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January 31, 2008
Debate chat (not any more)Wanna chat about the debate, realtime style? irc://irc.freenode.net/debatefest … LATER: We had a good time. Maybe next time I’ll post about this before the event. In any case, the chat room is now an ex-chat room, gone to meet its maker, joined the heavenly choir, having a kip, etc.
Categories: uncat Date: January 31st, 2008
Berkman shames and invitesThe Berkman Centers StopBadware.org today listed RealPlayer 10.5 as badware. And in almost the same breath, the Center today announced its 10th anniversary conference, May 15-16, at Harvard. It’ll be a splendid, wide-ranging conference followed by a gala party. You’re all invited. But not you, RealPlayer! You should go to your room and think about what you’ve done!
* * * Also at the busy, busy Berkman Center: The first installment of a guide to the law for citizen media creators. Why, you’ll learn enough to be able to sue yourself … and win!
Categories: digital culture Date: January 31st, 2008
TSA blogs, and the populace, disarmed of their 2″ Swiss Army knives, respondsKudos to the TSA — the airport security folks — for opening up a lively blog. As the first poster, Kip Hawley, says (and you can read about all the bloggers here):
And if there’s any evidence required that the public wants to engage, that very first post — a mere welcome message — has gotten over 300 comments so far.
Who’s Gore For?Why hasn’t Al Gore endorsed one of the candidates yet? Is he holding back because he thinks there’s still room in the race for him? PS: Ralph Nader Who?
Categories: politics Date: January 31st, 2008
That’s a ton of videoSays a Center for Media Research Brief:
Categories: media Date: January 31st, 2008
Free Public Wifi explainedDavid Pogue points to a TechBlog post that explains why we keep seeing “Free Public Wifi” listed on available wifi networks. No, it’s not a fraud. No, it’s not a hoax. Yes, it is maybe the stupidest Windows thing ever. As TechBlog says, it’s viral without being a virus. Or, maybe it’s a virus that is all symptom. In any case, I’m glad to have this clarified at last.
Categories: tech Date: January 31st, 2008
January 30, 2008
Thank you, John Edwards. (Go Obama!)CNN reports John Edwards is out. I’m saddened by this because I liked Edwards on the issues and themes — we need to be talking about class and poverty. The Democratic race was better for having him in it. And I’m proud that I had a chance to contribute a tiny, tiny bit towards his Internet policy. And I could tell you what my issues with Obama are — mainly about the inevitable collapse of a policy process that thinks it’s going to find shared “great American values” among people who really, really disagree. Between pro- and anti-Iraq war folks, the only shared American value is the belief that Britney Spears needs to take a rest. Nevertheless, I feel a sense of liberation now, because Obama touches me in a way that Edwards did not, and, btw, in way that Howard Dean did not. (It’s a different story when it comes to (1) Elizabeth Edwards, who I find truly charismatic and hope-giving, and (2) the Dean campaign, which was amazing.) I have to look back to being a high school kid handing out leaflets for Bobby Kennedy to find the same sense of hope that Obama inspires in me. In part, I think, it’s the pure youth of the candidate. My generation had its chance and produced Bill Clinton and He Who Needs Forgetting. Time for us to pass on the baton, as quickly as possibly. And, in part it’s the sense of common cause, common enthusiasm, and common hope across this country’s class and race lines. It’s awe-inspiring and oh so best-of-America to be out in streets dappled with so many colors. Then there’s this: With McCain the likely Republican candidate, it’ll be character vs. character. And in that matchup, Obama is by far the Democrats’ best choice. Go, Obama! And thank you so much, John and Elizabeth.
Categories: uncat Date: January 30th, 2008
January 29, 2008
Accidental journalismAs we we’ve continued to talk about citizen journalism and citizen media, I’ve come to think there may be a class of citizen journalism that could be an important part of the new ecosystem: Accidental journalism. Or possibly it should be called incidental journalism. Or may be accidental/incidental coverage. Anyway, the idea is that journalism may come to rely on coverage of events by citizens who are writing them up not to provide coverage but for their own more personal reasons. This has already happened at times. Will it become an important and semi-reliable part of the ecosystem? I dunno. Maybe.
Categories: digital culture, media Date: January 29th, 2008
Course beginsI’m too nervous to be able to blog about the course I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey, beyond saying that we had our first session yesterday, and there’s a course blog open to the students as posters and to anyone as a reader. (We didn’t have time yesterday to tell the students the URL, so none have posted there yet.) Well, I will say a couple more things: The title of the course is “The Web Difference,” and it’s about whether and how the Web is different, and what that means for law and policy. Also, JP is an awesome teacher. OMG. What the heck. Yesterday, after going through preliminaries and intros, JP led the class for half an hour in a discussion of a case in which awful things were said on a discussion board, yet the discussion board owner was not held liable. If those things had been said in a newspaper, the paper could have been sued. What’s the difference in the two situations and why might the law be different in them? I led a similarly-themed discussion, far more awkwardly, about whether friendship on the Web is “real” and how it differs from real world friendship.
Ads I didn’t get past the first independent clause ofFrom Computer Gaming World:
Categories: marketing Date: January 29th, 2008
January 28, 2008
The Google generation is illiterateThat’s the briefest summary of a very interesting report from University College London. A press release puts it this way:
Very interesting, and alarming. But it’s important to keep the scope in mind: This report is looking at the Internet as a library. Good scope but not the only one.
Categories: digital culture Date: January 28th, 2008
Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen”: Giving high school existentialism a bad nameWe saw Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning play, “Copenhagen,” last night. Disappointing. It’s about the mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Newark, NJ. (Nope. In Copenhagen. Just kidding. Haha.) The play goes over various “drafts” of the meeting, trying out possible explanations of why Heisenberg, a loyal German (or is he??), would seek out his former mentor, a half-Jewish Dane living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Heisenberg was the head of the German effort to create an atomic bomb (or was he??), and Bohr snuck out of Denmark and joined the Manhattan project (or did he?? … well, yes, he did). The play has some crackling good scenes as the two men fill us in on Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi effort. (Bohr’s wife is the third person in the play, but she’s just annoying, given to saying to the audience things like ‘And then: Silence.’ Embarrassing.) But it’s over-written and, worse, depends upon a stupid pun: Y’see, Heisenberg is famous for his Uncertainty Principle, and all of human understanding is also uncertain, so since both use the word “uncertainty,” they’ve got to be the same thing, right? So, let’s make a play about it. Yech. Say, I have an idea! Let’s write a play called “Croton” about Pythagoras. It will draw a dramatic parallel (so to speak) between Pythagoras’ theorom about right angles and his own uprightness. “It is all a matter of finding and living the right angle,” he will say. “After all, aren’t we all a hypoteneuse?” Or we could do one called “Strasbourg” about Louis Pasteur’s family life, because just as is his work confirmed germ theory — small bodies pass from one to another, changing everyone they touch — his wife and he pass their children back and forth, each time changed by that gentle touch. Also, he had an infectious laugh and a contagious enthusiasm. Or how’d you like to invest in this sure-fire winner: “Naugatuck.” It tells the story of Charles Goodyear, who discovered vulcanized rubber quite accidentally — or was it on purpose? — and who lived a “vulcanized” life because, well, um, you see, things happen sorta accidentally - or on purpose? - especially when we bump into fiery emotions that transform us into more rigid and yet more durable beings. Yeah, that’s it! And then: Silence.
Categories: entertainment, humor Date: January 28th, 2008
January 27, 2008
The FCC auction is coming ungluedHarold Feld, who understands this stuff as well as anyone and 150 times better than I do, is calling on the FCC to stop the current spectrum auction because of underhandedness in the killing of the bid by the Frontline group. Harold has more details here. And Dow Jones has a shorter version here. Harold also points to an op-ed by one of the Frontline members.
Categories: digital rights, net neutrality Date: January 27th, 2008
JP Rangaswami on the Net’s capillary actionI haven’t tried the software yet, but I like how they’re developing it:
Categories: blogs, digital culture, everythingIsMiscellaneous, social networks, web 2.0 Date: January 27th, 2008
January 26, 2008
Facebooking means something different depending on where you areRichard Sambrook of the BBC World Service has a fascinating post (from Dec 17, so I’m a little slow) about the meaning and effect of Facebook groups in different countries, focusing on the Middle East.
Fairplay casinosGov. Deval Patrick plans on funding necessary and humane projects in Massachusetts by licensing three casinos. I’m not crazy about that idea, in part because casinos stack the odds against customers. The house always wins. That’s unfair, even though casinos are transparent it. If we’re going to finance public programs on the backs of the desperate, we at least ought to give our local pigeons fair odds. So, why not require Massachusetts casinos to pay out at odds that factor in no cut for the house? If there’s a 1:38 chance your number will come up at the roulette table, your winning number would be paid at 38:1, not 36:1. Even without their edge (5.26% in roulette), the casinos would make money selling food, liquor, lodging, parking, pay-per-porn in-room tv, and tickets to entertainers you thought died fifteen years ago. Not only would this keep the state from profiting from an industry predicated on unfairness, it would also give Massachusetts casinos a competitive edge against the casinos in those other states. Why would you gamble in a place where the odds are stacked against you if you could instead “A mass more wealth in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…the Fair Play State.”
January 25, 2008
The early tags are in at Flickr+Library of Congress (=Library of Congrss?)Poking around the photos the Library of Congress has posted at Flickr shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of social tagging. For example, take this 1940 photo of two kids gathering potatoes in Maine. There are about 80 tags, ranging from potato, maine, and boys to rural, bucolic, plaid, browen, and pommes de terre. The comments include people appreciating the aesthetics of the photo, recollecting their own lives on farms, and nattering on gaily about the cute hats the kids are wearing. For example:
and
Three people have played with Flickr’s feature that lets you draw a box around a portion of a photo and add an annotation. All three are wastes o’ time (obviously in my opinion): “I love these barrels” is not worth the visual interruption. (You only see the boxes if you move your mouse over the photos.) So maybe Flickr will turn these off for the LC photos. Maybe not. We’ll see. Nevertheless, this is some very cool stuff. Sure, some of the tags are oddball. So what? In the great wash of tags, they will lose significance. Meanwhile, that photo of two children harvesting potatoes, which had been locked away behind brick and paper walls, now is in the world, gathering meaning, memories, and connections. [Tags: library_of_congress flickr everything_is_miscellaneous tagging folksonomy taxonomy]
Beginner-to-Beginner: Installing Vista’s Web server and PHPVista has an integrated Web server, but it’s off by default. If you want to use your machine as a Web server (I do because I use some javascripts that write to my hard drive and thus need to believe that my hard drive is the Web server they’re running on, and if this is stupid or incredibly insecure please don’t tell me because I think I’ll cry), you have to jump through some hoops. Unfortunately, they’re invisible hoops. Fortunately, over a year ago, Blondr, in his very first post, explained how to do it, with words and screen captures. Incredibly helpful. And along the way, he even explains how to find the !@#$%-ing Web server control panel: Go to Run and type “InetMgr.exe.” Once you have it running, pages are served up by default from C:\inetpub\wwwroot. I think. It looks like once you’re in the Web server manager (the IIS Manager), the left-hand panel lets you add sites and specify where those sites live on your hard drive, but I haven’t tried that yet. Anyway, thanks Blondr! [Tags: tech vista web_server blondr]
Categories: tech Date: January 25th, 2008
MacBook fixedMy unreliable MacBook has a brand new motherboard, thanks to The Computer Loft. Thank goodness, the intermittent failures intermitted while they were watching. Much as I appreciate the loaner from the Berkman Center, I’ll be very glad to get my own back. Using a loaner feels like wearing someone else’s shoes. [Tags: macbook]
Categories: whines Date: January 25th, 2008
January 24, 2008
John Edwards on no amnesty for telco eavesdroppersJust received the following mass email mailing from the John Edwards campaign:
You can find your senators’ phone numbers here. (Disclosure: I sometimes get to talk wit the Edwards campaign about Net policy but had zero to do this with.)
Categories: net neutrality, politics Date: January 24th, 2008
Facebook apps and controlJonathan Zittrain, of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Berkman Center (this is sort of like Al Gore winning both the Oscar and the Peace Prize in the same year), points out that apps written on top of social networking sites (or other such Web service providers) are subject to different regimes of control than general-purpose computer apps. Very interesting. If these walled gardens become the Web’s new infrastructure, Jonathan’s right that there will be big changes in authority, liability, and control — and the norms, techniques and policies we use to enforce them.
Categories: digital culture, digital rights Date: January 24th, 2008
January 23, 2008
RulesOfThumb.orgAt this quite new site you can post your favorite rules of thumb and rate others. For example: “When youre playing blackjack, assume that any unseen card is an 8.” “The crossbar on your bicycle frame should come just to your crotch when you straddle the bike with your shoes off and your feet flat on the ground.”
Categories: misc Date: January 23rd, 2008
smARThistoryI just came across smARThistory. Here’s how Beth Harris and Steven Zucker describe it:
It’s interesting, multimedia, good looking, free, and nicely voiced, although I personally would like to see them push it further, especially with regard to incorporating students and other readers. (Easy for me to say.)
Categories: education, everythingIsMiscellaneous Date: January 23rd, 2008
January 22, 2008
The NYTimesoverse
The New York Times has proclaimed Twitter a phenomenon in a piece redolent with all the smug, self-referential authority it can muster. Journalists are using it! One twittered something that made it into the NY Times! Twitter therefore matters!
January 21, 2008
John McCain vs. Chuck NorrisOh please let Chuck Norris continue to continue to criticize John McCain!
I’m not going to vote for John McCain but not because of his age or his character.
Categories: politics Date: January 21st, 2008
When all you have is a hammer, nobody looks for MaslowMy friend Bob Morris at UMass Boston, in a message to a mailing list, points out how few posts attribute “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” to Abraham Maslow. Bob found the attribution via Google Groups, which pointed him to Google Books. In fact, a search at Google Books for Maslow as the author and for hammer and nail turns up the relevant snippet of Maslow’s 1966 The Psychology of Science, in which he writes: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The folk process seems to have sharpened the aphorism. Bob notes that the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs only traces it as far back as a NY Times article. Bob also points out that Google Books does not give page references for the Maslow book, which unnecessarily limits GB’s utility as a tool for scholarly research. That aside, all hail Google Books!
Categories: digital culture, digital rights Date: January 21st, 2008
January 20, 2008
Moi moi moi
Doris Obermair interviewed me at the Picnic conference in spring 2007, and now has posted an edited version in which I talk about the effect of the miscellaneous on business. (With Spanish subtitles.) (By the way, I list videos here.)
When IP goes bad: Berkman retaliates against cyberlaw™ & Apple patents ordering from a menuItem #1 A cyberlawyer named Eric Menhart has trademarked “cyberlaw,” according to slashdot. In response, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law is changing its address from cyber.law.harvard.edu to eric.menhart.harvard.edu, will rename its annual conference to the EricMenhart conference, and is petitioning Google to do a search-and-replace on the 75,400 pages containing harvard berkman cyberlaw. All your EricMenhart™ are belong to us. [Legal notices: I don't speak for the Berkman Center. And one of those jokes was Ethan Zuckerman's.]
Categories: culture, digital rights Date: January 20th, 2008
January 19, 2008
SpeedDial for FirefoxJanuary 18, 2008
Control doesn’t scaleControl doesn’t scale. That seems to me to say it all. Or, it at least says some of it. Now, here are some of the people who came up with that phrase, some well before I did: David Friedman (economics) I hereby claim that phrase in the name of Her Highness, Queen Generality.
January 17, 2008
All computers suck
I no longer have a working computer and I don’t know what to do about it.
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