Ed Yourdon has created a mother lode of a Google docs presentation that gathers tons of info about Web 2.0. Plus, he’s inviting bunches of people to add to it, edit it, put in a nicer background, etc. [Tags: web2.0 ed_yourdon ]

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BradSucks has posted the main track of his new song “Out of It,” and is asking you to provide the backup vocals. [Tags: bradsucks collaboration ]

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David Michaelson and Joy Romanski post at HuffingtonPost about Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 12 which basically requires everyone at NASA to open up their financial, medical and personal records to government scrutiny. As the post points out, this is simply Bush issuing a ukase.

Remember when liberty was worth a risk? [Tags: homeland_security privacy bush ]

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Our sixteen year old son is being required in his junior year to memorize the state capitals. This is at the excellent public Brookline High School. It’s like the educational system is trying to give us examples of how bad it’s become. What next? Have them spend a month making a papier-mâché recreation of a fort? Grade them on how well they cut out paper snowflakes to decorate the classroom?

The amount of time our son is being required to spend memorizing whether Bismarck is the capital of North or South Dakota will dwarf the total amount of time he would spend in his lifteime looking it up at Google. This is information that adds nothing to this comprehension of the world. Memorizing the dates of the states’ admissions to the union might at least sometime in his life help him notice a relationship of some consequence — that Texas was admitted before the abolition of slavery has some possible effect on his understanding, whereas that Austin is the capital will only matter if he runs for governor of Texas and doesn’t want to look foolish in the debates.

It especially hurts me that this sort of crap education is going on in history, a field essential to filing away our natural human arrogance by showing us that we got where we are because of what other humans did. And what could be more fascinating than our own story? Obviously, then, we want to teach it by telling students that there will be a quiz on Monday, so could they please memorize the fricking state capitals.

Aarrrggghhh! [Tags: education history state_capitals ]

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Ok, so I forgot the password for a WordPress installation I was playing around with. That makes me an idiot, but just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill idiot. The built-in WP idiot-guard, which sends you a copy of your password, didn’t send me anything.

In googling around for a solution, I found lots of info about installing phpMyAdmin, a powerful tool for managing your SQL install. Except I don’t want a powerful tool. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to install it, and failed.

More googling, however, revealed an extremely simple php script at (appropriately) www.village-idiot.org. You install it into your WordPress directory, you visit it in your browser, you enter a password, and then you immediately delete the script. Couldn’t be simpler.

Thank you, Village-Idiot! [Tags: wordpress]

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Here’s a video of the full session I was at at Picnic ‘07. It includes Walt Mossberg’s introduction, my 40 minute keynote (very similar to the presentation that I did at Google, although with a short section on the importance and difficulty of the implicit added, and some references in anticipation of the debate to follow), and then the half hour or so of my debate with Andrew Keen, moderated by Walt M.

I haven’t watched the video beyond the first few minutes — the production quality is high — but my sense of the debate was that Andrew was on an oddly anti-intellectual track, attacking me as a “professional philosopher,” which I’m not (I was an assistant professor of philosophy 22 years ago), and even if I were, why would that be a criticism, especially coming from a guy who is out arguing for the importance of credentialed authorities? Not helpful to discussing the actual topic. Frustrating. My feeling coming out of the discussion over all was indeed frustration. I didn’t think we were able to pursue points sufficiently.

BTW, somewhere in my presentation you can see me very carefully get left and right confused. Also, I’m going to plug again my more coherent attempt to explain and evaluate Keen’s argument: Andrew Keen’s Best Case. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous picnic2007 taxonomy folksonomyk ]

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In the British Airways lounge at Heathrow, If you use their free computers to connect to BoingBoing.net, you instead get a page that says it’s been blocked. Here’s a copy-and-paste of the page (because the PC has been crippled so that, among other things, I can’t do a screen capture):

Internet Access to this site has been BLOCKED British Airways Plc prohibited website information page.   British Airways has blocked access to certain Internet sites which may be considered to be illegal or offensive. This site is currently on the barred list.We understand that the Internet changes constantly and that the decision in respect of this particular site may no longer be appropriate. If you would like us to review the decision to bar access to this site, please give the website URL and a contact e-mail address to a member of staff at the Lounge Reception. The response will be written confirmation that either the ban on this site has been lifted, or that the site continues to contain material that is inappropriate and, therefore, the bar on access will continue. Thank you for your co-operation. Date/Time: 2007-09-28 – 07:29:54 Website: http://boingboing.net/ Category: “Nudity;Personal Pages”

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John Palfrey, Wendy Seltzer and Angela Kang have an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson about the Harvard bookstore’s kicking a student out for recording the price of six books. The bookstore claimed that that information is protected by copyright, a wrong and frivolous attempt to extend copyright to cover, well, everything.

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Just in case you’re not on the Republican National Committee’s email list, here’s a message that came “personally” from President George W. Bush:

During my six and a half years in office, you and I have worked together to advance the Republican Party’s principles to keep America safe, strengthen our economy, protect our values and extend the American Dream to every person who’s fortunate to be a citizen of our great country.

In just over 13 months, Americans go to the polls to elect the next President. We have an important mission: to keep the White House in 2008, and retake the U.S. House and Senate. It is critical we do so and your help is needed today to ensure a GOP victory.

Next year, Chairman Mike Duncan and the Republican National Committee (RNC) will have the job of organizing our Party’s national grassroots campaign effort.

Mike and I both are counting on your support to help lead the Republican Party to sweeping victories in the 2008 elections.

We know it is grassroots activists like you who put up the yard signs, knock on the doors, make the phone calls and do what’s necessary to win and elect a Republican president and Congress.

And it is people like you who give generously to ensure our candidates have the resources needed to run effective campaigns and win. That is why I hope you will make a special online gift of $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, or $25 to keep the RNC’s 2008 election programs moving forward.

Winning the 2008 elections will be the toughest test our Party has faced since we won the White House and added to our numbers in both houses of Congress in 2004.

To accomplish our mission, Republicans must make clear how we will meet the challenges of defending America and extending our prosperity.

Republicans have a solid record when it comes to protecting the United States of America.

After the enemy attacked us, I vowed I would rally this nation and use our resources to protect you. And that is exactly what we have done. We have reformed our intelligence services to make sure we can find the enemy before they strike. We have fought to deny them safe haven in Afghanistan and Iraq so they cannot plan and plot again.

The fight for freedom in Iraq is the fight for the security of the United States of America and we must prevail. If we leave before the job is done, the enemy that attacked us would be emboldened. I believe if our candidates take the message of doing what is necessary to protect the American people, we will win in 2008.

Republicans also have a solid record when it comes to growing this economy.

Republicans cut taxes for everybody who pays taxes. We understand that if you have more money in your pocket to save, spend, or invest, the economy will grow.

If you look carefully at the budget the Democrats proposed, they want to return to the days of tax and spend. [Coming from the administration that has created the greatest deficit in our history, we have here a new definition of chutzpah -- DW] They will raise your taxes and figure out new ways to spend your money.

If our candidates remind the American voter that tax cuts have worked, that the economy is strong as a result of the tax cuts, and instead of raising taxes, we ought to make the tax cuts permanent, we will retake the U.S. House and Senate and hold the White House in 2008.

You can win most elections based upon strong national defense and good economic policy. But the RNC needs Sustaining Members to get this message out and support our Republican candidates.

Please support our cause today by making a special online contribution of $1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, or $25 to the RNC to help elect Republicans at all levels in 2008.

David, Republicans believe in doing what’s right for America. We believe that the best days lie ahead for our country. And I believe that we’re going to succeed in 2008 with your support.

Sincerely,

President George W. Bush

I’m actually surprised that they would use Bush’s record and name to raise money. File this under “Pleas to the Core.” [Tags: politics bush republicans ]

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After my presentation in Aarhus as part of ITForum.DK’s get-together, I chatted with Babak Djahari, a lobbyist for the tech sector. I asked what his issues were, half afraid he was going tell me how Net neutrality is a communist plot, but then I remember that, oh yeah, I’m not in America. He said the industry’s main issue is a shortage of programmers. The pay is excellent but, he said, programmers are considered nerds. Also taxes are very high (65-70% at the high end) and the weather is less than ideal; he says there’s only fall and winter, and during the winter there are only six hours of light. (Since when do geeks see the sun anyway?) On the other hand, you get to live in Denmark, the beer is great, there are lots of Danes here, English is the second language, the Danes rescued my people during WW II, and you’ll be just in time for when nerds become the new cool people, just like in the US.

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After the meeting, I bicycled from the hotel to Aarhus, about 5k along the bay. I used one of Aarhus’ free public bicycles and had an exceptionally pleasant ride. After returning the bike to one of the stands, I wandered aimlessly, i.e., I got totally head-facing-backwards, wasn’t-I-just-here lost. The part of the city I saw — which included the pedestrian section — was quiet, old, unpretentious, possibly student-y. I went to an Asian restaurant, thinking I might find something vegetarian there. There was nothing on the menu, but they wokked up some vegetables. Then I wandered, trying to find the bay because my only way back to the hotel would be by biking along the water, although first I would have to bike a few miles to figure out I’m going in the wrong direction, since my experience has consistently taught me that the right direction is always the second direction, and no amount of figgering or trying to cheat the system (”Which is the way I wouldn’t go? That must be the way!”) circumvents this law of personal physics. Amazingly, I fell into a worm hole that brought me directly to the hotel, where “worm hole” = “taxi.”

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Now I’m on my tiny balcony overlooking the bay, from which I can see the loading docks, carbon paper clouds, and lights drifting toward my family. [Tags: denmark travel programming ]

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I’m in Aarhus, Denmark, listening to the only English presentation of the day (besides mine), which is a terrific talk by Mark William Hansen about Lego’s embrace of Web 2.0. E.g., four days after Lego launched MindStorm, the software had been completely redone. “We could have gone after them with a lawyer,” he says, but instead “We embraced the changes.” The adult hobbyists, who had been a “shadow market,” with Web 2.0 have become key because they drive enthusiasm and stretch the product. Lego is working on “Lego Universe”: A social world in which you can build with virtual bricks and play with them online with others; the planes will fly and the boats will sail. [Tags: lego play web2.0 ]

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Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it’s bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.

This is the first in a “distributed blogging” experiment that will have three other bloggers responding. [Tags: content publishing books clay_shirky martin_weller long_tail chris_anderson everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Julian Dibble has a rich post about the interpenetrating of work and play. There’s so much in it, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don’t have to decide because I’m running late for a presentation… [Tags: julian_dibble game play philosophy economics ]

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I’m only a little bit into Bioshock, but so far it’s the most immersive game ever. It’s game play may turn out not to hold up as well, but as of now, it’s actually got HalfLife2 beaten. It plops you rather literally into a utopia-gone-sour created by a suave visionary named Andrew Ryan (who, I’ll bet, is as to Ayn Rand as Howard Roark is to hard work). The graphics, the sound, the voice acting, the settings — post-WWII sf — all work to make the city feel like there’s an entire world behind it.

I’m still just warming up. It may get tiresome or disappoint in any of the ways that games, narratives, and computer programs can disappoint. But so far, it’s swell. [Tags: bioshock games halflife]

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Here’s the video of Tuesday’s Berkman lunch featuring four fellows giving five minute talks on the future of the Net, followed by a lively group discussion. It’s all part of the global One Web Day celebrations of the Web and its value and its values. [Tags: one_web_day -berkman]

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Doc posts about Yet Another Scary Lawsuit. From what I can gather (I’m on the road and running to check out of my hotel in time), this one asks that an anonymous blogger be identified so that a defamation suit can go forward.

And, in another case, a judge has ruled that a high school student isn’t free to call her school administrators “douchebags in her blog outside of school.

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David Isenberg has a good post on One Web Day, Yom Kippur, and their coincidence tomorrow.

So, go celebrate the Web while we still have one that’s distinguishable from cable TV.

And if I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I ask your forgiveness. I will try to do better next year, especially if you’ll let me know what I did wrong (self@evident.com).

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Donna Maurer, an information architect, writes about how she organizes her wine, thereby answering the question: What is the opposite of miscellaneous? But who cares? She is not aiming at organizational purity, although her scheme has the attention to detail that purists often demand. But those details represent the information that matters to her, and her system lets her find and use that information…exactly as you would expect from a leading information architect. A folksonomic, tag-based wine cellar — while a fun concept — is not exactly called for here. [Tags: tags taxonomy wine donna+maurer information_architecture ia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I keynoted Shop.org this morning and then walked up the long aisles of their exhibit hall. I was (and am) pooped, so what caught my eye was more random than usual.

I thought PermissionData.com was going to be one of those phony permission marketing companies that are all too happy to spam you. Nope. They show you (at your request) a page of offers. None of the boxes are pre-clicked and none are pre-clicked and below the fold. The idea is that if you trick people into giving you permission to spam them, they are remarkably bad leads. Bad leads cost money. So, good for PermissionData!

3B.net looks like a combination of Second Life, the early Wolfenstein, and LL Bean. They render the entries in your product catalog as posters along the wall in a 3D space. Your avatar and your friends’ avatars can wander together, talk about what you see, and click to be taken to the normal merchandising page. The guy in the booth (lost his name…sorry) and I bonded over our days playing Doom, Duke Nukem, and the under-rated Painkiller.

I met Rousseau Aurelien, CEO of SecondRotation, which aims at being the place you sell your stuff when you’re done with it. If the item is one of the thousands on SR’s list, SR buys it from you and arranges to have it picked up. It then refurbishes it and resells it or donates it. Rousseau says they pay about two thirds of the going rate at eBay. But, boom, you’re done. I asked how many people say their item is in one shape, but when it arrives, it turns out to be broken or damaged. Rousseau replied that 95% of the stuff is in the shape claimed or better. “People are generally good,” he says.

I kept running into people from Bazaarvoice. (Brett Hurt, the CEO, introduced me when I gave my talk; he said some very kind things. Thank you, Brett. It meant a lot to me.) Bazaarvoice creates customer review pages. The booth had one of the more effective marketing gimmicks: a rack of irreverent sayings you could attach to your name badge, like the “speaker” and “media” tags. I saw a whole bunch of people with “More cowbell” tags from Bazaarvoice.

I met with Daniel Wright, CEO of mporia, which does “m-commerce” (= e-commerce for mobile phones). Interesting space. It’s not going to get smaller over time. The actual transactions are handled via PayPal, or by sending the merchant an encrypted message with the credit card info.

I stopped in at Broadvision because they bought Interleaf years ago, a company I worked at for eight years. (I was long gone by the time it got bought.) Interleaf was way ahead of its time, with a structured document editor, electronic publishing system, document management system, and program-enabled documents. I often wonder why there’s no market for high end document systems for managing the creation and management of large, complex document sets. Broadvision is still selling the Interleaf system, and the maintenance stream is strong. Good to see the product is still around.

I also visited briefly in the Endeca booth because Endeca is doing great selling faceted classification (they call it “guided navigation”) systems, and I like what they’re doing. It’s been fun watching the company go from just about nothing to having an amazing client roster.

So, that was a truly random assortment. Now it’s off to the casinos to use my patented and proven Lossless Las Vegas System(tm): I don’t play. Well, I will drop $20 into gambling machines and wonder why people consider this fun. [Tags: shop.org ecommerce marketing ]

[Note: I had a stupidity glitch and ended up deleting and then rewriting from memory what this post said. The original was up for about 15 mins and this one is as close as I could come to the original. If you noticed the change, I didn't want you to think there's anything nefarious going on. Just stupidity.]

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Keynote’s ability to animate objects has gotten much better in the new version (Keynote ‘08, v 4), but it’s still not up to PowerPoint. The biggest gap at this point is it’s inability to loop actions. This may be because Keynote apparently doesn’t let users interrupt animations, so a loop would loop forever, making for an especially ineffective but oddly hypnotic presentation. Also, and less important, Keynote is surprisingly sparse with the graphic shapes it provides, and those shapes aren’t as manipulable as PowerPoint’s. E.g., PPT gives control points for block arrows so you can adjust the head, provides “smart” workflow connectors, etc.

Way more important to me: Keynote doesn’t always let you say two effects should run at the same time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was finding this frustratingly unpredictable until I realized that in some cases it would allow simultaneous actions that were in slide sets I imported from PowerPoint. (Keynote’s import and export facilities are awesome.) As soon as I altered the action in Keynote, the “do action with” option went away, leaving only the “do action after” choice. If I’ve diagnosed this correctly (and, really, what are the chances?), then Keynote can display behaviors it doesn’t allow users to create.

Weird. But it does leave the possibility of exporting the deck to PowerPoint, doing the animation work, and importing back into Keynote…except you’ll lose Keynote’s over-the-top eye candy, especially for slide transitions.

(I’m not a Keyspan expert, although I’m pretty good at PowerPoint. If I’m wrong about any or all of this, please set me straight. Thanks.) [Tags: keynote powerpoint animations ]

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As part of One Web Day Matthew Burton is holding an Ask-Jimmy-Wales-a-Question event. To participate, go here. The event will be live in NYC on Saturday. If you’re in town, here’s the info. [Tags: onewebday ]

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Anastasia Goodstein of ypulse.com talks about the questions she gets asked by parents about teenagers and their social networks. Will they lose their social skills? Can the kids take down photos, etc. The kids are used to putting it all on line. [I got a phone call I had to take and missed the rest.]

Stefana Broadbent has done studies and has found that social networking sites are not used by teenagers to communicate, but rather to identify people they’ve met or record where they’ve gone. Day-to-day communication is done through instant messaging and the phone. [and I missed the beginning of this one :( ]

Sean Kelly of Zoodaloo talks about the fact that his company doesn’t use email. They use Basecamp. Zoodaloo is a social networking site for kids. The avatars are done as cel shading (cartoon style). The boys want to explore and the girls want to customize and decorate.

Mike D’Abramoof Youthography. Last year they did about 120 studies in North America. The 10-29 year old group divides into four equal five-year cohorts, with no one cultural force driving all four. Kids are getting enrolled in school younger than ever and having sex earlier, but having kids, getting married and graduating from college later than ever. It’s now more important to people to have a lifelong partner than to get married. People find religion far less important than having faith or being spiritual. Conclusion: It’s not just the culture that’s changing, but the people. Trends: People integrate culture better than ever before. Identity is harder to catregorize. We are becoming more hedonistic. There’s rehumanization.

Fiona Romeo begins by talking about Club Penguin’s banning of numbers because members were speaking entirely in coded numbers. “Dictionary dancing” was born substituting other signs for the numbers. [Wonderful.]

Paarents are anxious about children’s use of digital tech because they overestimate the risks. There are few public spaces in the real world, so they spend more time on line. “Mobile phones are the new bicycles”: It gives them more freedom and greater range. Kids are fine about surveillance by video cameras and being fingerprinted by schools, but think that montoring mobile phones crosses the line.

[Sorry of the inadequacy of these notes] [Tags: svs2007 social_networks teens ]

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I’m at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Seminar. It’s a fantastic group of attendees. Liz Lawley does the intro, followed by Lili Cheng. We hear a little about Social Genius.

We go around the room saying who we are and what we’re interested in. There are about 60 of us here, I think.

Now Matt Biddulph of Dopplr.com is talking about how to make presence fuzzy. Dopplr lets you see which of your friends are going to be in a city. But why not be able to control the size of the range? So there’s a slider.

Tom Coates (who is hilarious on the back channel) is working on a project code-named Fire Eagle at Yahoo’s Brickhouse. He talks about presence as making you visible and comprehensible not just to other people but to software that could do yet more with it. You can tell Fire Eagle your location via SMS, other apps, etc. E.g., you could map all the Twitter tweets. You could use your phone to look for groups. You could automatically geotag your blogs posts or flickr photos. Tom now talks about protecting against abuse of this info. In addition to the opt outs, you can create “special places” that are off the map, so to speak.

Gilad Lotan talks about presence and objects. He likes to embed conective technology into objects. E.g., he built “imPulse” tha transfers heartbeats through a wall. The next version was wireless. When two of these pods are in the same room, they talk to each other. Likewise, he did a touch project for the Kotel. Ubi.ach (say it aloud) “takes email away from the screen.” It’s a doll that blinks when you get new email. A street exhibit in Jerusalem shows some of the missiles fired at Israel embedded in ordinary scenes. Another of Gilad’s projects creates Tibetan prayer wheels controlled by images from news feeds. Overall: Four points on presence: Connection through intimacy, range of immediacy, culture and context, and importance of the tangible.

danah boyd talks about social networking site as “networked publics” (in the Habermasian sense). They are spaces within which collections of people exist, through mediating tools. Hannah Arendt said that the presence of others assures of the reality of the world around us. Mobile phones create social spaces for teens — an always-on intimate community. [sorry, this is coming out far more disjointed than the actual presentation.] When you write, you write for an imagined audience, a public that your writing creates. Socnets do this for groups of friends/acquaintances. For teens, at socnets you display that you’re engaged in a relationship before you actually are; they’re ways of marking relationships. The intended audience is the social network. danah shows two photos of teenagers kissing by the juxtaposition (”juxtapokissin’”?) of the photos; this is because it’s so hard for teenagers to find real world public spaces. She points to the traces of relationships in the real world in which we can see time and the aging of the relationships. [Tags: scs2007 social_networks microsoft_research berkman ]

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On Tuesday at 12:30, the Berkman Center wil celebrate One Web Day [video | rocketboom] by devoting its weekly lunch discussion to The Net in Ten. Four Fellows will each give a five minute presentation on the future of the Net, and then there will be open discussion. You can sign up for the lunch here. [Tags: onewebday future ]

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My digital camera stopped being recognized by both my MacBook (with the latest version of OS X) and my Windows laptop. I tried lots of things, including many reboots and various photo import programs. I was on the verge of ordering a card reader when I tried a second USB cable, even though the first one worked without any problems when plugged into a mouse that uses a removable USB cable for its cord. With the new cable, the camera was recognized by both the Mac and Windows machines.

I may be missing the relevant factor here, but since the first cable continues to work fine with the mouse, all I can figure is that thickness matters. The first cable is one of those thread-like jobbies that come with a spring-loaded winder. The second cable was a normal USB cable.

Assuming that that’s the factor, does the skinny cable not let enough electrimification through? Oh, pity the poor humanities major! [Tags: tips mac windows cameras ]

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My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, the novelist and writing teacher, ran a piece in her newsletter about how small presses see Amazon. It’s by Jonathan Greene of the Gnomon Press. I thought it was interesting. Here it is, in its entirety:

Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill
useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in
incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal
devastation in the eastern coalfields.

But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over
40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than
ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many
instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are
not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon
Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky
enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.

But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that
is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes
the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but
(unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up
condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to
its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut
the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had
to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being
non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would
consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores
complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific
salaries.

Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store
will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry. Research
on-line and contact or buy from the publisher directly. Not all
publishers take credit cards, a reason some would prefer to deal with
Amazon. Barnes & Noble often will not order from small publishers
directly, but often seem to give out their telephone numbers to those
that want books from those publishers. Small Press Distribution and
Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less
to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or
chains at 40% – 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment
and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And
Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores
or distributors return. In other words, it is almost impossible for a
small literary publisher to survive without massive infusions of grants
from NEA and foundations. Or increasingly asking for author subsidies.
And this affects writers who want to be published by small publishers.
The health of these publishers helps the writers they publish. The
worsening condition is also caused by big publishers deciding to kill of
their mid-list authors, authors who do not sell books at or above the
10,000 range. They would rather publish fewer authors selling more
product (a ubiquitous hateful word now in the book trade).

Print-on-demand vendors are a new avenue for authors and publishers. Or
in many instances now the author is the self-publisher. A complicated
situation. Bashing Amazon is not really helpful. Bash Ingram, bash the
fact that mainstream literary publishing is now dominated by
multi-nationals. Knopf, Random House, Farrar Straus, etc. are now owned
by German companies. Or lament the fact that just released figures state
that 27% of Americans do not even read one book a year. One was quoted:
reading made them sleepy. Well, then tout reading for insomniacs as much
healthier than sleeping pills. That should boost book sales.

BTW, Gnomon is no longer accepting manuscripts for publication. [Tags: amazon books publishing gnomon_press jonathan_greene meredith_sue_willis media bookstores ]

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The Beppe Grillo blog (in Italy’s top five) quotes the International Herald Tribune [pdf]:

The success of a grassroots anti-politics campaign spearheaded by an iconoclastic comedian is giving Italian politicians pause for thought.

Beppe Grillo is the man behind V-Day (the V stands for a very rude Italian expletive), which attracted 300,000 people on Saturday to sign a petition supporting a common goal: purging Italy of its corrupt political class, which in Grillo’s view includes political parties, most government institutions and the media…

The petition wasn’t no stinkin’ online jobby where signing requires scrolling two inches in order to click on a box. People lined up in 200 towns to sign an honest-to-pete, atom-based piece of inconvenience. And there are physical meet-ups. Sounds like an effective blending of the digital and the analog, with all the pleasures and difficulties of the latter. [Tags: beppe_grillo politics italy petitions ]

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To win this quiz (and receive absolutely nothing), your answers have to be within an order of magnitude.

According to an article in today’s Boston Globe: 1) How many Dunkin Donut stores are there? 2) How many donuts do they serve per year? 3) How many pounds of fat do they use for frying up those donuts? (It’s transfatty oil at this point.)

The answers are in the first comment. [Tags: quiz donuts ]

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My Times is in beta. I’m not sure how much of it I’m getting for free because Times Select comps people at universities. And I haven’t played with it extensively. But what I’m seeing I’m liking.

my.nytimes.com lets you choose your feeds. Of course, NY Times material is available, but you could make a page that shows the feeds from the Washington Post, Slate, and BBC and not the NY Times. The site lets you see suggested feeds from various NY Times celebrities. You can add widgets like a Flickr photo browser. You can lay out the page you want. You can add tabs to organize your many feeds. You can even add your own feeds. Plus there’s a meta-tab that will take you to Times Topics, taking them from their undeserved obscurity.

It’s not perfect, even at first glance. The feeds only show headlines, not any of the text. It doesn’t input or output OPML. The feed of the NYTimes columnists only shows the title of their posts, not the names of the authors. There’s still no way to comment on the articles, not even a thumbs up or down. The articles don’t link to blog posts about them.

Nevertheless, the decision to allow us to aggregate other sources on a page at the nytimes.com domain is a big symbolic deal. [Tags: nytimes media blogs newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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A couple of days ago, my friend Francois Gossieaux (whose name in my address book is marked with a big “THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING”) interviewed me (phoninar format) for his marketing group called MarketHum. The mp3 is here. [Tags: marketing cluetrain francois_gossieaux markethum]

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The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation awards a $10,000 scholarship to some lucky and worthy US college blogger. Get the details here. (Thanks to danah for the link.) [Tags: blogging scholarships]

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From Dotnaught via slashdot:

“The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report (PDF) that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy than copyright industries contribute. “Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.”, said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.”

It’s the sort of report that: a) shows that economics is to the right of statistics in the chain that begins with “lies, damn lies…” b) I choose to believe. (Note: I recognize I lack competency to actually evaluate the report.) [Tags: fair_use copyright ]

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John Edwards has bought air time to respond to Pres. Bush tonight. (Disclosure: I advise (for free) the campaign on Net policy.)

I don’t envy any of the candidates. There’s no way forward and no way backward. It’s what we call a “quagmire.” Most of the candidates — Biden excepted — have provided process plans, not actual pictures of what the country should and could look like. I don’t want to hear that we’ll involve the countries that have a stake in Iraq’s future, even though I think that’s important to do. I want to hear that Iraq is going to end up as three federated regions and here’s how they’re going to split the oil revenues, and here’s how we’re going to prevent a war when one of the sub-nations gets greedy…or whatever. I want a plan with a vision, not a plan with a process to get to a vision.

I am, of course, asking too much. That’s how badly the Bush regime has screwed up. And how many more Americans and Iraqis will die for it? [Tags: iraq politics john_edwards]

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W. David Stephenson has created a word cloud of the latest bin Laden video. Interesting… [Tags: osama_bin_laden w_david_stephenson everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations ]

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The IBM Center for the Business of Government has issued a report called “The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0” by Donald Wyld at Southeastern Louisiana University. It’s a nicely done 70-page report, although only the first thirty pages are really on the topic announced in the title. The rest is a more generic backgrounder on blogging.

(Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.)

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Just a generic whine: The report is a PDF. Why oh why? Is there a format more hostile to on-screen reading?* This corporate infatuation with PDF is one of the great Not Getting It’s of the age.

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*Yes, there are formats more hostile. Still, PDF is usually a poor choice for reading on a screen. [Tags: blogging e-government ibm pdf]

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Bradsucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, provided the inspirational background while William Gibson was writing his latest novel….

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From TechPresident’s indispensible Daily Digest, compiled by Joshua Levy:

…Wired’s ever-diligent Sarah Lai Stirland reports that “Yahoo has decided not to support citizen remixing of the footage — reducing the once-bold experiment to little more than a fancy online version of an on-demand cable television offering.” Yahoo had originally planned to upload the raw footage from the debate to its Jumpcut service for citizens to use in their mashups. But now a spokesman told Stirland that Yahoo will only let participants choose what candidates they want to hear from, without the ability to mashup actual footage. “Bloggers will be able to embed the video into their sites, YouTube-style, but will have no easy way to repurpose it,” writes Stirland. Those who want to create mashups won’t be able to use the simple Jumpcut service, and will instead be forced to download individual videos and use desktop video-editing software. Not nearly as fun.

[Tags: politics yahoo mashups everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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According to a survey of Korean bloggers done by Edelman Korea (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, which is how I heard about this study), the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is “To create a record of my thoughts.” Only 1.2% blog “To raise visibility as an authority in my field.” This compares with 34% of American bloggers blogging to raise their visibility as authorities and 32% blogging to create a record of their thoughts. [Tags: korea blogging blogosphere edelman]

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“Should we be telling the American people we will be there five, seven, 10 years?” Biden asked.

Crocker didn’t answer, arguing that it wasn’t possible to know what the situation would be next summer.

“In the past we have set expectations that cannot be met,” Crocker said. [LA Times]

Ryan Crocker is an ambassador. David Petraeus is a general in the Army. They owe us the truth. Of course they do. Yet, when they are asked one of the most basic questions, they refuse to answer. They pretend the Senators are asking for a precise date. They are afraid they’ll be wrong.

The ambassador and the general may not know if it’s going to take 8.25 years or 8.5 years, but they know it’s going to take more than two. They must have some plan, some idea, some conjecture. We are sophisticated enough to understand what they mean if they were to say, “Of course, there can be no certainty about this, and events may intervene, but the earliest I can see Iraq becoming stable enough for all but a maintenance force to leave is ____.”

Two years? Ten years? Five years? Twenty years? Our experts and our leaders owe us an answer. How can we decide if we should stay the course if we’re not being told to expect the course to be a 100 yard dash, a 5K run, or a double marathon with a triathalon at the end?

This lack of candor ought not be acceptable to us, much less the norm. [Tags: politics iraq petraeus]

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Peter Galison is a university professor of physics at Harvard. He’s giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, getting things wrong, etc.]

Positivists tried to ground knowledge in an accumulation of observations, with a minimum of theory, Prof. Galison says. Science would come in the form of little bricks. The result would be “out of the reach of metaphysical theories.” Observation-based science would get better over time.

After WWII, via Thomas Kuhn and others, there was a rebellion against the positivist view. Theory comes first, they said. Science was so framed by theory that what counted as valid observation was dictated by the framework of theory. There is no neutral observation and there’s no raw perception outside of the framing provided by our theories. Various theories therefore were not continuous (as for the positivists) but were ships passing in the night…at least according to this point of view.

Example: The positivists saw special relativity as the capstone of a continuum of observation-based theories, while the Kuhnians think Einstein overthrew his predecessors and created a new whole.

Prof. Galison looks at the rhythms of the rise of theories. There are breaks in the strands of experiment, theory and instrument but the breaks don’t occur at the same time. And that’s to be expected because new instrumentation takes a while to yield new experiments and theories.

Doesn’t this just make the Kuhnian predicament worse? Now there are three strands with discontinuities, not just the strand of theort. “How do subcultures of science coordinate? What is shared between experimentalists and theorists, or between instrument makes and theorests…or between a subculture like instrument making and the wider technical world?” When a string theorist want to talk to a biochemist, do they have to engage in radical translation as posited by the anti-positivists? No, it’s more like the pidgins, jargons and creoles that build up at the real, “thick boundaries” between the natural languages. Prof. Galison wants to use linguistic anthropology to see how scientific disciplines talk. He calls the areas where these inter-languages are built up “trading zones.”

(There are no pure fields, he says. Physics, for example, contains elements of craft, math, experimentation, Plato…)

He looks at the growth and change of language, its local connections to people and places, and its contextuality within the wider world. E.g., Einstein had the idea that time is nothing but properly coordinated clocks. Poincare in 1898 had to figure out how to synchronize clocks so he could figure out the longitude of places around the world. He used this to talk philosophically about what simultaneity means. In 1900, he saw that simultaneity existed in the intersection of philosophy of time, technology of time synchronization, and the electrodynamics of moving bodies. New trading zones are emerging: Nanotech (surface chem, elec eng, atomic phyics…), string theory (geometers, field theories), simulations (computer science, stat, viz display). Each of these have had to develop jargon, pidgin and then a creole.

Of course these fields are collaborative. The question is how they’re able to. We should dig in to understand the shared techniques, theoretical notions, and instrumentation, and how they relate in the various intersecting fields. What exactly is the coordinative project, how does it change over time, and what does that tell us about the local knowledges?

Q: (ethanz) To what extent have people looked at languages between the engineering and business communities?
A: There’s been a little work. It’s a very important area for research. You can see the influence even in the architecture. When a lab is built, it reflects where ideas sit in the world. Does the lab resemble a church? A factory? Is it a place to bring VC’s? “VC’s don’t expect to go to PS 101 circa 1956. That’s not who they expect you to be.”

Q: (eric von hippel): When engineers talk to others, there’s often someone translating. What are the general principles?
A: There may not be a generic solution to this problem. In the coordinative process, what is characteristically coming from the different groups. E.g., in the development of radar, the engineers taught the physicists to look at the problem as that of providing a black box with voltage in and voltage out. So, look at what’s relevant to the exchange — part of it is knowing what to ignore.

A: (halley suitt) If two disciplines like biology and chemistry create a whole new set
of words to describe biochemistry, per your example, is the number of
new words in a new field — for instance all the Net jargon bursting
forth — predictive of the importance of that new field?
A: Boundaries are always thick. “In these thick regions of exchange, a lot of the vocabularies produced by these individual fields get thrown out. There’s a stripping away.”

Q: (judith donath) In a consulting company, there’s a different type of cooperation — it’s very competitive. They’re trying to use a new language to convince the clients that they have something unique to offer. It’s more about jockeying for leadership than cooperating. It’s intellectual scent-marking
A: Yes, complexification can sometimes be obfuscation. Cooperation and competition are closer together than we often think. Freud once said “Ambivalence is the basic emotion.” I’m trying to move away from an intentional account.

Q: (me) Do these intersections simplify the concepts? Do the participants translate back into their own terms? Do the translations change the theoretical understanding of each of the fields?
A: There’s a difference between simplification and regularization. We know how to talk differently to different people. The regularization doesn’t mean that you’re simplifying the ideas. When two famous physicists wrote a book on physics, they wrote a second volume for experimenters. All sorts of intra-theoretical connections were dropped out, but the calculations got more complicated. This was more regular but also more complex. So, is it simplification? Simple is not a simple concept. The “outspeak” becomes regularized. And does it feed back into the constitutive fields? Yes. And that’s why interests me most. It’s not that physics founds everything. The radar story is an example where the engineers taught the physicists. The fact of the coordinative activity begins to backform the science. I think that happens all the time, and it’s really important. The top down picture not only is bad business, but it keeps you from learning things.

Q: (wendy seltzer) Attorneys are called on to speak many disciplinary languages. What’s the role of formal education in differrent disciplines as opposed to learning on the job? Should law firms hire biochemists to talk to biochemists. Others hire generally interested people. I think the generally interested people are going to better at explaining it to a judge, etc.
A: People often think that’s what wanted in a book about science is to make it stupider. That seems to me to be empirically wrong. Pedagogically, we need to develop ways to speak about technical-scientific ideas that are not weighed down by jargon and don’t require prior knowledge, but are cognizant of the ability of people to deal with complex concepts. If you go to an art museum, it’s designed for adults. If you go to a science museum, it’s designed for children. You don’t have to write in one-syllable words and assume the audience wants to climb on the exhibit. [You go, Dr. Pete!]

Q: (john palfrey) People argue that locking up IP discourages research. Others disagree.
A: The idea of individual development is mythopoeic, although our institutions try to recuperate it, including the Nobel Prize. It’s trying to get back to an Edenic past, but it’s like chasing the sunset. In science and engineering, innovation always have aspects of collectivity. Patent lawyers sometimes want the physicists to do work they don’t want to do, patenting every variation on an innovation. Sometimes, though, patents can provide an incentive, and maybe makes us less interested in the classical ontological, philosophical questions. Physicists are thinking more like engineers. Patents and IP play a very complicated role in the changing ethos between science and technology. [Tags: berkman peter_galison science linguistics philosophy ]

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