Debatepedia wants to collect the best arguments pro and con for issues that matter. It’s not a place for people to shout at each other. On the contrary, it aims at assembling reasoned arguments.

It’s a noble idea. I don’t know if it’ll catch on, of course, but I do like the way the Web is shortening the MTBNI (mean time between noble ideas). [Tags: debatepedia wikis debates reasoning everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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There’s a good article by Ivar Ekman in the NY Times about the meaning of Google’s purchase of Jaiku. Relying heavily on Tim O’Reilly and Chris Messina (two good people to rely heavily on), the article says it’s all about expanding the services Google can provide for one’s presence.

So, here’s the story so far. Computers are invented. They’re all about bits, data and information that reduce experience to what can be managed by digital processors. PC’s are invented. They are about making us big-brained. The Web is invented to make the Internet usable. The Web is about creating a new type of public in which we can connect with one another in ways we’re still inventing. Our presence thus goes from being a reduction to holes in punch cards to being rich, open-ended and fully socially shaped and defined. But, so long as we access the connected net through a computer, it is a place we visit. As it becomes something we carry with us everywhere, it swallows us whole. Our presence in this world becomes constant, intertwingled with the real world, and connected in ways that will emerge from constancy and intertwingling.

From data to connected, ubiquitous presence. Quite a trip. [Tags: jaiku google presence mobiles ]

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Scott Kirsner has a terrific post about why trying to control PR can hurt PR. After arguing with a film company about its policy of requiring a password to log into the PR site, Scott actually went through the process of trying to get a password. It happened at postal speeds. Making it hard for people to talk about your film is probably not the best way to market your film. [Tags: pr scott_kirsner marketing cluetrain ]

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Two members of the Bush cabinet have blogs: Mike Leavitt of Health and Human Services and Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security.

And that concludes this month’s Say Something Nice about the Bush Administration feature. [Tags: blogs mike_leavitt michael_chertoff ]

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If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries books_everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Here’s Alan Watts talking to IBM (1 2), probably in the early 1970s, although I’m just guessing. Very Alan Wattsian, very Sixties yet contemporary, and very enjoyable. Here’s a bite:

“But nature itself is clouds, is water, is the outline of continents, is mountains, is bilogical existences. And all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance, because we want to figure it out.”

(Thanks to Steven Kruyswijk for the link.) [Tags: alan_watts everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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There’s no nice way to put this. Last night I won the “Mover and Shaker” of the year award from the Mass Technology Leadership Council. Apparently, my three summers at Macarena camp have paid off.

But seriously, thank you, MTLC! [Tags: mtlc ]

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Loic Le Meur’s startup, Seesmic, seems to be off to a twittering, buzzing start. Mike Arrington likes it. It’s in a closed alpha, with 150 people in it, and I haven’t seen it, but you seem to be able to record and post videos, with some stuff to make it easy to find videos. Arrington talks about it as a video twitter.

Loic (who is a friend) is recording a video a day, marking the progress of the company’s launch. Overall, this is some fine Web marketing. [Tags: seesmic marketing]

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The copyright cartel has decided how they want us to play. According to Reuters:

The companies agreed to use technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content uploaded by Web users and to block any pirated material before it is publicly accessible.

Yeah, well that sucks. Will their fingerprinting technology be able to tell that I’m posting 15 seconds of Bill O’Reilly as part of a mock news report to make fun of him? That’s Fair Use. Technology can’t tell Fair Use from infringement. The copyright cartel’s idea would squeeze the leeway out of the system that allows culture to advance.

Google’s idea with YouTube is a lot better. Copyright holders would register their stuff so that Google can fingerprint it. If I then post the fingerprinted clip of O’Reilly, the copyright holder is notified (actually, Google says they’ll have a tool to identify infringers, so I don’t know if they get actively notified) and is given the option of asking Google to remove the clip or keep it up and get ad revenues from it. If the copyright holder has Google take my clip down, I’m notified and can counter-notify. (This is much like the DMCA, but it’s not the DMCA.) Google’s lawyers will then adjudicate the claim. If it’s not covered by Fair Use, the clip comes down. If they think it is, it stays up.

This beats the cartel’s plan by a mile. Actually, by three miles:

Mile 1: Material is not preemptively blocked from being published. Google thus allows for the possibility of Fair Use.

Mile 2: I have a right of appeal, so to speak, to Google’s lawyers.

Mile 3: Google has provided copyright holders with a damn good reason to allow people to post copyrighted material — the holder not only gets the mind share that comes from letting your material be spread, they also get cold hard cash via ad revenues.

Note, please, that IANAL. If I’m misunderstanding how either the cartel or Google plan works, lets me know. But, as I understand it, Google’s plan is far more aligned with our Founders’ intentions than the piratical cartel’s plan is. [Tags: copyright google copyleft ]

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Dave Winer has come up with a clever way of reslicing the NY Times. Not only does it group articles by keyword, the layout creates a histogram of the topics. [Tags: dave_winer ny_times nytimes everything_is_miscellaneous media metadata ]

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From Andy Carvin’s blog:

Move over YouTube debates, now for something meatier! A coalition of blogs and news organizations is using Web 2.0 tools to create another exciting experiment in interactive presidential debates. It might even be a chance for your students to pose the perfect question to them.

This week, techpresident.com teamed up with the New York Times, MSNBC and a whole slew of blogs to launch 10Questions.com, an online presidential debate that’s a fascinating mix of video blogging, tagging and user-generated content. Joanne Colan, My colleague at the video blog Rocketboom put together this video to explain how it works:

Andy also provides a clear text-based explanation if you don’t want to watch the video.

Here’s my question:

[Tags: politics video techpresident andy_carvin edemocracy ]

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After years to talking about our move to “good enough” information, I’m just a little late to learning that Herbert Simon coined a term for this phenomenon in 1957. Yes, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of “satisficing.”

I found this via a very interesting blog post at Just Communicate by a knowledge management grad student who, in the course of discussing the wisdom of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap article, also points to a post by Steven Bell at the Association of College & Research Libraries blog, on using social sites to move good enough research beyond good enough. [Tags: satisfice herbert_simon everything_is_miscellaneous cory_doctorow just_communicate ]

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Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful. [Tags: wesch everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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You know what’s not helpful? A bill from AT&T that spreads across 56 pages of tiny print the information that explains why my bill is twice as high this month as usual.

You know, if they organized their information in a useful way (which is actually what my sense of the miscellaneous is about), I might even be able to tell that I should up my plan and pay AT&T more money every month. So, how about fewer lists of data — I don’t really need to know about each and every text message our children send — and perhaps some notifications of where my usage has swerved off the norm?

Who designs these bills? Squirrels? [Tags: information_architecture, whines]

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Oliver Goodenough, a fellow at the Berkman Center, is leading a lunchtime discussion on the topic “Modeling Cooperation for First and Second Lives: Suggesting a General Case.” [As always, I'm live blogging, typing quickly, missing some points, paraphrasing throughout, getting some things wrong. Sorry. But you can always see the presentation itself at Media Berkman. (This talk was particularly over my head, as you'll see.)] [The paper is available here.]

Oliver says: Cooperation is “a key element of our existence.” Economically, biologically, we are cooperative. But we haven’t understood it well. And neoclassical economics assumes that cooperation is easy (e.g., contracts) and that it’s impossible (the “rational actor” model). And biology’s “selfish gene” assumes that we’re selfish.

“Outcomes that vary from Nash equilibriums have not been well studied.” “Many of the opportunities for cooperation come in defection-prone contributions.” E.g., I can offer to pay you, get the goods, and then not pay you. “Cooperation is likely to occur in circumstances where it is the dominant game strategy.” We’re not stuck in bad games. “We can choose and shape the games we want to play in.” The Mechanism Design approach (its creators just won the Nobel) lets us evolve the game. We can cooperate in the design of the mechanism we’re building. We can have deals and create institutions.

The mechanism design toolkit for constructing institutions and mechanisms includes reciprocity, hierarchy, partnership, contract, property, fairness… And these mechanisms can be located in various institutions and mechanisms, e.g., dual key lock box, genes, psychological values, law, culture, code…

Examples of mechanism design: A Coke machine in a college dormitory is made reliable to the Coke company via physical armor. It is made reliable to the buyer via Coke’s reputation, the big sign, the history of transactions. eBay has a different set of mechanisms. YouTube is making it possible for copyright owners to give permission for the posting of their material in return for advertising revenues from those postings. These are all mechanisms.

So, we are making progress in understand cooperation. Some of the progress is coming from outside of economics.

Q: How about non-monetized projects like Wikipedia?
A: There are lots of motivations other than money.
A: [andrew] There’s a literature on why people contribute to open source software.

Q:(wendy) What about DRM? It is an institution written in code to keep us from “misusing” copyright works. But we are not free to refuse it.
A: Individuality rationality says that we don’t accept the best deal we could design, but we take the deal that’s the best we can get. Between the quicksand and Nirvana of cooperation is a continuum. We could even look at politics as the renegotiation of distribution rules.

Q: (doc) What about generosity?
A: That would be in the realm of my psychology of values. One wants to avoid becoming mechanistic about human attributes. E.g., love plays a highly evolved biological role, but it’s also splendid. Generosity is either a gift from above, or it is the result of material processes that we can understand. If the latter, we should try to understand it.

Q: (corinna) The more close knit the network, the more likely you are to cooperate. How do you transfer this to the digital world where you’re unlikely to know the person directly, e.g., eBay.
A: When you’re designing digital mechanisms such as eBay, you’re combining a reputation system, a repeat transaction history, network reputation, access to Paypal, a trusted intermediary, etc. These are mechanisms.

(gene) If you were doing the mechanism design for record companies, what might be a mechanism that would work?
A: The record company was a mechanism. The technology is destroying their role as middle broker. They’re desperately hanging onto a IP position to maintain what was a market position?
Q: So, would your model suggest that Radiohead will succeed?
A: That asks what mechanisms a band can use…

Q: (me) What domain is this theory in? What do we have to stop believing to start believing this?
A: Economists will tell you they explore behavior. Biology and psychology also explore behavior. The most serious formalizations in economics and biology don’t get how this works. Now institutional and game theoretical economists have advanced this. People like Martin Nowack (sp?) are undoing the blockages in biology. My one contribution is perhaps to turn it around to mechanism design and see that there’s a general case there.

Q: How does your theory view law? Is it something that can bring about good outcomes for everyone? Or does it always involve hard political questions?
A: In a mechanism structure, there are people who getter better or worse deals. Is being part of that mechanism individually rational is a different question than “Would I redesign the game if given the opportunity.”

Q: You sound a bit like early Douglas North: Institutions fix the problem. I think the really new stuff in what you say has to do with the technology piece. Tech can constrain where you put the mechanism.
A: I have taken a bunch of ideas from North, but he doesn’t take the next step to mechanism design. The most I’m doing is putting the pieces together…

Q: (gene) Is it the monetization that undermines cooperative systems or the rational counting of it. E.g., at eBay, you can look beyond the numbers to see what kind of seller you are.
A: There’s a literature on impersonal vs. personal exchange. One of the problems in designing big markets is whether you want to strip away all the personal signals.

Q: (jp) You probably have most of us convinced of your critique of classical economics. We’ve all seen lots of motivations online. What is it about the digitally mediated environment that causes people to act differently? What are the strands you could pull together about what makes the digital world differently? Also, what is the institution you want to build? What problem are you trying to solve?
A: I take these as challenges. I’m working on the business instance. I’m trying to figure out how a constraint-space within which we could use the techniques of contracts combined with software to create a space where people can design something better. Can I help create a legal framework in a state that is friendly to virtual businesses?
Q: (jp) The contracts in the Web 2.0 space are a house of cards. E.g., 5,000 build FaceBook apps without good contracts underneath them. Your work could help in such cases.
A: Emergent is great when it works, but hierarchy has its place, too. [Tags: oliover+goodenough economics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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It might be sorta interesting to aggregate when people last saw a presentation that used an overhead projector (acetates, the heady smell of marker…) and in what domain.

And while I’m being trivial, we need a word for the sense that you keep getting the same captcha codes (the “Please type in this code so we know you’re a human” codes). [Tags: crowdsourcing overheads technology ]

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Gleen Greenwald has a great article at Salon on the indistinguishability of the telecommunications industry and the government. [Tags: ]

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I have a friend who is in charge of managing the peer review process at some serious scientific journals. It’s a tough job requiring a set of skills that includes dealing with sometimes ornery people, managing multiple schedules, and expertise in the fields in which she works. She makes a good case for peer review, and for the journals that rely on it. Peer review has value and costs money, she says. So, journals have to charge fees to support the peer review process, and they have to hold onto the rights at least long enough to recover their costs.

I recognize the value of peer review. It not only directs our attention to worthwhile research, it is part of an editorial process that improves articles before they’re published. But peer review doesn’t scale. There’s so much research being done. A lot of it is good work but isn’t important enough to merit the investment in a traditional peer review process (including the failed hypotheses that we were taught in school were not failures at all). Peer review is valuable, but it’s a choke point required because traditional publishing’s neck is so thin. And it may — may! — turn out that the combination of crowds and quirky individuals can replace peer review’s value. Of course, we’d want the crowd to consist of people with some standing for evaluating the research. And we’d want to be sure that the quirky individuals who buck the crowd are not delusional psychotics. I of course don’t know what the world will look like (or what it does look like, when you come down to it), but I suspect that we’re going to have a mixed research ecology, with peer reviewed journals making recommendations we trust highly, and a wide variety of other ways of finding the research that matters to us. With PLoS and PLoS, and arXiv, and Nature’s version of arXiv, and all the rest of it, we’re already well on the way to filling the important niches in this new knowledge ecology.

In fact, peer review generally establishes two characteristics of a piece of work: It was performed properly and it is important enough to merit throwing some ink at it. Those are important criteria, but hardly the only ones. “This hastily performed work uses a flawed methodology but turns up an interesting fact worth considering” is the type of criterion researchers use when recommending articles to one another. There’s value there, and with research that has good data that it misanalyzes, research that is promising but incomplete, research that inadvertently demonstrates a flaw in some lab equipment, etc. etc. etc. And, as always, the value is in the long tail of et ceteras. [Tags: peer_review open_access science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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J. Kristin Ament has been writing sarcastic recaps of episodes of the AMC show “Mad Men.” They’re hilarious. For example, here is one from the week before last (the one with the erotic washing machine).

I’ve been enjoying Mad Men, but find myself holding back from utter and complete enthusiasm because, I think, there’s something too mannered about it. It’s still in thrall of its premise. But there’s so much to like: The acting is terrific, the writing is pointed and funny, the sociology is exhilirating if a bit overdone, the art direction is fantastic, I care about the characters. It’s on its way to becoming an unreservedly great show in its second season, especially if the writers can stay away from the big, melodramatic arcs; the writing is better in the details than in the big strokes. IMO, of course. [Tags: mad_men j_kristin_ament humor tv]

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I’m just back from the Veerstichting symposium in Leiden, the Netherlands. I know I’ve made several references to it i (1 2) without explaining what it is. Now that I’ve been there, I have some idea.

It’s an annual two-day conference, by the Dutch and for the Dutch, that’s been around for about 25 years. About 600 people attend, half of them students. They emphasize the presence of students. For example, at one of the dinners, you’re seated carefully at the long tables in a student-nonstudent sequence. And each speaker is assigned a student host who stays with you throughout the two days.

The program itself consists of a series of thirty-minute presentations (20 mins of talk, ten of Q and A) by an eclectic set of speakers. This year, they included a former high official of the UN who talked about the nature of Indian identity, the coach of the winning Dutch women’s hockey team, a guy who writes about why management sucks, a leading biologist explaining the evolutionary basis of herd behavior, Naomi Klein on “shock therapy economics,” the head of the Rwandan courts punishing those who participated in genocide, and the star of a popular sex-and-drugs interview show on TV. The attendees seemed to favor senior business folks, government officials, and the occasional Queen of the Netherlands. (The Queen brushed by me on her way to talk with one of the speakers. I was this close to the back of her head!)

Unlike most American conferences, Veerstichting incorporates cultural events. For example, to kick off the afternoon session, there was a ten-minute modern dance routine, and there was a longer dance about freedom or something — all I know for sure is that the dancer pulled the head off of a large stuffed sheep — where Americans might have had an after-dinner speaker. Also, there’s much more drinking than at American events, not even counting the party at the student union where I lost my voice and 45% of my senses in a large packed room where the beer flowed like good, cheap beer.

The venue itself is gorgeous. It was held in a cathedral that now is a public space. And Leiden itself is a snow-globe version of Amsterdam. My student host Ben Zevenberger, who is studying IP and Net law, took me on a walking tour. The architecture is highly reminiscent of Amsterdam, but lowered a few stories, while the streets are (or seem) wider. Bicycles rule the streets, and cars are the interlopers. What a beautiful place.

And here’s one more way it’s beautiful. At a speakers dinner, I sat next to a senior business guy who was also one of the event’s sponsors. He told me that after Katrina hit, he spoke with the manager of his company’s facility in New Orleans. It had been destroyed. “But don’t worry,” the manager said, “We’ve already stopped the payroll, since obviously no one’s coming in.” The Dutch executive was appalled. “Pay them twice their normal salaries. They need our help!” The Dutch sense of social obligation — the “we’re in this together” attitude — is remarkable, but really only what it should be.

The event itself is a bit like PopTech or TED in its eclecticism. Add to that the focus on students, the beauty of the surroundings, and the fact that you get to spend time among the Dutch, and you have yourself a unique event.

I asked Ben if the Dutch were ok with having English-speakers call their country “Holland” instead of “The Netherlands.” It’s fine, he said, adding that the Dutch call it “Holland” (although I thought Holland was a region of the Netherlands). Since “nether” has unfortunate connotations in English (we can just stick with the “nether world” if you want), I was happy to have permission to refer to the country as “Holland.”

And while we’re on the topic, if it’s ok to call the country “Holland,” can we call the Dutch the “Hollish”?

PS: Here’s some info on the various terms.

[Tags: veerstichting holland leiden ]

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David Pogue has a piece about TiVo’s support of the National Hockey League’s use of DRM. I don’t care about hockey (unless that’s the sport the Red Sox play, since residents of Boston are apparently legally required to insert “Go Sox!!!!!” into everything they write), but I do care about handing over to my machines the power to override Fair Use and fair use.

So, after about two years of trying, I sure wish I could get my open source MythTV to work :( [Tags: drm tivo nhl mythtv copyright ]

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Chris Locke, in a mailing to his EGR mailing list, describes his discovery of Caldinoro, a dolt who reviews at Amazon, except he (possibly she) is having the last laugh. Take a look at some of the reviews.

I’ll just give you one tidbit, because it appeals to the miscellaneous side of me. Chris points out that Caldinoro has three Amazon ListMania lists:

1. Hamburger-related books
2. Non-hamburger-related books; and

3. More non-hambuger-related books

[Tags: chris_locke caldinoro amazon reviews humor everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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if you love the Internet and want to keep it free, I think the Democratic candidate with the best Internet policy ies is John Edwards (Disclosure: I am an unpaid consultant on Internet policy to the Edwards campaign). He’s got progressive positions on Net Neutrality, the 700MHz auction, amd broadband access. The guy who just won an Oscar for best Nobel Peace Prize and Elizabeth Edwards would also be great Net candidates.

And here’s Matt Stoller on Hillary as a Net candidate:

… Here’s Clinton’s ‘Innovation Agenda‘ . Notice what’s missing? That’s right, net neutrality.
And here’s a tip as to what she’s really planning.

Establish a national broadband strategy called Connect America

Clinton is citing a program called Connect Kentucky as a national model for expanding broadband penetration. Connect Kentucky, which is embraced by the telcos as a way of warding off net neutrality and a real internet policy, defines broadband as 256k, which is about 500 times slower than what’s in Japan…

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Jeremy Wagstaff on Jiglu for auto-tagging your blog and its archive…

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I’m at the Veerstichting conference in charming, delightful, beautiful Leiden..

I had to surrender my laptop to the AV squad — I would have been the only one taking notes on one anyway — so I could only scribble a few notes on a piece of paper, and even then I only heard the first two speakers all the way through.

Jan Willem Duyvendak is the author of the book on human herds and identity. Since the theme of the conference is the power of the herd, he was a natural beginning. He talked about the Dutch believe that they are a diverse society when in fact there is much commonality among them. “We are a herd of individualists,” he said. He spoke in the context of the current Dutch debate over immigration and national identity.

Next, Shashi Tharoor, an author and once high enough at the UN to be consider for the secretary general post, gave a beautiful and delightful talk about the Indian national identity. After listing some of that country’s amazing diversity (23 official languages, for example), he said “The singular thing about India is you can only talk about it in the plural.” Indian national identity, he says, works in practice but could not work in theory. It is a nationalism of the idea that people can disagree, so long as they agree on the ground rules.

Domitila Mukantaganzwa, the Executive Secretary of National Service of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, went through in some detail the process of trying almost 900,000 people for crimes of genocide. The magnitude of the legal process implicitly showed the extent of the suffering. She was asked why the South African peace and reconciliation process forgave those who acknowledged their crimes, while the Rwandans are punishing those convicted. She said the severity of the crimes were different. And the Rwandans, she said, need to develop a culture of accountability. The survivors need to see the guilty punished. They also need, she says, to have the guilty tell them where they committed their crimes so parents can find and bury their children with dignity. This is a story beyond comment.

Finally, after rewriting and rewriting the talk I’d prepared on the challenge of the implicit in forming groups (summarized here), I at the last moment decided not to switch. So I gave the one on the implicit. I have no idea how it went over. [Tags: veerstichting crowds india rwanda leiden ]

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Berkman and StopBadware.org, sponsored by Google, are having a contest. Create a YouTube that explains cookies and win yourself $5,000. And before you waste your time getting out the flour and the cookie cutters, be sure to read the rules. [Tags: cookies videos contests youtubes berkman stopbadware.org ]

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I’ve been working hard on a new presentation, to be given tomorrow at the Veerstichting conference in Leiden, in the Netherlands. After tonight’s speakers dinner, I’m thinking maybe the last half (including the Wikipedia portions) of my Everything is Miscellaneous talk would be more suitable. I don’t what I’ll decide.

Here’s the gist of the new talk. I’m going to be sketchy, because I have to go to sleep very soon, but mainly because there’s something missing at the talk’s core. The title is something like “The Challenge of the Implicit.” It’s a 20-minute talk.

The Web is best understood as a social realm. But groups (vs. mere groupings) become real when people know more about one another than they can say. For example, I can’t tell you much of what I know about my kids. And when you can express a character in just a phrase, the character’s been badly written. What makes a group a group is not the lines among the people, but what is unsaid and can’t ever be said fully

But computers are monsters of the explicit. That’s why in the 1950s they symbolized the mechanizing of relationships. From the beginning, information itself was invented to manage, and thus reduce, complex relationships. Now this poorly defined word (few use it in Shannon’s sense) has become an assumed part of how we know our world.We think we’re constantly emitting info. E.g., a street scene used to be a river with eddies of public and private. Now it’s all info. This has enabled a switch in how we think of privacy, from that which we exclude from the record, to what the authorities are not allowed to pay attention to in the record that now includes everything.

The Web is a disruption in this informationalization. It is built of links, which use language to contextualize relatioships. Links are the opposite of databased information: They enrich rather than reduce, are decentralized, personal, and fundamentally social in that they are written by one person for others to use.

Yet the Web is (in a sense) lousy at the social. It knows about links but not about people or groups. That’s why social networking sites are rising so quickly. They internalize the Web, providing the connective features we’re used to on the Net (email, IM, etc.).

While groups depend on the implicit, social networking sites start by asking for explicit info about our network and interests. But that’s ok because they so quickly transcend those sticks and twine. Real, messy social relations grow. Good!

But: (1) Making things explicit can be highly disruptive. Computers — and software designers — are not always good at this, especially since we don’t have good norms yet, and perhaps never will. (2) Much of what’s of value in the implicit was created without intending to. There are thus issues about how much we are entitled to make not just explicit but public. (3) The implicit is by its nature messy and connective. It always drags more into the light than it intended. It’s thus hard to keep the above issues separate and containable. (4) We have an obligation and an opportunity to increase and preserve the unspoken. Explicitly.

The end.

I’m thinking that this talk is not ready to be presented. Too bad. I’ve worked hard on it. I guess I’ll decide tomorrow morning. Sigh. [Tags: implicit sociality veerstichting ]

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I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. (Disclosure: Jyri is a conference buddy.)

It’ll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.

And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle. [Tags: jaiku twitter google blogging Jyri_Engeström everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is giving a Berkman lunch about the Media Tracker project. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, missing things, getting things wrong. You can always hear the entire talk at Media Berkman.]

In 1934, the Fed Communications Act was passed and the FCC was created. It got authority over radio and the Bell system. “So, for many years you had effectively two sides of the FCC: The wireless side and the wired side.” The past couple of decades has made that much messier. Drew’s group watches the FCC.

He shows the Media Tracker. Type in a zip code and it searches 5 million records and it shows the which media are available there, including TV radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. IT shows that for 94306, Clear Channel has 13 stations. Media Tracker provides three different views and lots and lots of detail, including type of license and parent company. And, of course, you can slice by media company as well, seeing not only how many outlets they own, but also how much they’ve donated to each political rep. Then you can click on a member of Congress to see all the contributions she’s received from individuals and companies in the media sector. (Here’s Google. Here’s Comcast.)

The Media Tracker is part of the Well Connected project which also includes blogs, investigative reports, and the telecom portal at Congresspedia.

Drew also talks about FCC Watch, still in beta. But the work they’ve done on the 700MHz auction gives a taste of what’s to come. They scrape the ex parte summaries every hour to see who’s lobbying which commissioners. (Frontline is the most active lobbyist on this issue, followed by the CTIA .) You can click all the way through to see the summary of a particular lobbyist’s phone calls to a commissioner. You can easily see who, say, Chairman Martin is meeting with.

Q: You’re familiar with Connect Kentucky…?
A: Connect Kentucky has gained a lot of traction in the past year, for some good reasons. It’s a state-led initiative, housed in a non-profit. It started out to get tech deployed in deprived communities. They connect data about broadband availability. It’d be good to also know about competitors, speeds, and prices. Drew would like to build a system for tracking all of this nationally.

Q: (ethanz) I’m dumbstruck to find out that companies are required to register every telephone call their lobbyists make. But what are the data sets that you can’t get? What are the crown jewels that should be available and aren’t?
A: 1. Broadband competition, speed, and price. 2. More detailed reporting about the Congressional lobbying. 3. Do that for the states as well . 4. Likewise for lobbying disclosure for international.

Q: (jpalfrey) We’ve been interested in a distributed app that you download onto your PC. The ONI is interested in this as a way of gathering data about which sites are being filtered, but you could do this for speed tests as well. It’d have three checkboxes: Check for malware, check for filtered sites, and check speeds.
A: eCorridors has a distributed speed test (using NDT, an open source network diagnostic tool) that does something similar.

Q: (doc) How about harnessing the power of the crowd?
A: We want to do that.

Q: (me) Has the ONI thought about having say, Google Tools include its reporting sw as an opt-in? It could also gather Dave’s data.
A: ONI has so far only aimed at “gold standard” data. But we have a project for developing this distributed software, which would provide useful data but not totally trustworthy.

Q: [missed it]
A: This is both a journalism effort and a citizen data effort.

A: Newspapers will be gone in 20 years. It’s time to play taps and move on. We have to think creatively and work collaboratively in some new ways. It has a bright future but a very different future.

Q: (jp) What difference is this info making?
A: It’s always hard to tell. The openness of the Internet is of the same value as the traditional values enshrined in our Constitution. [Tags: center_for_public_integrity media_tracker fcc mashups web2.0 fcc_watch connect_kentucky broadband 700MHz everything_is_miscellaneous net_neutrality ]

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Why oh why aren’t there tags in Google Calendar? Oh my sweet Jeebus, I want tags for events! I get so tired ot trying to find every birthday, every speech, every “maybe” event. In fact, I try to use those terms — embedded tags! — in the content itself just so I can find the events again. Please, oh great Google, give us, your unworthy supplicants, calendar tags!

Wordie started out as a joke – a site that was all tags and no content. Now it’s added tags. I have to run for a train, so I don’t have time to step into its infinite loop of metareference, but John McGrath explains it all here. [Tags: tags tagging folksonomy google_calendar wordie ]

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David Isenberg lays out a history of common carriage as part of an argument for Net Neutrality.

You should also note his quoting of Jim Hoffa on AT&T’s decision to censor messages it considers critical of AT&T. [Tags: david_isenberg net_neutrality at&t jim_hoffa free_speech ]

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I mean this seriously, not snarkily or rhetorically: Is there any reason why Blackwater “contractors” are not more properly termed “mercenaries”? [Tags: mercenaries blackwater]

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I started poking around at Madame Levy’s quilt gingerly. As luck would have it, the first link I followed was to Arcade Fire – Neon Bible live in an elevator. As I kept poking, I found more and more. As Frank Paynter, who pointed this site out to me puts it, this is curation. It is indeed curation as art. [Tags: madame_levy curation art everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The always-interesting Zack Exley is on the road scouting “the fourth Great Awakening,” in which grassroots Christians are discovering that Jesus was pretty damn progressive. His blog as he travels through the heartland is provocative and eye-opening (at least for this Northeastern Jew). As he writes in the about page:

This blog is a plea to the progressive movement, to take another look and get to know the diverse and complex world of evangelical Christianity in its own terms. Here you’ll find interviews, commentary, analysis and other dispatches from all over “Jesusland.” This tour will explore everything from the workings of the local church, to the evangelicals’ vibrant, decentralized national leadership training infrastructure to theological questions such as, “How in the world DO they read the Bible literally?” and “Do they really think I’m going to hell?”

[Tags: christianity progressives liberals politics zack_exley ]

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Berkman.TV has posted a video in which Wendy Seltzer and Angela Kang explain why the Harvard Coop was deliriously wrong when it used copyright to justify its kicking out a student for copying down book prices. [Tags: copyright berkman wendy_seltzer angela_kang publishing harvard harvard_coop ]

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I was supposed to be doing the closing keynote at the Ideas conference in NYC tomorrow — which looks like an excellent conference — but I’m in Day Two of a miserable sore throat, ear ache, head ache beat down. I had been hoping it was going to be a one day illness, but I woke up way worse than I felt yesterday.
So I’ve regretfully told the conference I’m not going to make it. I just can’t visualize dragging myself down to the train station and making the trip. I feel like, well, crap.

I hate doing this. And it’s probably not a genuine health issue…it’s not like if I travel, I’ll die. It’s just discomfort, and maybe a slightly longer recuperation although I’m not convinced that that’s the case. So maybe I should just suck it up and go to the train station. But, the thought of 3.5 hours of head rattling, even in the relative comfort of a train, fills me with anxiety.

So, I guess I’m not going. I’m sure the conference will be splendid without my closing comments. Think of it as my gift of more hallway time.

:(

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According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, “Unlock the Rock,” which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump’in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it’ll play that. If there’s an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it’ll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.

Interesting. It’d at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it’d be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data…. [Tags: james_vasile internet_radio everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center is giving a Berkman lunch. He’s going to talk about aspects of the Gnu Public License that people don’t generally talk about. He says he’s going to skip the part where he explains how great the GPL is, which he fully believes it is and focus instead on some problems with it. [As always, I'm blogging sloppily, missing stuff, mischaracterizing, etc.]

The Software Freedom Law Center is a pro bono, non-profit law firm for people who produce free software. It spent a year crafting a “really good license.” It’s a copyright license that gives others conditional permissions to use the software. The GPL is also a patent license, as of version 3.

What isn’t the GP? It’s not a social contract. It’s not the embodiment of an ethos. “It is not the constitution on which the software world is built.” It’s sometimes treated that way, but it’s really just a set of permissions. “There are people running around with images about what the GPL says that don’t match what’s in the license.” E.g., people think the GPL forbids the commercial use of free software, although it’s never said that. People insist on believing that. it does It will never be everything that people want it to be. That’s the price of having “one dominant license,” which, however, is good for interoperability.

Although the license isn’t perfect, it’s really good. “In fact, we’ve won.” The free software wave is not going to end. There are more projects every day, and they’re getting better and better. Businesses use free software not because they believe in the ideals of free software but simply because it’s efficient. But that means “we’ve invited into our community” stakeholders who don’t share our “starry-eyed ideals.” What do we do about starting a conversation about what we owe each other? What does the partnership actually mean on a day to day and long-term basis?

The GPL is also not a trademark license. Some large free software projects have their own brand managers. E.g., Gnome would like to let people use their foot symbol with some degree of freedom, so they’re writing their own trademark license. That’s not covered by the GPL.

Q: (wendy seltzer) Does the community need its own, special trademark law?
A: I often tell them they don’t need a trademark law; they need a trademark policy delineating what is ok and what is not. The GPL has habituated to thinking that licenses should tell them what’s right and wrong, as if a license were a good way to communicate with developers.

Q: (me) Didn’t that happen because the license precipitated the conversation and was the place where the details had to be worked out, as opposed to thinking that people wanted to read legal language?
A: Yes, but we shouldn’t move forward by working on the license. E.g., we need a discussion about trademark, but it shouldn’t happen within the framework of the discussion of the GPL.

The GPL is also not a document that reads itself. Version 3 has more pieces than 2, and the pieces interact in more complex ways. It’s tough for a layperson to read. The GPL four freedoms are useful but not enough.

The big benefit of the GPL was that it made it easier to make it compatible with, e.g., the Apache license and the Affero license. (Wikipedia on Affero: “…derived from the GNU General Public License with an additional section to cover use over a computer network.”)

Finally, there are the hard cases. ” E.g., DRM is complicated. “There will never be a system that allows you to authenticate a Britney Spears song that doesn’t also authenticate a client.” Some people wanted the GPL to prevent free software from having any DRM, but there were too many unintended consequences of doing so. It’s an interesting area we should watch.

Many of the above limitations are inherent in using legal documents to create documents.

Q: (wendy) The technology is the same to authenticate a game client and an authorized copy of a song, the game player can make a choice to be part of a network where no one can cheat, while the music purchaser hasn’t made that choice.
A: You could let people explicitly opt in rather than relying on the implicit acceptance of the terms of service. But trying to write that into a generally-applicable GPL would be extremely difficult. We thought about it.
Q: I just hate it when people say that there’s no difference between bank security and DRM because they really want DRM.
A: Oh, I agree. I am as bothered by DRM as Richard Stallman is. E.g., E-911 legislation forbids the owner of cellphone from disabling the auto-locater functionality. So, “can you deliver a GPL phone in the US without running afoul of E-911 legislation?
A: (wendy) The legislation says that device must be “robust” against user modification, which free software isn’t.

Q: (me) How do we have the conversation but not around the GPL? And where do we get a plain English version of the GPL so we can understand it?
A: Try here. And it’s not clear where the conversation could be held, and bringing all the voices to the table would be difficult. [Tags: james_vasile gpl gnu free_software fsf berkman ]

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Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) is one of those strong-voiced writers who makes a real difference in her domain. Now she is leaving the American Library Association’s TechSource blog — which she was instrumental in beginning — in order to follow her writerly instincts. Her last post is a message to librarians that usefully points them toward their fears. [Tags: karen_schneider libraries ala everything_is_miscellaneous]

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