My new new Mac (a white one) is well, except Finder doesn’t see my family network. To be more exact, there’s no “Network” icon listed in the sidebar of Finder. If I go to Finder’s prefs and toggle “connected servers” or “bonjour computers” on and off, there’s no change. But, if I go to Connect to Server and tell it to connect to smb://192.168.0.134, which happens to be the static IP of a network storage device, it finds it fine, and shows it to me in the Finder. It likewise finds smb://honkervista, which is my big, Vista-crippled machine.

I’ve tried making random alterations in the system config network panel, since that traditionally has forced empty network panes to fill up properly. Not in this case.

Should I really have to be mounting these machines by hand?? TIA…

[Tags: mac os_x network_configuration ]

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It’s official. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center has been put in charge of the Harvard Law Library. This is great news, although John’s contribution to the Berkman Center cannot be overestimated.

To be precise, JP — with whom I’ve had the privilege of co-teaching a course this semester — has been appointed associate dean of library and information. (He was also given tenure.) That means he is in charge of the greatest law library in the land. Open access just got a champion installed at the head of one of the most important collections in the world. This is pretty damn exciting.

JP is going to stay affiliated with the Berkman Center, but not having him at the helm is going to hurt. He is both a strong leader and a selfless facilitator. Enthusiastic, kind, humble, brilliant, pragmatic, funny, articulate, instantly likable, learned, visionary, down to earth, committed, articulate, sweet … in a word, we love him. And always will.

Congratulations, John!

[Tags: john_palfrey harvard_law libraries ]

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WorldBlu has put forward its 2008 list of the 25 world’s most democratic organizations…

[Tags: democracy work business ]

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Chris Conley, a Berkman Fellow working on the Open Net Initiative, is giving a lunchtime talk on “Digital Surveillance and Transparency.” [Note: I am live-blogging, hence typing quickly, missing things — missing many things today, actually — getting things wrong, etc. The session will be available in full at Media Berkman. ]

The Surveillance Project looks for evidence of surveillance. But lots of surveillers don’t talk about what they do, so the project looks at tools and technologies, infrastructure, and the legal and/or political constraints. And it looks at the implications for privacy, civil rights, etc.

A security consultant, Ed Giorgio, said “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” But this isn’t necessarily true, says Chris. Disclosure can make surveillance more effective. For example, people may behave more the way you want by letting them know they’re being watched.

Chris goes through the parameters of the question. The effect of transparency depends on what you’re trying to do with surveillance. E.g., Facebook’s Beacon ad program watches what you’re doing, without a lot of transparency, to increase the accuracy of ads. Phorm watches what sites you go to in order to achieve the same aim. Surveillance for security purposes is aiming at preventing actions and may well want to be non-transparent. There’s also the audience to consider: the targets of the surveillance, affected third parties (e.g., victims of botnet infections), and other interested parties. It is, he shows, an equation with lots of variables.

Chris walks through some examples. E.g., if you monitor file sharing, announcing that you’re detecting 5% might have an effect. Or, you might announce that you were detecting all files available via BitTorrent. Or all those who are uploading. Each of these might have a different effect. Does announcing a surveillance program deter terrorists? Perhaps not, and announcing it might enable terrorists to counter the surveillance.

What’s the difference with digital surveillance, Chris asks. You can collect more, from more places, of more types. The legal constraints are often very unclear. The mechanisms are rapidly changing. Private entities are being involved. E.g., OnStar was collecting conversations in cars for policing purposes.

The goal of the project is to argue that surveillance needs oversight, public discussion of the goals, and how those goals can be most narrowly met. Chris ends by pointing at Zimbabwe’s recent law that requires ISPs to wiretap their users. Even though it may not actually be happening, this “transparency” can “be a tool to suppress expression on the cheap.”

Q: In the US, are there laws beyond wiretapping, child porn, and financial data retention, that have caused private companies to alter their data retention processes?
A: There are no data retention laws in the US.

(ethanz) The gap between what may be possible in surveillance and what people perceive to be possible is pretty vast. In the middle east among activists, it’s believed that the entire Net passes through seven servers in DC, and that every communication is monitored. This rumor has attained the status of fact in the developing world. The panopticon effect is orders of magnitude more powerful than what these systems are capable of doing. People will not stop believing this.

Q: How well do the counter-digital-surveillance techniques work?
A: Unclear. If you’re identified as a target in a technologically sophisticated country, there’s very little you can do on line to counter it.
Ethan: In one country, they were listening in through parabolic mics a few doors down. There’s nothing you can do about it in a sufficiently motivated environment.
Chris: The best way to keep yourself unidentified is obfuscation. Talk about your topic when in World of Warcraft.

Do people use steganography?
Roger: It’s a myth that it can’t be detected. You can detect non-random low-order bits in graphics.
Ethan: And if they communicate through Tor, you’re flagging (in many countries) that you’re up to no good.

Ethan: I’d like information so people can make better risk assessments. How good are the surveillers? Are they as good as the “tin hats” think? I doubt it, but it would be good to know. E.g., people in Zimbabwe are dropping off of political humor lists, for fear they’re being watched. People over-estimate the ability of governments to watch us.

Gene: Let me sum up: To stop terrorists we’d also stop activists. We have a false sense of security but also a false chilling effect.
Chris: Yes, from the point of surveillance, terrorists and activists are both people trying to hide their communication.
Gene: If from a policy/legal standpoint there’s no difference…
Chris: In a repressive regime, there’s no difference…
Ethan: It’s a difference between behavioral and content analysis. If we were capable of doing the sort of content analysis that most people think we’re capable of doing, people wouldn’t be scared off from (e.g.) participating in Koranic online discussions to argue against suicide bombing. [Tags: surveillance transparency ]

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Mary Joyce did a nice job live-blogging my ROFLcon talk. Thanks, Mary! [Tags: roflcon2008 ]

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From an article in the Boston Globe — by a reporter who saw the trick done in the flesh — here’s a video from the site of Bruce Kalver, magician:

[Tags: magic optical_illusions ]

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I’m giving a talk on “Everything Is Miscellaneous” at the Vilna Shul (which is habitually prefaced with “historic”) in Boston tomorrow, Tues., starting at 6pm. If you want to go — and as of now I’m thinking I’ll give my plain ol’ “Misc” talk — please RSVP to dougvilnashul.com.

UPDATE: I think I’m instead going to talk about knowledge in the age of the miscellaneous, and in particular as if the Internet is Jewish.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous vilna_shul boston ]

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If you want to chat online with a Comcast support person, they cannot do so unless you give them your social security number.

Lessons to learn:

1. Unless restrained, companies will demand more and more identification from us, because violating our privacy doesn’t cost them anything.

2. We cannot rely on market forces to restrain publicprivate sector ID greed.

3. Comcast continues to lead the field in overall corporate suckage.

[Tags: comcast privacy ]

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Chris Kelty, a prof. from Rice, leads a panel of Internet cult leaders. He asks if we want these celebrities to become leaders. [I am totally out of my demographic]. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics). Randall Munroe (xkcd). Moot (4chan). [Live-blogging. Highly compressed. Many mistakes. Even sketchier than usual. ]

Ryan denies he has any leadership beyond superficially. Randall also doesn’t want to lead anything. He’s humbled and horrified that there are other people like him. Moot says he merely provides a place for people to express themselves.

Randall denies that the comic is based on his life. Ryan “tries to have it both ways with his comics.”

Q: Ryan, you’re the creator of Project Wonderful, an auction-based ad system that has revolutionized advertising on the Web. So, which Dinosaurs characters are based on your ex-girlfriends?
A: Sometimes. Unadvisably.
Randall: It can be bad if you write about a fake relationship while you’re in a real relationship…

Q: Are you fighting any preconceptions?
Ryan: People don’t know how to respond to someone writing comics on the Internet.

Q: When have you been most afraid about what you’ve created and the consequences thereof?
A: Right now. [applause]

For some reason, Moot pantomimes a barrel roll.

Ryan says that he doesn’t explain his jokes even when people get them wrong.

For reasons I don’t understand, Randall has the entire audience do a barrel roll. Later, he says that he expected controversy when he did a comic on the meth addicts of cunnilingus in order to set the outer edge of edginess within which he can operate. But there was no controversy.
Ryan adds that he’s surprised by which of his comics are controversial.

Q: Why are so many of the cultural producers men?
Ryan: Online I could be a 12 yr old girl if I wanted to, and perhaps I have been. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in the Internet that selects towards men.
Moot: It’s a conspiracy. We can’t talk about it.
Kelty: A comic like yours does more to entice people into that world than anything the universities do. You seem to be trying to do this. Can you do more than a comic?
Randall: It’s hard to be preachy and funny at the same time. The causes of the gender imbalance are complex. It’s by far the most complicated thing I’ve ever studied, and I’ve studied quantum mechanics.

Q: When you meet someone in a bar, is it more weird and awkward when they know who you are?

Randall: The weirdest is when they seem to be friendly, and they’ve read the comic and don’t like it.
Ryan: It’s nice when you start on an even ground.

Moot: I’m a huge fan of anonymous posting. It evens the playing ground.
something

Q: Was society crying out for the communities you’ve created?
Moot: 4chan was based on 2chan. Eventually, someone else would have come along and done it.

Q: 4chan has a different community than it started with. During the panel, moot, you’ve both distanced yourself and identified yourself with. What parts of the community do you like?
Moot: Hard to articulate. Started out for anime. The random board grew. The “let’s raid someone’s life for no good reason” is terrible, but a lot of that has migrated elsewhere. I don’t control 4chan but I am at the reins and can say what we do and don’t want there.

Q: What will you be doing in 10 yrs. The same thing?
Ryan: I can see it. My drawing doesn’t change. It’s hard work but I enjoy it.
Randall: Me, too.

Q: Ryan, do you feel more constrained or liberated by the form of your comic?
Ryan: There’s a lot you can do with the narrative form even with a repeating graphic.

Moot: I spend most of my time on the Net reading news. It’s important to be connected to your world. Not just BBC, but community sites.

For reasons I do understand, people ask many insider questions I don’t understand.

Huge applause at the end. Even huger for the organizers of the conference. And why not? ROFLcon is now a meme as much as conf. On its way to becoming a movement? [Tags: roflcon2008 ]

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BoingBoing points to some wonderful comments by Vint Cerf in an interview in Esquire, including:

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

So true. And also quite different from one of the founding ideas of Western culture. For the ancient Greeks, beneath the apparent complexity there had to be a simple order, or else knowledge wasn’t possible.

You have to wonder about the role our current technology has played in our moving from the Greeks to Vint. (1) We are far better able to externalize ideas now, so that we can know more than we could when memory was confined to what fit in our skulls and could be written down by hand. (2) Our technology now lets us put things together far more complexly than the physical world does; reality is designed to keep things apart (to be something is to not be something else, said Aristotle), while the Web is designed to link things together. (3) Our technology connects us in socially complex ways, enabling us to understand things together.

And it’s not just that things become more complex the closer you look. They also become more interesting. Everything is interesting if looked at closely enough. I take that as one of the lessons of the Net. [Tags: vint_cerf philosophy ]

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I was talking with Kate Raynes-Goldie of the CBC at the end of the first day of ROFLcon yesterday [live-streamed here] and had a small realization about another difference between broadcast fame and Web fame. A little connection that immediately seemed too obvious to blog about. Nevertheless, here goes….

I said in my talk at the conference yesterday that we are making fame our own, rather than an alienating effect of the broadcast regime, because we make people famous on the Web by passing around links, and that — especially when you watch people watching YouTubes together — it’s a lot like how people tell jokes together: one video reminds someone of another, and there can be a type of pleasant one-upmanship as people try to top the current video with one that’s even better.

Not until I was talking with Kate did the further obviousness occur to me: One of the differences between broadcast and Web fame is that in making someone famous on the Web, we are putting a little bit of our social standing at risk. We’ve got a stake in it.

For example, during the wonderful, impromptu videofest blogged by (and, to a large degree, led by) the wonderful and impromptu Ethan Zuckerman, during Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center last week, everyone was pointing to the next great video to play. In the midst of this, I lost the thread and pointed to a video that, when projected to the group, was out of place and not even very interesting. People shuffled uncomfortably, trying to figure out why I would suggest such a clunker. I was embarrassed. (At least the video was short.)

That we have something at stake in what we recommend is, of course, well understood and completely obvious. But for me, only last night did I recognize that that’s one of the reasons the Web famous feel more like ours than the broadcast famous usually do. Not only do we make them famous, but we do so at some risk to ourselves.

It’s a type of sweat equity, or, in my case during video night at the Berkman, it was more like a type of flop sweat equity. [Tags: roflcon2008 fame ]

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The LOLcats panel at ROFLcon, with six panelists and a moderator, is redeeming the format. It’s been hilarious. And sometimes more than that. “Ignore the haters,” says Cheez (ICanHasCheezburger), “because every moment you spend responding is a moment taken from those who love you.” Another advises not to try to control the meme.

Q: Why is it pronounced “loll” instead of spelled out L-O-L? Because it’s easier, they say. But an audience member — and it’s a raucous audience — says that it’s because you can make puns with “loll” but not with L-O-L, e.g., LOLicoaster.

Someone asks when the dialect went from based on toddlers to based on the retarded. (I told you it was raucous.) Cheez responds that it’s the first dialect that was written first, and spoken later. Thus, he says, we all hear it in our heads differently. So, if the questioner is now hearing a retarded person instead of a toddler…

One of them says that the LOLcat Bible is well underway. The moderator suggests a LOLcat Koran…

A question about origins brings replies pointing to l33t speak and to Yoda.

Is there LOLporn? The panel rolls its collective eyes. Oh yes. “The most common meme is ‘do not want,’” one says.

Has anyone tried to own the language? “There’s so much prior art,” says Cheez.

I haven’t gotten close to capturing this. It was hilarious, with a great panel and a great audience. There’s a real sense of commonality at this conference, and it’s in high spirits. [Tags: roflcon2008 lolcats ]

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The Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project has a site that’s rich with information, written in non-legalese, about your rights and liabilities as a blogger (and general citizen media person) in the U.S. There’s lots to browse there, and it’s all quite concise and helpful.

For example, the section on whether it’s legal to record a phone call you’re having with someone else says, in part:

Federal law permits recording telephone calls and in-person conversations with the consent of at least one of the parties. See 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d). This is called a “one-party consent” law. Under a one-party consent law, you can record a phone call or conversation so long as you are a party to the conversation. Furthermore, if you are not a party to the conversation, a “one-party consent” law will allow you to record the conversation or phone call so long as your source consents and has full knowledge that the communication will be recorded.

In addition to federal law, thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have adopted “one-party consent” laws…

This is an excellent resource.

[Tags: citizen_media law cmlp journalism ]

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I’m talking tomorrow at ROFLcon, a conference about Web fame, celebrity and culture. I’m supposed to be talking in a general way about Web fame. Then I’m leading a panel composed of men (yup) who are Web famous: Kyle Macdonald (One Red Paperclip), Joe Mathelete (Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke), Ian Spector (Chuck Norris Facts), Andy Ochiltree (JibJab.com), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage)

Here’s a sketch of what I’m thinking of saying:

Fame has been a property of the broadcast (= one-to-many) system. Fame is based on the math of many people knowing you, so many that you can’t know them. But it’s not just math, of course. It’s also economics. The broadcast economy has a fiduciary interest in building and maintaining the famous. They’re “bankable.”

Because of this scarcity and the fact that the one-to-manyness of the relationship means the knowing is one-way, the famous become a special class of person: mythic and not fully real. They are not like us, even ontologically. Fame is a type of alienation.

Outside of the broadcast system, fame looks different. This is a type of do-it-yourself fame, not only in that we often want human fingerprints on the shiny surfaces we’re watching, but also because we create fame through passing around links … occasionally for mean and nasty reasons. Kids sitting around watching YouTubes with one another are like kids telling jokes: That reminds me of this one; if you liked that one, you’ll love this one. And the content itself fuels public conversations in multiple media. This is P2P fame.

There’s a long tail of fame, although I suspect the elbow isn’t quite as sharp as in the classic Shirky power law curve for links to blogs. At the top of the head of the curve, fame operates much as it does in the broadcast media, although frequently there’s some postmodern irony involved. In the long tail, though, you can be famous to a few people. Sure, much of it’s crap, but the point about an age of abundance is that we get an abundance of crap and of goodness. We get fame in every variety, including anonymous fame, fame that mimics broadcast fame, fame that mocks, fame that does both, fame for what is stupid, brilliant, nonce, eternal, clever, ignorant, blunt, nuanced, amateur, professional, mean, noble … just like us. It’s more of everything.

But most of all, it’s ours.

* * *

[ROFLcon will be live-streamed here. [Tags: roflcon2008 web_culture fame celebrity ]

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Ike Piggott posts about the effect of tags ‘n’ such on identity politics. Nicely done. (And, if I may say be so self-centered he seems unknowingly to be channeling Everything Is Miscellaneous.)

[Tags: politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Apparently, the traits I like in a candidate are the traits most of the country dislikes. I am therefore a counter-indicator. And also pretty depressed.

Pity me.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that the candidate I prefer (= am in love with) has in fact “closed the deal” with the majority of Democratic voters and delegates. So, maybe you shouldn’t pity me.

Yet.

[Tags: politics obama ]

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In case you were wondering, we have scientifically determined that the Net is different on a scale of 8.4 out of 10.

Our methodology was unassailable. Each member of the Web Difference class had to state a number from 1-10 saying what difference the Net will make, where “Net” includes the Internet, the Web, and the computing devices it uses, and where the potential for change is included in the number.

Next question!

[Tags: web_difference webdiff ]

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Steve Pepper has started a blog, and one of his first posts explains — from his insider’s vantage point — how Standard Norway managed to approve OOXML as an ISO standard despite the overwhelming disapproval expressed by the committee members. It is not a pretty story.

The following post on Steve’s blog is about prostitution in Norway, starting with a conversation he had with a woman called Jenny. So, Steve’s blog is off to an appropriately eclectic start! [Tags: steve_pepper iso ooxml standards norway ]

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YaCy is a peer-to-peer, open source Web search engine. You can use it to create a search portal, but the officially Very Cool thing about it is that you can peer it up with other Yacy installations, creating a distributed, p2p search engine.

[Tags: search p2p open_source everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Can you guess what the Open Science Directory might be a directory of? Score 0 points if you guess “open science sources,” but subtract -10 if you guessed anything else…

[Tags: science open_access ]

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Tomorrow, for the second to last class of our Web Difference class, John Palfrey is leading a discussion of chapter 11 of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. So, I just re-read it and liked it even more than the first time. Which is saying something.

The book as a whole is at times daunting because of its thoughtfulness, detail, and multi-disciplinary expertise. But, Chapter 11 should be required reading for anyone who cares about the Net’s future. In it, Benkler considers the multiple layers of challenges we face in building (and maintaining) the Net we want … one rich in collaborative creation. Clear, comprehensive, magnificent.

[Tags: yochai_benkler net_policy open_access peer_production webdiff web_difference ]

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Over at the Web Difference class blog, I’ve posted my qualms about posting here (i.e., at Joho) some thoughts about the course. Very circular and self-involved, I know.

Anyway, the question over at the Web Difference blog is whether a teacher should be neutral/fair/objective or transparent… [Tags: education media objectivity transparency ]

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After a regrettable clunk at precisely the right spot on my wife’s Thinkpad, we’re short a laptop with a screen that consists of fewer than 867 pieces. So, I bought a white MacBook thinking that we’d cycle machines, giving my wife my son’s Powerbook (she only uses it for Web access), and giving him the white Mac. But now I’m thinking I’ll keep the white MacBook and give my son my haunted black MacBook. He is a less-intensive user than I am, so I’m hoping the gremlins will atrophy. And the new white MB’s processor speed and graphics capabilities are marginally better than the year-old black MB, or so I believe. (Take this as a plea for disabuse.) (My son is very happy to take either MB as an upgrade to his PowerBook, so no need to call in the authorities.)

I transferred data from my black MB via firewire during the set up. (Windows, I hope you’ve noticed this feature. It saved me at least a full day of reinstalling and configuring.) If nothing else, this may help determine whether the gremlins live in the black MB’s hardware or software. It’s all working so far, except for the Apache server, but this feels more like a configuration error than a bug . (Yes, I turned on Sharing.)

The white MB, however, has no Enter key, which I had at times mapped to a forward delete key. (I generally have turned off the remapping sw for fear that it was gremlin fodder.) Any suggestions for which key to remap and which sw to use to do it?

Any other white MB-specific hints or tips? And do you think I’ve downgraded myself? So far, it seems pretty sweet…

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Amazingly, the course I’ve been co-teaching with John Palfrey, called The Web Difference, ends on Tuesday. The question the course poses is, unsurprisingly: Is the Web very different from what came before, a little different, or not different? More important, in what ways? The class has looked at a number of different domains and dimensions. (A now outdated version of the syllabus is here.)

John and I haven’t talked about what to do on the last day, but I’m tempted to raise the question of the Web’s difference by asking the class how epochal they think the Web is. Is it different enough and important enough to call this the Age of the Web? (For purposes of this discussion, I’m not distinguishing between the Web and the Internet. If you’d rather substitute “Internet,” I won’t argue. And, yes, I do know the difference.)

Since that’s still pretty vague, suppose we were to ask whether the Web is as big a deal — in terms of defining an epoch — as genetic manipulation. TV. The telephone. Anesthetics. CB radio. The printing press. Paperback books. Bronze. Steam engines. Commercial aviation. Electric keyboards. The computer. Ball point pens. Johnny Depp.

Personally, I think it’s roughly on the order of the printing press. But I also believe that Wikipedia is our Gutenberg Bible… no, not in terms of credibility or spiritual depth, but as the artifact that shows the importance of the new technology. I suspect and hope many of the students in our class thoroughly disagree… [Tags: webdiff ]

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Ronald Brownstein argues in the National Journal that that’s how we’ll remember the Clinton-Obama race. It’s a nicely done piece…

[Tags: politics ]

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I will understand if you don’t think this is funny, but I do:

TF2 Karaoke: My Heart Will Go On from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo.

It comes via Bradsucks. It’s a karaoke version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” as performed by some guys playing Team Fortress 2. [Tags: karaoke team_fortress ]

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Baby bump.

[Tags: ]

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This BoingBoing gadget lets you smash corporate shillery in a most amusing way.

[Tags: marketing games boingboing ]

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Yesterday afternoon, somehow the Berkman Fellows Hour turned into a campaign musical videofest. Ethan has blogged it all, with plenty of links.

For reasons I can’t possibly explain, this is my favorite:

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Thanks to my relentless ego-surfing, um, I mean my participating in the ongoing conversation that is the Web, I came across a rough draft of a course paper by Devin Dadigan about the racism and sexism implicit in playing cards, — which, apparently are ordered the way they have been since the 14th century. Kings beat queens, and, the black queen is an especially disastrous card in several games.

At first I thought Devin’s hypothesis about race was problematic, because I thought clubs are sometimes taken as the highest suit, even though Devin says that black cards represent labor and slaves. (That link seems incontestable in America where “spade” has been a demeaning — and occasionally hip — term for African-Americans.) Wikipedia, however, says that when suits are ranked, clubs sometimes come first because the ranking is done alphabetically. Ah, the hidden power of alphabetization! Why, it even cures racism!

Fascinating fact: According to the paper, the ascent of the ace as the highest card “was hastened in the late 18th century by the French Revolution, where games began being played ‘ace high’ as a symbol of lower classes rising in power above the royalty.”

[Tags: cards games history devin_dadigan ]

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I am coming to grips with the sticker shock of hitting my 40th birthday. Unfortunately, I’m 57.

This inconvenient truth is born home by Doc Searls‘ recent “incident.” [More from Doc here, here, here, and here.) I am one of the absurd number of people who count Doc as a close friend. I happened to be in the conference room when the pain in his chest got too strong to ignore. He called the Harvard health folks who said it might be a good time to stagger on over. So, I walked him there. It's the least the second oldest person in the room could do. Not to mention, that way I found out as soon as possible what was going on with him, which turned out to be a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot that had traveled to his lungs), which was treated quickly and well.

Boston is a good city to get sick in.

Doc's doing well, thank heavens. He blogged a couple of days after the incident that he's resolved to start taking better care of himself. Good. We want Doc around for many decades, purely for selfish reasons.

Doc is in the midst of what I guess we should called a Two-Thirds Life Crisis because it comes some time after the Midlife Crisis. I've been through my own, having eaten my way into Type 2 diabetes a couple of years ago. I resolved to start taking better care of myself, and, fortunately, you can no longer use my blood to top off your pancakes in the morning. I'm actually in better shape than before. (Irony alert: I'll probably drop dead this afternoon, just to give y'all something to blog about.)

Anyway, here, is a handy comparison chart:

[Tags: midlife doc_searls aging old_farts ]

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As the 2004 Dean campaign crashed, Steven Johnson wrote one of the more provocative and insightful analyses of why it failed despite all the enthusiasm behind it. In the piece, Steve refines the notion of “emergence” he had popularized in his terrific book of the same name: There’s emergence that clusters and emergence that copes. Clustering is exemplified by slime mold, which creates a crowd without any top-down control. Coping is exemplified by termite nests which result from a bottom-up regulatory regime which is able to adapt. The Dean campaign, under this analysis, clustered people and money but was unable to cope when things started to go badly.

Steve ends the piece this way:

I suspect that such a system may well be fundamentally incompatible with the necessary structure of a national political campaign, at least for the foreseeable future. Emergent systems that excel at coping do so out of truly local information; they take their random walks through their neighborhoods and record patterns in what they find. National campaigns, on the other hand, work at a macro scale, and they are necessarily wedded to the broadcast amplifications of the national media. Whatever local disturbances or opportunities they discover are quickly uploaded to the world of network TV and satellite feeds, where they undergo all sorts of distortions. And national campaigns, by definition, have to have leaders, at least in the form of the politicians themselves…

Is there an emergent politics capable of a more subtle form of self-regulation? If there is, I think it will first take shape, not as a political campaign, but as a more local, day-to-day affair: more polis than politics.

Was Steve right? (Just to be clear: I’m not asking about Steve, of whom I am a giggling fanboy, but about the state of politics.) [Tags: politics steven_johnson emergence everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I haven’t tried Drop.io yet, but I like the faq. It makes it easier to share stuff than by FTP’ing it, and it adds a little value to what you share when it can: It adds thumbnails to photos, etc. You can add to a “drop” via the Web, phone, email, or fax. You can set a drop so that it’s read-only or so that others can add or delete to it. The site isn’t indexed, so it’s as private as the people you tell about a drop care to keep it. Drop.io not only is free, it doesn’t require you to give your email address.

Ok, I just tried it and hit a glitch: Uploads freeze about 5% of the way in this morning. Could be them, could be the Net, either way, it’s got to be temporary…

[Tags: drop.io free_ftp_sites ]

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John McCain explaining — in a disturbingly incoherent way — that this is a Christian nation (found via JedReport):

My favorite part: When he confuses what’s on our money with what’s in our Constitution.

And while I’m youtubing, here’s an oddly inappropriate response from Hillary Clinton to what seems to me to be a reasonable, albeit aggressive, question:

[Tags: mccain clinton hrc religion ]

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ISO’s taking over of Microsoft’s 8,000 page specification of the “open” standard based on Word’s document model has been slashdotted with typical, um, vigor.

[Tags: ooxml standards iso microsoft odf ]

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For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about writing something that argues that the history of information is way more discontinuous than we’ve thought. Usually, we trace info and computers from Turing and Claude Shannon back through Hollerith’s punch cards, back to Babbage, and maybe back to the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards to control the patterns being woven. But I think this reads the modern idea of information back into machines that were not information-based at all. The loom cards look like punch cards, but they’re not really information, any more than a gear is. Or a comb is, for that matter.

When we discovered atomic theory, we were able to claim that historic objects were made of atoms all along. But I don’t think it’s the same with information theory. Reading info back into historical objects feels more like what happened when the universe started to look like clockwork.

This matters to me because I think we’re beginning to emerge from the Information Age. The paradigm is just starting to break. So it’s a good time to wonder how we ever managed to conceive of ourselves and our world as made out of information. How did we become information?

So, I’m not sure how to approach this, but I’ve been having a lot of fun reading about Babbage (including the new Difference Engine construction, as well as Doron Swade’s account of the first one), Hollerith, Turing, Shannon, and the rest of the cast of characters. I’ve also been poking around in some disciplines that reconceived of themselves as being about information, especially genetics. Some great stuff has been written about this. (E.g., “Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code” by Lily Kay) Every conversation leads to another three books, and every book leads to another ten, so I’ve been reading fairly randomly and quite happily at this point. (No, I have not yet read “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,” by N. Katherine Hayles, but it sounds spot on.)

I’m greatly enjoying the poking and the prodding and the not understanding. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous information_theory babbage turing shannon jacquard_loom ]

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A librarians’ group is meeting today at the Berkman Center to talk about the future of libraries. Gene Koo, Jake Shapiro, and Melanie
Dulong de Rosnay, all of the Berkman.

I’m supposed to give a discussion-opener later this afternoon. Here are the notes of what I’m thinking of saying:

- Two themes
   - metadata over content
   - socializing of knowledge

- Knowledge as content
   - K was a quality of a belief
   - Became content esp. with books
      - Good fit because K was believed to be universal, single and eternal – permanence of books
         - Christian belief in a single universal truth
   - Books created:
      - topics as self-contained
      - experts as containers

- Web/Net
   - Primary characteristic: Abundance
      - Abundance of good is scarier than abundance of crap
      - Web invented to deal with abundance by giving us links…gives human-mediated shape to the endless sea
   - Links destroy container model
   - Web as social realm leads to socialization of K

- Socialization of K is all about metadata
   - e.g., this is worth reading, this is wrong, this connects to that
   - Paper-based metadata throws out info
      - Digital includes it all
      - Means that in general we get good enough info (but is that good enough?)
   - What does this mean for digital libraries?
      - Library is all metadata
      - distributed content
      - Place for expert and social knowing

Question: Digital libraries have nothing in common with libraries?

(Pardon the compressed form. These are my notes.) [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Congratulations to the folks at the Public Radio Exchange for receiving one of eight MacArthur Foundation awards for Creative and Effective Institutions. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people! (More info at the Berkman site.) [Tags: prx berkman macarthur]

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Here are photos of an actual IT protest demonstration in Norway. How often do you see that? (Answer: This is the second IT protest demonstration in Norway’s history.)

Steve Pepper, Chairman of the Norwegian ISO committee since 1995, gave a speech that explains why standard document formats are important and why the adoption of Microsoft’s specification — OOXML — as an ISO standard was a bad mistake. There’s also bloggage here, which links to a podcast I have not yet listened to.

Steve has stepped down as chair of the Standard Norway committee in protest of the overall committee’s process. Steve told me about what happened when we had dinner in Oslo last week. It sounds pretty gruesome.

Says Steve, 80% of the committee was apparently against changing Norway’s vote from No to Yes, but that wasn’t close enough to consensus, so everyone had to leave the room except for three administrators and four technical experts, the latter conveniently chosen to get the balance down to 50-50. When there still wasn’t consensus (surprise, surprise), the experts were dismissed and the Vice President of Standard Norway just decided the way he wanted.

Steve believes the 8,000 page spec (!) should not have been “fast-tracked,” and that ISO voted in favor of the Microsoft spec in part because it didn’t want to leave it in the hands of Ecma (a semi-competing standards body). Yet, OOXML is pretty much nothing but Word’s document model with a whole bunch of angle brackets added…overly complex and too tied to Word’s peculiar capabilities. Meanwhile, we have a truly open and well-worked out document standard in ODF. (Get yer copy of Open Office here — it’s free and it works real good.)

This matters a lot, for two basic reasons. First, the world runs on documents so we want to be able to interchange them without even having to think about which application made them. Having two standards vitiates much of the point of having a standard. Second, OOXML is so tied to Word that having it be an official ISO standard gives one vendor (guess which) a market advantage that truly open standards should take away: You should be able to pick the word processor you want based on its features and feel, without having to worry if using it will lock your documents out of the worldwide market of ideas and information.

Steve tells me that the battle to reverse the Norwegian decision is continuing, and he urges that irregularities in other countries be similarly investigated. [Tags: ooxml steve_pepper norway iso ecma microsoft standards]

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Francois Gossieaux reports on experiments described in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational that show just how influential our expectations are: People who paid more for an energy drink were more refreshed by it and even solved more puzzles. Francois concludes: (1) “We are doomed,” and (2) “…who said that messaging was dead? The things you say about your product may indeed be more important that the product itself…”

Almost from the day the Cluetrain site went up, I regretted point #74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” We are so not immune. Branding works. We think of Volvos as safe and the Ford Fiesta as a car for young folks. We think of Coke as the original and Pepsi as the copy. We can characterize someone as a “wearer of Birkenstocks.” Branding and advertising in some important sense work.

Now, we certainly can undo some of the cognitive damage advertising and branding do. Market conversations in fact often are about the ways in which a product’s promises and sloganeering don’t live up to its reality. But that’s a lot different than saying we’re immune to advertising. We’re not.

I’d still urge companies to move their marketing away from messaging, however. Assuming the studies Francois cites are correct, our reactions to products do seem shaped by what we’re told about them. No surprise there, although it’s always depressing to find out what big dopes we humans are through no fault of our own. But, customers (= all of us) are going to increasingly resist and resent marketing that focuses narrowly on messaging — that is, on finding the simple idea they can pound into our heads over and over. Telling us your drink will make us refreshed or more alert may indeed make us more refreshed or alert, but treating us like freaking morons by droning the same words at us over and over will make your product less interesting to us. The real challenge marketers face in a world of online conversations is how to help us find what’s interesting about their products.

(By the way, although Francois an I have been friends and colleagues for many years, I just this morning realized that his last name uses each of the vowels just once.) [Tags: francois_gossieaux marketing branding advertising cluetrain ]

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