos a hate site, I thought for some weird reason Tim O’Reilly was doing this. Didn’t seem very likely, to put it mildly. But it does show who is the Top Dog O’Reilly in my little universe. [Tags: bill_oreilly dailykos politics ]

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A few days ago, we went to the “Unknown Monet” exhibit at the Clark in Williamstown, MA. We loved it.

For reasons I don’t understand and in a way I couldn’t predict, Monet has always touched me. Renoir I find merely pleasant, Gauguin cartoonish and obscure, Seurat gimmicky, but Monet I become inarticulate about. (And, I do recognize that I’m being way over-articulate - i.e., ignorant - about those other masters.) The Clark exhibit showed early drawings and pastels by Monet that I found revelatory and beautiful. With a few lines — clear in ink and smudged in pastel — Monet showed light. He also did this other thing I like, although I’m not sure it’s an aesthetic response: He made me yearn to be in the places he depicted.

So, yesterday I read a review of the exhibit in the Boston Globe by Ken Johnson. He was not sold by the exhibit. The works were not impressive and do not contribute to our understanding of Monet, although Johnson was pleasantly surprised by the caricatures on display, which were the least interesting part to me.

It’s a terrific review. I learned a lot from it. Johnson’s main concern is one that I’m sure is obvious to people who study art as opposed to occasionally going to a museum, but it helped me both understand and appreciate Monet: Breaking with tradition, Monet didn’t build his paintings on drawings. Thus, he was able to see light, not outlines. (I’m paraphrasing crudely. Read the review.) Johnson thinks that the drawings at the exhibit prove that Monet just wasn’t very good at drawing. The drawings are, to him, workman-like at best, and thus do not contribute to understanding Monet’s ineffable paintings.

So, do I now like the drawings less? To some degree, yes. Sort of. Skill matters to how I see art. Now a critic who has better grounding to evaluate the skill required has downgraded it. That does change the way I view the drawings. But skill is just one component. The drawings still have a transcendent quality: I look at them and wonder how a person could bring forth these scenes with just a few lines. The scenes remain living, drenched, inviting, loving.

Johnson’s review does the proper job of criticism. He contextualizes, bringing to bear knowledge and wide experience. He has changed the way I see the Monet’s drawings and pastels. We see through education and experience. But, ultimately in this case, the review hasn’t changed the way the drawings and pastels speak to me. If I learned more, though, perhaps …[Tags: monet art ken_johnson ]

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Ross Mayfield, who has ably led Socialtext in all the right directions, is making way for the next CEO. He’s blogged about it, looking for recommendations. I can tell you personally — I’m on the board of advisers [disclosure] — that the Socialtext people are smart, solid and upright. So, if you know how to grow a company of 50 people and 3,000 customers, with a commitment to doing right in the new world, let Ross know… [Tags: socialtext ross_mayfield wikis ceo ]

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David Isenberg blogs a map of broadband availability in MA, put together by the Boston Globe. Keep in mind that this map defines broadband as 1 megabit, which is five times higher than the ludicrous definition promulgated by the FCC, but is many times slower than what’s taken for granted in much of the developed world. [Tags: broadband net_neutrality fcc savetheinternet ]

Megan Tady writes about why it’s so hard to get information like that…including the FCC’s reticence.

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The Crow

The crow is a well-shaped bird.
To the east, a fan splays out.
Crescents point west and south.
Beak down, tail up, it inquires
forward, but then flaps north
where it is not pointing.
The crow is a well-shaped bird.
And then it opens its goddamn mouth.

[Tags: poetry humor]

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Sicko is brilliant. And hilarious.

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The Wall Street Journal online has published an exchange between Andrew Keen (”The Cult of the Amateur”) and me. The full version is here. The condensed version is here. (I recommend the full version.) [Tags: andrew_keen web2.0 cult_of_the_amateur everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Susan Mernit has a nice post about what we can learn from Facebook, Twitter, et al., even if you think they’re just fads.

My overall lesson from such sites - much in line with Susan’s — is that we really enjoy one another. [Tags: susan_mernit facebook twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The Open Library project has opened the doors on its demo, and it is a big, big deal. Read the about page (written by Aaaron Swartz) to see how exactly promising this project is.

From my provincial point of view, the Open Library Project addresses the miscellaneous nature of books: Lots of editions, lots of variants, lots of relationships.. So, include everything you can and enable the creation of rich metadata.

This is exactly the sort of infrastructure of meaning Everything Is Miscellaneous is so excited about. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries metadata wikis ]

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[Tags: poetry bears lists ]

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Dan Gillmor has posted a terrific report on the past year in citizen media. Dan is a partisan, but is so innately fair and honest that this report from the front lines is invaluable. [Tags: citizen_media citizen_journalism dan_gillmor media journalism ]

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Last night we saw Shakespeare & Co.’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Lenox. Over the course of the twenty years we’ve been going, this was one of the best productions of this play, and one of the flat out most enjoyable productions of them all. It’s hilarious.

Jeez, that guy could write! [Tags: shakespeare ]

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The recording industry group that is responsible for collecting the new outrageous fees from Internet radio stations - they pay per channel, as if “channels” made a lot of sense for build-your-own-stream sites like Pandora - has decided not to start collecting the stated fees, subject to negotiations. (See Salon.)

Good news…except how comfortable are you with Congress handing his power to the recording industry? On the other hand, Pandora’s Tim Westergren sees this as a victory for the people: Congress stepped in (and Ed Markey’s the guy, which is a good thing) because you and I complained so loudly.

We’ll see. In any case, it’s better than the shutdown we were facing. [Tags: internet_radio pandora politics media ]

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I read Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut yesterday as research for something I’m thinking of writing about leadership. I was looking for what he thinks leadership is. Man, is “leadership” a squirrely concept! And, I’m pretty sure, corrupt - not in the taking-bribes sense but in the been-used-so-often-it-now-means-18-contradictory-things sense. It’s not even clear how to separate leaders from leadership: it’s perfectly possibly to have leaders who don’t exhibit leadership, and there can be people with leadership who have no followers. Leadership seems to be some set of idealized personal traits that have their own independent life.

We have teachers but no teachership. Librarians with no librarianship. Followers with no followship. Why do we need leadership?

My head’s a-swirl. [Tags: leadership business jack_welch ]

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David Pogue’s Missing Manual for OS X is just about perfect. It’s packed with explanations at the right level of specificity and generality - some of us like to have a mental model as well as step-by-step procedures - and it’s fun to read. In fact, I’ve been enjoying reading through it sequentially. Well done, suh!

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I’ve used and owned Macs since they were the Lisa, but they’ve never really gripped me. My new MacBook has. It’s a keeper, and I’m not sure I can tell you why any more than I could tell you why the previous didn’t take. I’m bonding with it even as we speak.

Now, having said that, let me tell you about the weird problems I’m having with it.

Thanks to your help, I got my terminal back running (it was a pfile problem). Now I have a new and more entertaining problem.

I noticed that some of the extra apps that had been on my disk were no longer there. E.g., GarageBand was gone, so was Process Manager, and maybe some more. So, I backed up to an external drive (SuperDuper, totally worth the $27) and reinstalled the apps (and only the apps) from my Apple CD’s. All seemed to go well, except when I rebooted, about two seconds after the desktop appeared, the desktop went up a couple of pixels in resolution. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was enough to throw off the sharpness of on-screen type. Weirder, the screen shifted left those few pixels if I moved my mouse to the left, up if I moved my mouse up, etc. This happened even if I made small motions with my mouse in the middle of the screen; I didn’t have to go skating to the edge. Weird.

Here’s what’s probably a crucial clue: My official Apple CD’s are version 10.4.09, whereas the version of the OS installed on my hard drive is 10.4.10. Just to be very clear: My MacBook came with 10.4.10 installed, but with 10.4.09 CDs.

So, I reinstalled the OS, and not just the extra apps, from the CD’s, thinking maybe it was an incompatibility between the apps and the OS. Everything was fine except I had the same resolution problem. So, I restored from the system backup I had done. And all is well. No resolution problem. No screen shifting with the mouse problem. Of course, I still don’t have those extra apps, but I can live without them until I can get my hands on a 10.4.10 CD set…or until one of you figures out what the heck is going on.

Interesting, eh? Or maybe it’s so obvious to you that it’s not interesting…

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Among the phishing spams I got today was one addressing me as a Mid America Bank FSB customer (which I am not). Apparently there’s been a little mixup with my records, and they need me to submit all of my personal information, passwords, and embarrassing photos.

These scammers are so lazy that the URL to which I’m supposed to respond doesn’t even attempt to make it look like it’s a bank address. In fact, the domain is:

http://svindler.dk

Well, I guess you;d have no one to blame but yourself if you fell for this one.

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