Just because I think it’s sort of interesting, here’s the form Dartmouth wants you to fill out if you want to get press credentials to cover the Democratic presidential debate they’re hosting in September.

MEDIA CREDENTIAL FORM The following information must be submitted for each individual for whom you are requesting credentials. Media organizations with multiple reporters must fill out one form for each reporter or staff person. All media attending the Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate at Dartmouth must also present national or state accredited press credentials and a letter on official news organization letterhead and a photo ID to receive their media credentials. Name: News Organization: Title: Street Address: City: State: ZIP: Work Phone: Cell Phone: Fax: Email Address: WORK SPACE REQUESTS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE AT DARTMOUTH Please indicate the resources you or your news organization will need to cover the Debate. Please be certain to enter the quantity of each item that you will need: A “work space” is a writing table position with chair and an electric outlet. “Stand-up locations” are for television only; each position will include 20 amps of power. Any additional needs or modifications requested by media will be handled individually as requests are received. Please note: media will be charged for work required to meet special requests. Please contact Genevieve Haas at office.of.public.affairs@dartmouth.edu for special requests. __________Work space(s) for print, radio, photo editing (includes FREE wireless access) __________Work space with telephone line (an additional cost, see “Debate Phone Orders” below) ___________ 4′ x 8′ Spin Room standup locations ____________4′ x 8′ Spin Room standup location with telephone line (an additional cost, see “Debate Phone Orders” below) ____________Outdoor Dartmouth Green live shot locations ____________Outdoor Dartmouth Green live shot location with telephone line (an additional cost, see “Debate Phone Orders” below) ___________ Parking spaces for satellite trucks ___________ Dark corner with lots of power strips (Bloggers only)

Ok, so I added that last one…

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Angry Chinese Blogger maintains that US companies share the blame for the dangerous goods manufactured for them in China:

…much of the blame for unsafe or low quality products lies squarely with the purchasing policies put in place by Western companies. Policies under which companies sign short term “easy in, easy out” contracts with multiple factories. Allowing them to use the threat of moving to another manufacturer in order demand the lowest possible per unit price, and to chop and change factories at will if one proves unable to meet requirements for unit price and quantity. Thus creating a low security, high competition, environment in which factory owners must compete with each other for thin margin contracts, and in which they feel forced to cut corners, or to infringing regulations, as a way of staying in businesses.

It depends on your concept of responsibility, of course. If you think your responsibility ends with your signature at the bottom of a contract that includes quality standards, then the US firms are relatively blameless. If you think you are responsible for the conditions and temptations your greed — um, competitiveness — predictably establish, then the US firms bear some of the blame. The second point of view is, arguably, the realistic one, especially if the widespread nature of the violations indicate a systemic problem. (Thanks to GlobalVoices for the link.) [Tags: china responsibility globalism realism ]

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Rediff reports speculation (= rumor + fantasy) that the so-called Gphone is only two weeks away. This fantasy phone (oh please oh please oh please) would presumably be open to developers in a way that the iPhone isn’t.

Yes, I’m rumor mongering. But it made me feel happy for a good eight minutes this morning. [Tags: google iphone apple wifi earthlink ]

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And just because every happy rumor has an equal and opposite fact to spoil it, Earthlink has laid off 900 of its 2,000 workers, and seems to be getting out of the muni wifi business.

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Terry Heaton explains and evaluates in some depth the Yahoo! Consortium deal that has them partnering with 400 local newspapers:

I come away with the conclusion that the newspaper companies get something, but Yahoo! gets more. The gamble that the industry is making is that their piece will be sufficient to justify what they’re giving to Yahoo!, and on that question may rest the future of the industry as a whole. It’s a gamble, because Yahoo! is actually a competitor, so it is a very big question indeed.

That’s just the overall conclusion. Terry makes the details lucid.[Tags: yahoo newspapers terry+heaton media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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What political genius decided to have Bush announce Gonzales’ resignation at a podium surrealistically plopped in the middle of a huge, empty expanse?

You might as well have posed him next to a duck on crutches [Tags: ]

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Jeneane wonders how online and real world retailing are linking our desires across the realms.

Watching tweens on Webkinz and Bella Sara, I started wondering how smart companies will find that same sweet spot with adult consumers—a place where real-world point-of-sale drives the online experience.

This sort of borderless transaction is one-way when it comes to information — the article you read in the paper leads you online, but once online you’re unlikely to have to resort back to the real world. Retailers clearly would like two-way relationships. And, as Jeneane says, they’re going to come up with every reason they can to get us get our passports stamped. [Tags: jeneane_sessum marketing retailing business ]

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Edward Rothstein of the NY Times reviews Shakespeare & Co.’s Antony & Cleopatra alongside their production of Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing. I saw both and think Edward works too hard to find a Big Picture analogy between the two. Yes, the Stoppard play cleverly relies on a character mistaking a performance for life, but the play and the characters were too slight to make anything metaphysical of it. And while A&C is obviously about the political and the personal — and, as my sister-in-law Meredith Sue Willis points out, also about the personal struggling to become mythic — I just didn’t believe it. Or much enjoy it.

I blogged about A&C here. Meredith Sue Willis just blogged about Rough Crossing; look for the August 25 post. She’s a poet, novelist, teacher, and a hell of a writer.

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I hate to say it, but I also wasn’t bowled over by the new Kenneth Branagh “As You Like It” being shown on HBO.

I’m a big fan of Branagh’s Shakespearean movies, yes, including “Love’s Labour Lost.” But this one was weird, and not because it was set in Japan for no apparent reason. (Oh, there were some nicely framed indoor shots, but I didn’t think it was worth the distraction.) The first hour of this two-hour abbreviated version seems to be setting us up for tragedy. Touchstone — enjoyably played with exuberance by Alfred Molina — is the sole source of levity in this half, making him feel like the clown in a tragedy. Perhaps Branagh was thinking that he needed to deepen the drama so that the romance would be deepened, and the acting is indeed so good that I was touched by the love of the lovers. But the plot contrivance of this play is so outrageous that it can’t really handle much drama. (A boy plays a girl playing a boy playing a girl, although now of course we have a girl playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl.) And Branagh cut much of Rosalind’s part, so we don’t get a sense of her — an odd choice.

Still, there’s lots to like about the production, starting with the acting. Branagh finds a lot in the relationship of Orlando and his brother, Oliver. The play looks great, even though a forest in the UK plays a forest in Japan playing a forest in the UK, so to speak. And we want Branagh to do more Shakespeare plays. So, go out and buy the action figures and eat the Wheaties with Rosalind on the box. [Tags: shakespeare as_you_like_it antony_and_cleopatra reviews kenneth_branagh tom_stoppard rough_crossing hbo meredith_sue_willis ]

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This morning if you search Google for “Enron,” the top hit is Enron.com (the creditors’ recovery page) and the second is the Wikipedia article on Enron. The first listing from NYTimes.com is about 45th and it’s a TimesSelect (= pay) page that doesn’t even actually reference Enron. That’s an example of what’s on the mind of the Times’ ombudsman (um, “public editor”) Clark Hoyt when he begins his column. He finds the Times’ “business strategy” of getting “its articles to pop up first in Internet searches” — well, at least not at #45 — responsible for the quandary the Times finds itself in when it comes to the errors in its archive. I don’t quite see it that way.

Hoyt takes as his example an article abot Allen Kraus, who “once led a welfare office praised for its efforts to uncover fraud.” The Times first reported he resigned under pressure after a bribery investigation without including Kraus’ side of the story and later published a more balanced follow-up. Kraus says his boss eventually publicly sided with Kraus’ version. The details don’t matter much, although I must say it’s a relief for a change not to be talking about John Siegenthaler. The point is that Kraus is understandably upset that searches on his name turn up the Times’ faulty story. If that’s all you read, you’d think he’s a crook.

Hoyt then considers several solutions to this problem, seeming to favor the suggestion that the Time expunge faulty articles from its archive.

Nooooooo!

In fact, the solution is already in place. If you google “allen kraus” (in quotes), the #1 hit is a Times topic page about him that lists first the corrective article and then the faulty one. Perfect! We get the context we need while preserving the record. Topic pages are in fact the Times attempt to move its content up the Google results page. They give us a single, persistent URL that aggregates everything the Times knows about a topic…including what it got wrong.

Jeez, if the Times expunged from its archive every article about Iraq Judith Miller wrote, we’d think the Times slept through the whole run-up to the war. And future researchers would never understand how culpable the Times was for getting us into that miss. Bloggers get this right-er than Hoyt when we use strikethrough font to indicate an error we’ve corrected. We need the full archive.

Topic pages are a great solution to the problem of providing context, as well as advancing the Times’ search engine optimization desires. Removing articles from the record destroys the value of the record. You shouldn’t write history by rewriting the record.

So, rather than setting “time-outs” for articles based on how important the Times’ judges them, which is Hoyt’s suggestion, do more topic pages. And harvest the power of the crowd to create more topic pages and more context. [Tags: nytimes wikipedia newspapers journalism history archives everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It’s called “Googling the Victorians,” and the premise is: “Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. ” He’s got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon’s “Remember the grotto!” caption — to make the point that “What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected.” Here’s another example:

…when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had
been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly
located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical,
The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers
Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights;
and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as
editor in the 1890s.

Leahy goes on:

Such experiences reinforce the
conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been
placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself,
gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and
rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the
internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?

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I don’t want to miss another of Leahy’s points: “…the vast reach of online
searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one
another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” [Tags: copyright scholarship google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Comcast users are complaining that they are no longer able to seed their torrents, so that they are unable to use the popular BitTorrent protocol to share large files. It seems that Comcast has decided that it doesn’t like that use of the Internet, so apparently they have simply turned it off.

If true, this is an example of why we need not just Net Neutrality, but Net Neutrality with teeth. [Tags: net_neutrality bittorrent comcast ]

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I think I “run” faster when listening to my iPod because I have it cranked it up so loud — I have middle-aged hearing loss, also known as “Why do today’s youth mumble? It’s a sign of disrespect!” disease — that it masks the sound of my panting. That can’t be a good thing.

In only vaguely related news, I find fascinating the explanatory hypothesis of why we have out of body experiences. If I understand it (and there is no chance that I do), the idea is that the brain constructs the sense of having a persistent body by synthesizing the various streams of internal and external sensations. When those streams fall out of synch, the brain, which would rather be wrong than confused, synthesizes a body standing slightly outside of the one it’s actually in. Ah brains! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em! [Tags: brain ipod exercise aging middle_age out_of_body science ]

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Tim “LibraryThing” Spalding bought a box of copies of Everything Is Miscellaneous, Lor’ bless him, and decided to hold a contest of sorts to give the remaining dozen away. So, he asked people to comment on how tagging changes knowledge. Now he’s collected a sampling of the 170 replies. Great stuff.

Also, Tim now let’s you see a reverse (inverse? converse?) tag cloud, which he calls a tag mirror. He says:

Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing’s twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection…

Here’s a for-example. I don’t use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They’re just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It’s interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I’m more interested in gender studies than I thought.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tim_spalding folksonomies tags tag_clouds knowledge ]

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Dave Winer has dug up and made presentable some of the metadata for Flickr photos. Flickr knows more than you think!

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We were expecting so much. My family loves Shakespeare & Co., the Berkshires-based institution. The Company’s founder and spirit, Tina Packer, stars in this production — taking a leading role for the first time in many years. And the play has gotten raves, including in the Boston Globe.

But I thought the performance lacked many of the Company’s signature delights. Although the language was as clear as ever, and many of the performances were strong, the director Michael Hammond staged it inertly. It was as close to watching actors stand and declaim as I’ve ever seen the Company come. Some of this he clearly did on purpose, as when the factional leaders meet and form an alliance. But the rest of the play also was staged as a rectangle within which people talk. Usually, Shakespeare & Co. fills the place with movement that enlivens and enlightens. To this performance’s detriment, two nights earlier we’d seen the Company’s version of Midsummer Night’s Dream for the second time, which is staged beautifully and hilariously. But A & C didn’t just pale by comparison. It was, put most positively, staid. And that’s really being too generous. For example, Hammond chose to insert battle scenes that were slow motion, stylized ballets that conveyed nothing; they might just as well replaced them with a placard that read: “Insert battle here.”

And, although I hate to say it because she has been such a force for making Shakespeare matter despite the barriers of time and language, I thought Tina Packer was not very good in the part. I never believed her. Her final scene — granted, by that time I was already resenting being held in the theater — struck me as a parody of a stagy Shakespeare reading…Cleopatra as performed by Mrs. Rittenhouse. Where she should have shown us Cleopatra’s allure, she was coquettish. Where she should have broken our hearts, she resorted to tricks — the brave smile, the looking away. She was at her best, I thought, in her scenes with her maidens; the Company usually excels at women’s roles.

I liked some of the other performances. Nigel Gore, so good as Bottom, was believable as Antony. I was especially surprised by Craig Baldwin, one of the lovers in Midsummer’s Night Dream, who brought nuance and sympathy to Octavius Caesar’s cold determination. Walton Wilson as Enobarbus, well-delivered the beautiful explanation of Cleopatra. He evoked her better than Packer did.

I’ve never seen this play before. I’m glad to have seen it, but, alas, not because of the strength of this performance of it. I hate to say it. Go instead to see A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Twice. [Tags: shakespeare reviews tina_packer antony_and_cleopatra berkshires ]

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For an alternative view of the same performance, see Meredith Sue Willis‘ blog, where she’ll soon be posting about it. She’s my sister-in-law and a novelist whose opinion is far better founded than mine.

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DishyMix interviews me (and it’s one of the odder interviews, as I recall — it was done a few weeks ago — and decides to use my 1972 college yearbook picture of me. The actual podcast is here. [Tags: dishymix longhairs hippies ]

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Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes:

The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we’re only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove &mdash step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.

That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.

The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas. My apartment’s messy piles of papers and mottled floorboards are hard to model in Floorplanner, and it’s tempting to imagine a living room without them. But take them away, and my living room wouldn’t feel like home.

I’m not sure how broadly that last paragraph applies, but the previous ones make a good point. The ability to play what-if with ideas lets us run down dead ends faster than ever, which is an important benefit of the Web. Finding paths of thought that go nowhere is often the best way to find paths that maybe go somewhere. [Tags: wsj messiness everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I enjoyed AJ Fortin’s post that trains a Mortimer Adlerian eye on blogs and those who make extravagant claims about them. (I seem to be his main example of the latter.)

And John Eischeid, who worked with NewAssignment, is starting a crowdsourced project addressing broad questions of the effect of crowds and crowdsourcing. It’s called “The Cult of the Rebuttal,” a reference to Andrew Keen’s book (which I’ve tried to explain and evaluate here), but it’s really focused on the topic, not the book. [Thanks to Andy Angelos for the link.] [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous andrew_keen]

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Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to
picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states
defying the federal Real ID Act.

So says the increasingly-ominously named Department of Homeland Security, according to CNN.

Personally, I prefer my totalitarianism to be unobtrusive. [Tags: politics rights privacy homeland_security brave_new_world orwell undesirables ]

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Oxfam is collecting money for the victims of the horrendous earthquake in Peru. That’s where my family is giving.

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Wired is encouraging you to post the most egregious Wikipedia revisions here. Anonymity giveth opportunities for abuse. The crowd setteth right. [Tags: wikipedia marketing pr ]

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Matt Stoller has YouTubed Michael “the good FCC Commissioner” Copps connecting AT&T’s censoring of Pearl Jam with the need for Net neutrality. (At another level of the stack, so to speak, David Isenberg shows the disconnection. They’re both right.)

Matt has a second YouTube in which Commissioner Copps explains how the reclassification of Internet carriers in 2005 meant the loss of the Net neutrality that used to be the law of the land. [Tags: net_neutrality fcc michael_copps david_isenberg at&t pearl_jam ]

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I’ve posted a long piece at Huffington Post that tries to put together the strongest, most coherent version of Andew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen’s argument against the Web…and then critiques it. Tags: andrew_keen web_2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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My friend David Sifry has resigned as Technorati’s CEO because it’s grown to the point where it needs a person with strengths other than the founder’s. He’ll stay on as chairman of the board. The company is looking for a replacement. In the meantime, a triumvirate will act as an Office of the President.

Technorati also announced it’s laid off eight employees in order to “focus” and “adjust our expense structure,” according to Dave’s email. That’s painful. I wish them well.

Dave, too. Dave is one of the people who keep contributing and giving. I can’t wait to see what he does next. (Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors.) [Tags: dave_sifry technorati]

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In what sounds like a promising move, the commonwealth has appointed Anne Margulies as our Chief Information Officer. Margulies is currently the executive director of MIT’s inspiring OpenCourseWare project. She’s the fourth CIO in two years, so let’s hope she’s there long enough to do some good. (Here’s a podcast of a session at the Berkman Center she led.)

A predecessor, Peter Quinn, resigned after false charges were leveled against him, suspiciously after he championed requiring the commonwealth to use only software that supports open standards, i.e., not Microsoft. David Berlind has the full story on that requirement.

So, Margulies is not entering a humdrum environment. Her commitment to openCourseWare is a good sign.

[Tags: massachusetts cio anne_margulies open_courseware mit open_standards ]

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Susan Crawford goes through the details of the FCC’s decision about the rules for auctioning off the 700MHz chunk of our (yours and mine, sisters and brothers) spectrum. The quick overview is that the closer you look, the worse it gets, and it doesn’t start off that great to begin with [Tags: susan_crawford fcc 700mh net_neutrality ]

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From Christopher Herot at Zingdom Communications:

The concept is very simple: you add this application to your Facebook account, give it your phone number (just US and Canada for now), provide some selection criteria, and wait for your phone to ring. You’ll be connected, for free, to another person on Facebook who made matching selections. You talk for a minute and it disconnects. You see their first name and their photo, but no other information, such as your phone number or profile, is revealed. At the end of the call, if both of you so agree, the application will re-connect you for a more extended conversation. Otherwise you can move on to the next person.

Chris warns that the app works best when there’s critical mass. Also, he writes (in an email): “To install it, you’ll need to add it to your Facebook profile. So, log into Facebook, then cut and paste the following URL into your browser. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4255800247 .”

I haven’t tried it. I’m not that social. [Tags: zing facebook social_networks ]

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Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator has come up with a variation on the Digg theme. Y-Combinator was the incubator for Reddit.com, a Digg-like site that was bought by CondeNet about a year ago, and Y-Combinator has been maintaining a site focused on news about start-ups. Paul — who is a superb writer and thinker, as anyone who has read his stuff knows — is now opening up its topics to news of interest to startups and hackers, which is a much wider range.

What’s most interesting (well, to me, anyway) are the changes the site is making in the social dynamics. Reddit, says Paul, became of less interest to hackers like him as it succeeded with a wider public. Since the readers determine what make it onto the site, that’s the price of mainstream-ish success. To keep HackerNews focused on news of interest to hackers — and presumably, to exclude the sort of tech tabloid stories that show up at Digg that may be of interest to hackers but irrelevant to hacking &mdash a team of techies will “train” the system on what are relevant stories and what are not. (Since Paul is directly responsible for the widespread use of Bayesian spam filters, the word “training” makes me think there’s an element of that here.) People who thumbs-up stories that the system thinks are relevant will gain authority within the system (their thumbs up and down will count for more), and those who thumbs-up irrelevant stories will lose authority.

In addition, the site’s comments will be moderated to maintain “civility,” i.e., not ad hominem arguments.

I suppose there may be purists who think this is a betrayal of the wisdom of the crowd. But there is no such thing as untouched crowdal wisdom. In every case, someone has made decisions about how to gather the crowd’s input, who counts as a member of the crowd, how much authority the crowd will have, whether and how the wishes of the minority are respected, what the means of redress are, what typeface should be used to announce the crowd’s decision, and a thousand more factors. No single crowd mechanism works for every issue. We need lots and lots of ways of creating collective understanding. HackerNews sounds like a very interesting experiment at the least, and quite possibly much more than that. [Tags: hackernews digg reddit paul_graham media news everything_is_miscellaneous wisdom_of_the_crowd ]

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John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain, of the Berkman Center, have an article at C-NET on the ethical difficulties of doing business in tyrannical countries.

The more promising route is for one or more groups of industry members to come up with a common, voluntary code of conduct to guide the activities of individual firms in regimes that carry out online censorship and surveillance. Such a process has begun. Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo and TeliaSonera are actively working together on a code. This process includes nongovernment organizations (NGOs)&mdashincluding Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy and Technology…

As JP and Jonathan say, “The development of a code of conduct itself solves only a small part of the problem.” But it’s a key part. I’m proud to say that the Berkman Center is one of the NGOs working on this project. [Tags: berkman john_palfrey jonathan_zittrain corporate_responsibility ethics google microsoft yahoo ]

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Gwabs has a cool little trailer up showing how much fun it’ll be to go hand-to-hand where the destructible environment is your desktop. (Windows only. [Tags: games gwabs ]