[Note from the next day: This is a little embarrassing. I just noticed that this was first published in 2006. It came through my inbox on Saturday, and I carelessly thought it had just come out.]

Elaine Peterson, associate professor at Montana State University, has an article in D-Lib Magazine called “Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy.” It’s good to see the issues taken seriously, and many of her premises strike me as true. But, I disagree with her pragmatic conclusion that “A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers.” And I think I disagree with her philosophical critique, although I am not confident that I’m understanding it as she intends.

I read the article two different ways. At first I thought it was a critique of folksonomies on the grounds that they contradict traditional philosophical premises. The next time I read it, I thought it was simply pointing out the differences. Now I’m tending toward my first reading, in part because her section on the traditional defends it against some objections while about half of the section on folksonomies is critical of them.

Her philosophical criticism seems to be rooted in what she presents as the Aristotelian approach to classification: Things are lumped with other things like them, and simultaneously distinguished from them. Most important, she says, is the idea that “A is not B,” which means that A cannot be truthfully classified also as a B. But what about digital items that “can reside in more than one place”? That is “irrelevant,” she says, “since one is talking about a classification scheme, not about the items themselves.” I have to admit I don’t understand this. What is the philosophical basis for restricting things to one category if not that that restriction reflects the metaphysical truth that A cannot also be B? So, I think she’s saying we are to reject multiple classifications because such classifications are untrue metaphysically.

This reading is supported by the section on folksonomy, where she identifies philosophical relativism as “the underlying philosophy behind folksonomies,” and pretty clearly intends this as a criticism. (I personally am no fan of philosophical relativism, although there’s a longer story there.) The problem with relativism, she writes, is that it means classification escapes from the demand that A be A and not be B. I take this as indicating that, in her section on traditional classification, she is agreeing with the 1930 textbook she cites that recommends that classifiers give “emphasis to what the author intended to describe.” If you’re arguing that, on metaphysical grounds, things should only be classified in a single category, I guess looking for the author’s intention gives you a way forward…even though categorizing only by the author’s intent is to me like insisting that readers only underline passages that the author considers significant.

And this highlights what I think is my root disagreement with Elaine’s piece (if I’m understanding it correctly). It’s fine to raise pragmatic problems with folksonomies, as she does. But Elaine is pointing at philosophical problems. And those problems require assuming that folksonomists are trying to do what Aristotelian categorizers are trying to do. But they’re not. Aristotelians (I’m using this sloppily as shorthand, so pardon my “tagging”) are trying to find the one true and right category for each thing, creating a well-ordered system free of contradictions. Folksonomies are trying to help us find stuff.

Inconsistencies in tags actually make a folksonomy useful; a folksonomy that consists of 1,000 instances of a single tag isn’t worth the folksonomizing. But these inconsistencies are a problem for Elaine because she is thinking of a folksonomic classification as a philosophical statement rather than as a mere tool. She says that “perhaps … the strongest criticism one could make of folksonomies” is that because tags can be true for one group and false for another,

a folksonomy universe allows both true and false statements to coexist. Because tags are relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters, despite the document author’s intent.

To this many of us will say “Hallelujah!” because we disagree with Elaine’s opening claim that all classification is about answering the philosophical question, “What is it?” Indeed, she’s a hard-liner: An inconsistency to Elaine is any multiple classification, not simply one that contradicts others. Classifying a dissertation about “Moby-Dick” under “ecology” as well as under “novels: 19th Century” would introduce an insupportable inconsistency (in Elaine’s terms). She seems to assume that tags are Aristotelian judgments in which we say that A is a B. But, when I tag a photo of my wife as “ann,” “birthday,” “2008,” and “family events,” I am not saying the essence of Ann (or her photo) is any of those things. Even if I believed in essentialism (I pretty much don’t), we could make use of Aristotle’s idea of “accidental properties” (non-essential but true) to explain what I’m doing. And if I tag Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” as “Angelina Jolie” or “tripe” knowing full well that I am not staying true to the author’s intent, well, tough on Oliver. Tags are not always truth claims, and a folksonomy is not intended to mirror nature. Indeed, a folksonomy can reveal the most appalling areas of ignorance and prejudice in a populace — and, pragmatically, we may well want to address those popular errors, especially since a folksonomy can indeed reinforce them

But, Elaine is right to point to the philosophical implications of folksonomies. An individual folksonomy may make no claim to providing the real truth about how the world is ordered, but the use of folksonomies generally carries some philosophical implications. Elaine sees relativism underneath them while I see a form of pragmatism. But folksonomies didn’t arise out of philosophy. They are a “found” ordering: Hey, we have all these tags, so why don’t we make use of them in a more systematic way? So, I think Elaine is mislocating the philosophical moment in folksonomies. Philosophy isn’t underneath them or behind them. It’s after them, in their effect. Folksonomies reinforce our move away from the essentialist view that every thing has a single category that reflects its single and real essence. We’ve been moving away from that view for a long time as a culture. The success of folksonomies as a tool reveals that we accepted the traditional Aristotelian scheme in part because it was useful. If its utility has been undercut, then we have to ask for the other reasons we should believe in an Aristotelian metaphysics.

The ball is in Aristotle’s court.

* * *

Most of Elaine’s outright criticisms of folksonomies are actually practical, not philosophic. She makes them without empirical evidence. She has not convinced me that she’s right. For example, her final paragraph says:

A traditional classification scheme based on Aristotelian categories yields search results that are more exact. Traditional cataloging can be more time consuming, and is by definition more limiting, but it does result in consistency within its scheme. Folksonomy allows for disparate opinions and the display of multicultural views; however, in the networked world of information retrieval, a display of all views can also lead to a breakdown of the system… Most information seekers want the most relevant hits when keying in a search query.

By “exact” she apparently means the results include fewer false results (where a result is false if the search term doesn’t really apply to the result, as when you search for “fish” and get back posts about dolphins). And that seems correct: A professionally constructed index should have fewer of those sorts of mistakes. But the second criterion in her concluding paragraph is relevancy, and there folksonomies well may beat a professionally constructed index. Not only might a folksonomy retrieve results more relevant to me personally or to my cultural sub-group, but it constructs a semantic system that can retrieve results the narrow and carefully categorizing by experts might miss. So, I disagree with her last sentence: “A traditional classification scheme will consistently provide better results to information seekers.” Traditional classification is best for certain types of searches — ones where you want precision over recall and relevancy, and especially where there is a confined domain of contents that you have to be sure you’ve searched thoroughly — but is not as good as a folksonomy for other types of searches.

In short, neither traditional nor folksonomic classifications are best. Each is best for something.

[Tags: folksonomy taxonomy philosophy elaine_peterson ]

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I mentioned to my nephew Joel Weinberger, a CS grad student at UC Berkeley, that I wished the Javascript “split” method took multiple delimiters, and within minutes, he wrote one for me. If you know what I’m talking about, you can click here to get a zip file with the code (including a function as well as a method) and a sample. If you don’t …

[Note: all explanations are approximate.] Javascript comes with a built-in method for converting a string (that is, what normally consists of letters and characters in quotes) into an array (that is, a data structure of numbered elements). So, if you have a string that’s really a list of elements, such as “monday, tuesday, wednesday” or “12-345-6,” the split method will automatically chop it up into an array, using a delimiter of your choice (a comma or a dash in the two examples given). This is very useful.

But suppose you have a string such as this: “beef OR chicken AND duck” You want to be able to chop it up at the ORs and the ANDs, but the split method only lets you specify one delimiter.

Enter Joel. His multiSplit method lets you specify an array of delimiters. It chops up the string and records the phrases and their delimiters. Very handy.

Thanks, Joel!

[Tags: javascript_split javascript joel_weinberger ]

4 Comments »

James Boyle’s new book, The Public Domain, is an entertaining, insightful, seminal work. It’s available now for sale, reading on line for free, or downloading for free. You thus have zero excuses not to read it. And you’ll be glad you did. A book this important shouldn’t be so delightful.

[Tags: public_domain jamie_boyle james_boyle copyright copyleft creative_commons patents ]

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Amazon’s own review of the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s Alexander (the worst major movie ever?) includes the following note:

In Stone’s final cut, epic battles remain chaotic (although Alexander’s strategy is somewhat easier to follow, with on-screen titles indicating left, right, and center during his army’s greatest maneuvers)…

Yes, those are the sort of advanced techniques they just don’t teach you in film school.

[Tags: oliver_stone film alexander bad_movies ]

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Last night, my family and my brother’s family went to the outlet stores in Clinton CT at midnight when they opened. Or, let me be precise: At midnight we were waiting in the line of traffic sprawling out from the parking lot. We got one of the last spaces, and it is a bi-ig freaking parking lot.

The quarter mile of outlets store were jammed. People were lined up outside of popular stores, such as J. Crew, waiting to get in so that they could buy preppy t-shirts announcing their support of J. Crew and all that he (?) stands for, and then wait 20-30 minutes to pay for it.

I don’t know what this says about the economy. Maybe it means we’re not feeling as poor as we should. Maybe it means that we’re feeling so poor that we’ll line up to get a bargain. Maybe it means nothing.

But it sure was a pain in the ass. um, I mean, it was a shopatravaganza!

[Tags: economy meltdown black_friday ]

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Bob Walsh at Avangate posts about two companies using Twitter to talk with customers. Zappos is a particularly fun example. (Via Graeme Thickins.)

[Tags: twitter marketing market_conversations cluetrain zappos ]

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Vincent Sterken has posted his master’s thesis, which examines LibraryThing.com to understand the dynamics and utility of social tagging. It begins with an exceptionally clear backgrounder on tagging and taxonomies, and then moves to a fascinating exploration of LibraryThing’s folksonomy, including a comparison of how LibraryThing’s community and the Library of Congress classify books.

[Tags: tagging taxonomy folksonomy vincent_sterken librarything library_of_congress everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I sometimes put up a Powerpoint (well, Keynote) slide that says “Control doesn’t scale.”The assumption that large projects only succeed if they’re centrally controls led and managed turns out to have been true because we limited the scope of what we we considered realistic. You can build a Britannica using a centrally controlled system, but you could not build a Wikipedia that way.

But I know that there are some important counter-examples, so I’ll frequently add, “Except at an huge cost in expense and freedom,” for we know all too well that some regimes have managed to maintain intense control over massive populations for generations.

Today there’s an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald with Isaac Mao, pioneering Chinese blogger and Berkman fellow, in which he says the Chinese authorities are unable to keep up with increasing volume of social communications the 108M bloggers, millions in social networks, and people texting and twittering away.

So, maybe control doesn’t scale after all.

[Tags: isaac_mao control china berkman ]

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At search.twitter.com, the query “near:mumbai within:15mi” will bring you a remarkable stream. (Via Rick Levine.)

We are thinking of you, Mumbai.

[Tags: twitter mumbai ]

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Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite national holiday. Family, food, gratitude…what’s not to like?

Just as the meal is slightly more complicated for those of us who don’t eat meat, the holiday is a little more gnarly for those who don’t believe in G-d. We agnostics and atheists have all of the believers’ joy in what we have, as well as the simultaneous sad remembering of those who do not, but we don’t have anyone to thank. That’s a loss; religion as I’ve seen it practiced — my wife is an Orthodox Jew — sanctifies the everyday, which leads us to care ever more for the world we’ve been given and our companions in it.

I don’t have that sense of sanctity because I lack the sense of a Sanctifier. I am left believing that while the Renaissance distinction between Fortuna and Virtus is useful in some instances, in the final accounting when you’re stripped down to bare wood, even your virtues are accidents. If you hadn’t been born to those particular parents, in that particular time and place, with a body that can do this but not that, with the set of experiences that happened to form you, you wouldn’t have the virtues you claim as your own. It’s all Fortuna. I happened to have won the lottery: I have a healthy family, work I love, water, and a roof. I have no One to thank, but that does not make me less appreciative of what is spread on my table and aware that it could be overturned tomorrow.

I’m fine with that, especially since without Anyone to thank for singling me out for a happy life, I also don’t have Anyone to blame for leaving so many behind. That’s a more gnarly question than how to make a good vegetarian stuffing.

Happy Thanksgiving to us all.

[Tags: thanksgiving religion atheism agnosticism ]

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Here’s an odd thing.

I was sure that when Google China first started cleansing its results, a search for “tiananmen” at Google Images did not return the famous photo of the man standing in front of the line of tanks, or other photos of the Tiananmen demonstrations.

Today it does.

Even odder, I was talking with Lokman Tsui of the Berkman Center about this, and he discovered that if you search for “tiananmen” using the Chinese characters (天安门), you don’t get back photos of the demonstrations but sanitized, post-card-ish touristy photos.

On purpose? Fluke? A crack in the structure of control?

[Tags: china google tiananmen oni filtering lokman_tsui search berkman ]

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Antony Loewenstein is giving a Berkman Center lunchtime talk on “The Blogging Revolution: Going Online in Repressive Regimes.” He begins by reading a short paper. [Note: I'm live-blogging. Getting it wrong, Missing stuff. And this comes out far choppier than the actual discussion.]

In the paper he says that bloggers are at risk of being silenced in repressive regimes In Antony’s home, Australia, the PM is proposing filtering child porn and “excessively violent” sites. There has also been talk of blocking euthanasia and pro-anorexia sites. Wha next? Block Hamas sites? (Antony does not consider Hamas to be a terrorist group.) Despite all this, Australia isn’t one of the more repressive regimes when it comes to the Net. Antony’s book looks at bloggers’ attitudes toward their governments. E,.g., bloggers in the Middle East generally are angry at their governments for repressing the rise of Islamic government. There is a widespread desire to make incremental change without government involvement. Bloggers everywhere are unpacking issues governments would rather hide from view. “Blogging is not in itself revolutionary but the act of expressing yourself online can be.” Many of the bloggers he met with were aware of their international audience and hoped that would bring pressure on their regimes. They are also angry at global companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google in enabling the restrictions on the Net. “International laws and norms must be applied.” We need ethical labeling on media, as we have Fair Trade labels. And it’s not just other countries that we need to worry about it. Sen. Lieberman pressured YouTube to remove videos from supposedly Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Blogging lets people write and publish without a Western filter.”

Q: [ethanz] In your book, you look at how the rest of the world gets filtered by the Western media. You say that the blogosphere lets people see the world unfiltered. But, people aren’t queueing up to read international blogs. There isn’t enough demand for it. What’s an ideal relationship among the people raising their voices — probably not in English — and the people around the world who could change policy and structure?
A: The bloggers I met with have very popular sites within their own country. Part of my job as a journalist is to talk with other journalists and tell them they ought to be paying more attention to these voices. It doesn’t mean that they will, but it’s likely these people will have an effect. During the Olympics, over Tibet, bloggers on both sides were shouting across each other. For one thing, language is a key problem. On the positive side, newspapers ran what Arab bloggers thought about the election.
Q: [ethanz] But wouldn’t the old man-on-the-street interviews be more representative than a handful of bloggers?
A: We need both. You, Ethan, may be underestimating the effect bloggers are having on journalists.

Q: [me] Do you have examples of blogging affecting repression?
A: Egypt. Bloggers filmed torture and rape. It was distributed via mobiles. Eventually the government was forced to respond. Police torture still goes on, but now people talk about it. Also, in Iran there are far more discussions of issues such as women’s rights, religious affiliations, the Iraq War. I don’t want to overplay that, but that is going on.

Q: The effect of Al Jazeera?
A: Major. Satellite is having more effect in many ways than the Net. It reaches more people.

Q: Yes, Western media ultimately turns everything into what’s about “us.” Western media define Arabs in light of the geopolitical struggle. The press reduces my identity to whether I’m pro or against Hamas. What is a positive message we can get out about working the system to get them to report on the real cases happening on the ground?
A: The Western media sense is that the Israelis are good and the Arabs are bad. Almost all Western journalists are based in Israel. That biases them. Not every story about the Middle East has to be focused through the terrorism prism.

Q: [jillian] What about Syria? Why didn’t you write more about that?
A: I don’t the Syrian blogosphere as having as much impact on that country as the Iranian and Egyptian blogosphere does on those countries.

Q: I was born in Poland and saw the Solidarity movement go from tiny to 1/3 of the population supporting it, in just a couple of months. It was so successful not because the NY Times supported it (which it did). I haven’t seen similar movements come about through the Net or cell phones. Why is it that even though we have all of this beautiful technology, we haven’t seen anything like Solidarity happening?
A: Blogging communities generally don’t have massive mainstream support. Many of the bloggers are not dissidents. E.g., Iranian bloggers are frequently pro-regime. Blogging plays one role among many. Bloggers on their own won’t bring down a regime. Frequently the reforms are old school. It’s not easier to get people on the streets to protest. No one I spoke to is looking for a violent revolution.

My understanding is that with the advent of the Net in Islamic states, people are finding new channels to discuss their questions about Islam, instead of going to the religious authorities or your family. This is eroding the authority of traditional religious authorities. Have bloggers in Islamic states mentioned this to you?
A: Even those who criticize the state still want an Islamic state.

You say a great deal of speech comes out of the Moslem Brotherhood that represents the people better than the Egyptian government does. What should those bloggers be doing to have a bigger influence nationally and internationally?
A: There’s a struggle within the Brotherhood between moderates and hard-liners. The old guard doesn’t like showing these internal struggles. It’s not about the Brotherhood changing their message to make the West happy. To bring about greater engagement means putting a Western-friendly face on.

[From the IRC comes a strong recommendation for this post by Roland Soong about Chinese blogging.]

Q: Technology backbones?
A: Facebook and Twitter are being localized. YouTube.

Q: Should YouTube block particular videos that offend, say, the Thais. Or should they just pull out of Thailand? If they block the particulars, is that collusion?
A: I think it’s inappropriate to do this without transparency. I’d rather have them block a few sites than block all of them, but what happens next?

[I had to leave at this point ...] [Tags: berkman_antony_loewenstein blogging democracy ]

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We’re rebooting Radio Berkman, the Berkman Center’s podcast series. First up is an interview with Chris Saghoian about why you get zero hits on some celebrities when you search using Argentina’s Google or Yahoo. There’s also a two-question interview with Craig Newmark about the effect of “nerd culture.”

[Tags: berkman podcasts argentina google yahoo craigslist craig_newmark radio_berkman ]

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The Chicago Tribune actually has an article about the war we’ve been waging — and losing — in Somalia.

By the way, it’s interesting to put that article, which I think is quite good, next to Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post about Somali pirates. Who do you think is the more interesting, more knowledgeable commentator?

[Tags: somalia ethan_zuckerman piracy media ]

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Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the Chinese government has refused to let citizen journalist blogger Zhou Shuguang (known as Zola) travel outside the country. This is not the first time he’s faced the Chinese authorities. This time, he twittered it as it was happening.

Rebecca posts: “I just communicated with Zola online. I asked him how he’s feeling – he said he’s tired but he feels ok, isn’t stressed.” She is concerned, however, as we all should be.

[Tags: zola blogging Zhou_Shuguang china ]

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Saturday Night Live, which I have been watching since its first Saturday night, is the finest Tivo show around: Unwatchable live, but often excellent if watched with a fast forward button. And now that SNL is posting many of its segments online, I thought I’d save you those precious fast-forward moments by reviewing the links, in best-first order:

Clear-Rite ad. Loved it. Might have loved it more if they’d ended it before Tim’s entrance, but I’m not sure. Definitely will be on the Best of Kristin Wiig reel.

Country James Bond. Tim McGraw is excellent in this fairly funny, wandering sketch.

Keith Morrison. Funny, and would have been funnier if I’d known this was an imitation of a real guy.

Blizzard Man. Unfunny recurring character, but this one was slightly chucklish. T-Pain and Ludacris were good in it.

Turkeys. Good example of sketches that give SNL a bad name. Not funny.

Bill Clinton. Bill is a horndog. Wow, is this tired, lazy and not funny. Embarrassingly bad.

NBC is also providing an address by Rahm Emanuel as a Web extra. Predictable but slightly funny. I’d put it a giant step above Turkeys in the list.

So, now I’ve saved you 83 minutes of your precious time. You’re welcome. [Tags: snl saturday_night_live reviews comedy ]

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If you log into your Google account when searching (you can tell if you’re logged in by seeing if it puts your login name at the top of the page), Google has enhanced its results page with new features. The features are slightly useful (and largely mirror Wikia Search), but they also commit two rookie mistakes. Surprising, coming from Google.

The enhancements let you move a particular result to the top of the rankings, so that next time you search for that term, you’ll get that result first; doing so does not affect the results for anyone else (although Google isn’t ruling out that possibility). You can also demote, add or remove a result from the list the next time you do that search, or write a public comment. These are features some of us may find sometimes useful.

So, what’s my beef? (What are my beeeves?)

First, opting us in is obnoxious enough, but not giving us a way to opt out is unsupportable. Where’s the big “No thanks” button? (If you put your “I heart hackers” t-shirt on, you can use GreaseMonkey to turn SearchWiki off.)

Second, the results page shows you the nicknames of other users who have voted the page up. So, now the whole world will see that “dweinberger” not only searched for “Angelina Jolie” but thumbs-upped the page of closeups of her tattoos? Guess who just changed his nickname to something less identifiable! This is a feature without value — the list of names isn’t clickable or complete or tell you how many people voted it up — unless you recognize someone’s nickname, in which case it has negative value.

So, here’s a new question for Jeff Jarvis: Not “What would Google do?” but “What was Google thinking?” [Tags: google privacy searchwiki wikia_search ]

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An article in PC Gamer is titled: “Birth of a Nation: Does Eve Online’s Budding Democracy Represent the First Virtual Sovereign State?” Well, no, because the Council of Stellar Management that as elected by gamers does not have any real authority. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating case of governance…and hard to generalize from. That is, it’s a great example, but I’m not sure of what.

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Watching the YouTube of Obama’s weekly talk, in which he promises a huge stimulus package focused on rebuilding our schools, fixing our infrastructure, and investing in alternative energies, I had a sense of emotional deja vu … I had had that feeling before. It’s just so rational and obvious that we should invest in those three areas, since they all build a sustainable economic future. I knew I’d heard some president say things as straightforwardly right as that.

Yep, I was having a Jed Bartlett moment. And many more to come, I hope.

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I’ve published a new issue of my free newsletter

The main article is the text of a talk I gave a few weeks ago in Beijing at a one-day seminar/conference for the people in the Chinese government who are putting together sites — portals, usually — to provide government services. These were, I was told, the government people most excited about the opportunities brought by an open Internet. I gave the closing keynote. The previous speakers, from China, S. Korea and Denmark, had expanded the audience’s practical imaginations. I would’ve if I could’ve. Instead, I tried to resolve the seeming contradiction and doubtless cross-cultural meaninglessness that the Internet is weird and the Internet feels homey. It occurred to me afterward that that is the theme of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

You can read it here.

[Tags: china internet small_pieces ]

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LOLfed — all the economic news you want, now in LOLcat.

[Tags: economics lolcat humor ]

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From today’s Boston Globe, about Framingham, MA:

For five weeks, butcher-quality cuts of red meat – it appears to be beef – have been appearing regularly beneath a tree in the historic Town Centre Common

It’s be fun to see this ripped-from-the-headlines taken up by, say, Monk and Dexter.

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A three-year research project, headed by Mimi Ito, involving 28 researchers and 800 subjects, and sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, finds that the stereotypical idea of the Internet as a soul-devouring, anti-social wasteland for our kids is just plain wrong. If you suspected otherwise, now you know you were right.

The report makes a key distinction that helps explain some of the confusion we’ve been living through. From the press release:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Here’s one interesting observation, from the overview:

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority.

The study’s implications for education are significant. From the overview:

Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally.

[Tags: internet_sociology macarthur_foundation education digital_natives ]v

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Monty Python has announced that it’s making all many of its works available for free on YouTube. Yay!

What is the best Python-referencing headline for a post announcing this? “A hovercraft full of reels”? “Not pining for the fee(ords)”? “Wring out your dead”?

[Tags: monty_python doep puzzle ]

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WhoVoted.net tells you who voted, based on public election records. So far it’s only ratting out those dirty stinking voters in four states (Florida, Idaho, Ohio, and Washington).

Who voted and who contributed money to campaigns has always been public info in the US. But when you had to blow dust off of ledger pages in the basement of your town hall, we didn’t feel quite so exposed. Welcome to the fishbowl!

[Tags: democracy elections transparency ]

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I gave a lecture at my alma mater, the University of Toronto, a few weeks ago, at the Faculty of Information. The video is here. (Nit: The slides have the wrong font.)

[Tags: university_of_toronto knowledge moi_moi_moi ]

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Harvard Free Culture, ROFLCon, and Public Radio Exchange Proudly Present…

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY TWO: THE SECRET HEADQUARTERS EDITION
A Gathering Of Boston Tech

November 29th, 2008, 8:00 – 12:00
Berkman Squared, 50 Church Street, Cambridge MA
RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1369339/

Boston is full of cool Internet people. Why aren’t they meeting each other?

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY is Boston’s monthly party gathering hackers, activists, artists, designers, nonprofits, startups, academics and general geekery to hang out and connect with one another.

*No agenda, no “networking,” no presentations. Just beverages, food, ideas and cool people.
*Best of all the price is free, just like your courtesy black helicopter flight to A Secure Undisclosed Location

*This time: come out and meet Boston’s Secret Masters of Hidden Hackspace, Homebrew Mad Science, and Cyber Revolution
*Also: hear about our scheme to rent a decommissioned missile silo. And how you can too, on less than $10 bucks a month. (No, seriously).

With Featured Guests and Organizations:
*Jason Bobe, (DIYBio)
*Meredith Garniss and Andrew Sempere,(Willougby and Baltic)
*Alex Hornstein, (NUBLabs) (FabLab)
*David Weinberger, (Joho The Blog) (The Berkman Center For Internet and Society)
*Jake Shapiro, (The Public Radio Exchange)
*Jason Scott (Textfiles)
*Matt Lee (The Free Software Foundation)

[Tags: berkman boston party ]

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Michael Heller, from Columbia University, is giving a Berkman lunch-time talk on his book, Gridlock Economy. He says the nutshell version is that when too many people own pieces of one thing, no one can use it. Too much ownership creates gridlock, he says. [Note: I'm live-blogging, getting things wrong, missing stuff, introducing typos, etc.]

Example of gridlock: Too many owners of fragments of mortgages leads to a meltdown because there are too many people for renegotiation of the loans.

Another example: Too many patents to deal with to make advances in bio-tech. There are about 40,000 DNA patents now. Patents have gone up, but fewer “pills in bottles” to cure people. The patents are upstream from the work done to actually save people’s lives.

Another example: “What is the most underused natural resource in America?” A: Spectrum. 90% in this country is dead air. We haven’t updated our allocation system since the 1920s. Geographic licenses with restricted uses and no transfers. That makes it extremely difficult to assemble national wireless networks. We are now almost out of the top twenty for broadband.

Another example: Why do we waste so much time in airports? Why not build more runways and airports? Air travel was deregulated in 1978, and since then only one new airport has been built. If we have 25 new runways, it would end gridlock. But every community is able to block the assemblage of land you need.

We could move from 1% to 20% of energy from wind power, but we can’t set up the transmission from one place to another because of gridlock issues.

Rap no longer raps over samples. Gridlock caused by the recording industry “trying to monetize every shard.”

All of these problems are the same problem. There used to be a fairly tight link between the patent and the product, the land and the subdivision, etc. “That’s the old style economy.” The new style is a funnel. The new style economy is about assembling resources. “The breakthroughs come from assembling multiple pieces of protected property.” The same is true in arts, history, documentaries. “The cutting edge is mashups, is remixes.” “Even with land, the most socially valuable projects require the separate assembly of pieces of property.” But ownership has not caught up with this.

One of the great opportunities is figuring out new tools for assembling resoures, and for updating the structure of ownership to conform to the new structure of innovation.

Tragedy of the commons is that when there’s no clear ownership, shared property may get overused. This was a powerful concept when it was introduced in the 1960s. I was a turning point for the environmental movement because they could see that a bunch of resources issues were really structurally the same. It was also the spur in the push towards privatization: Private property was seen as the solution to the tragedy of the commons: If you own the lake, you have an incentive not to take the last fish out of it. But, privatization can overshoot. But, you can get the tragedy of the anti-commons: Too many owners and not enough use. These tragedies are often invisible: you don’t see the waste of what you’re not using.

Michael’s aim is to make the tragedy of the anti-commons visible by roping together many instances to show they’re structurally the same.

We need to reform spectrum allocation, he says. Patent hasn’t been structurally reformed since 1952.

Q: Pharma and biotech disagree on patent policy. Pharma is more like to change its view. Why?
A: Pharma wants to protect its current pipeline, so it tends to favor strong patents. They are willing to sacrifice more speculative research. Biotech companies like to show VCs that they have patents. They worry about weakening patents.
A: [Jim, who's written a book on this] Molecules are clearly identifiable. But it’s much harder with software and prcoesses.

Q: [jim] The biotech’s having problems, not mainly because of patents. The joke is that a biotech’s main products are patents. That aside, where’s the evident than the anti-commons is a real problem?
A: So far the best evidence is from Walsh, Cohen. They interviewed scientists who said the anti-commons is not a problem. They’re not blocked by patent law. So, this goes against my thesis. But, those studies wouldn’t get at my concerns. Scientists uniformly say that they simply pirate dozens of patents. That works until they get sued. And the Walsh study doesn’t consider commercial R&D. In pharma, they’d rather extend their current drugs. I don’t think I’ve proven that gridlock is the crucial issue, but it seems to be an issue. By not changing the patent law you’re implicitly making policy as well.

Q: Does what you describe impact innovation driven by money or across the board?
A: Across the board. The open source model gets past this. But even assembling multiple open source licenses can lead to gridlock.

Q: We had an open source CEO summit at Harvard last Friday. There was consensus that this more open approach to sw development would help them economically. Between the commons and the anti-commons, is there a commons that isn’t tragic?
A: Sure. My aim is to encourage people to come up with ways of overcoming the problems, once the problems are visible.

[yochai benkler] This is fabulous. Can you say more about what you think the solution is?For anti-commons to be the problem, you have to assume the problem isn’t with property itself. Is the solution a better idea of property? A better understanding of rights? Transaction costs? Is this about the rapid change of uses so you’re always be behind? How do we move ahead? E.g., what do we do about spectrum? How do you tell what to do? Can you think about this independent of the particular resource?
A: So, Yochai in a polite way is saying, “So what? What do we do about it?” E.g., we all agree that the current telecom model is terrible. Everyone loses. Should the solution be full privitization or a commons? If we have a technological way to get past the scarcity of spectrum, then creating private property is the wrong solution. The freedom-enhancing way is to have a commons, if we can get past scarcity. I am agnostic about this because I don’t know if we have solved the problem of scarcity. But I hope my book moves the debate forward by providing another way of showing what’s wrong.
Q: [yochai] I think the solutions lie in the particulars of the domain. The range for me is models of appropriate based on relations (software services) relative to appropriate based on units that are relatively stable. For me, the anticommons problem is a subset of the spectrum problem, in which rapid innovation renders obsolete. The real problem is that spectrum isn’t a resource. Information doesn’t fall on the floor and get lost.

Q: The public is acquainted with gridlock but frame it through government ownership or intervention, with gridlock arising from regulation. How does your framework frame intervention?

Q: In pharma, ownership incentivizes development. Can you break gridlock into communication and action? You can tell people that the 12 owners of a patent that they’re blocking development. Action would be getting them to do something about it. How do you decide whose valuation is more important?

Q: To what degree is the gridlocked society a description of a set of problems or whether it’s a metaphor. If the latter, where does it get too broad? My mortgage doesn’t really resemble my ideas. What’s the larger mechanism here?

A: On politics: There are lots of areas we deliberately design in gridlock, e.g., criminal justice system or preventing parks from being developed. There’s also regulatory gridlock that stops anything from being built.
On limiting scarcity: When is the right measure the subjective one that lets someone refuse to give up property, and when should you just have to pay the market price? It’s an old question and I don’t have a general answer.
Is it a metaphor? I think there’s more commonality in these diverse areas of the economy. So it’s partially an organizing metaphor, but it’s also meant to describe a new way the economy works. [Tags: berkman economy property michael_heller ]

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Meet the Rockstar of SEO

[Tags: marketing pr ]

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If spoilers were as incompetently directed and edited as Quantum of Solace:

Kwantom of Solars begins with this bigg car chase where it luks like a heliokopter is going to smash into a tunnel, but it turns out that the haliockropter is rally just where the camera is. Anyways, Jammes Bond lives at the end of the caar chase. Oh, but first there’s this carr chaise where three carrs are all the same, even the colorr is the same because they’re black, and they’re filmed like all quick and everything. So, one of the carz is going real fast, and another car is oh and there’s a truck, but it’s all smudgy in the shooting, so another carr or maybe the first carr is shooting at the second smudge and then the first smduge, no wait, it was the second no wait it was the third, well, no then the third smudge would be shooting at itself, anyway the blurry one is now the traffic is going the other way and there’s a truck and two of the smudges are clunking up against one and other, and wait one of them probully has Jumms Bornd in it and twank twank you here the zounds of them bullits twanking and it’s really exxciting what harppened?

[Tags: movies james_bond quantum_of_solace spoilers marc_forster incompetent_directors humor ]

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I’m enjoying watching various sub-cultures appropriate Obama as one of their own. Nerds, basketball fans, fantasy football leaguers, Blackberry owners, Mac owners, anti-torture believers in the Constitution…

[Tags: politics obama ]

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Root canal

My burning bone
magnified by proximity
smells sweet,
oaky,
Chardonnay.

On a fall day
like this
distance once rendered
the concentration
of molecules
the same.

Strong measures
were in the air.

[Tags: poetry root_canal ]

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In case you missed it:

Watch CBS Videos Online

[Tags: obama ]

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From 8:02 until 8:58 this morning, I was in the care of an excellent endodentist, having a root canal. At the end of that hour, I was presented with a bill for $1,080, a number I associate more with high definition TVs than with hourly wages.

My endodentist was excellent. She’s highly skilled and had great chair-side manner, narrating each step, and preparing me for every delightful little surprise ( “You’ll feel a dull thud as I jam this this phillips-head screwdriver into your tooth, handle first.” “The smell of your own body burning may be a little pungent.”) I am old enough to remember when root canal was the standard measure of pain, just as “the length of a football field” is the standard measure of distance and “as many books as in the Library of Congress” is the standard measure of volume, so I have no complaints about a procedure that has become merely uncomfortable with occasional sharp twinges.

But $1,080 an hour? In Boston, that’s seems to be the going rate, albeit at the high end. On the other hand, after dental insurance, it only cost me $1,080….because there’s no practical way for me to get dental insurance.

I seriously don’t understand the pricing model. The endodentist is part of my dentist’s general practice. She shares the facilities and uses the same rooms. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of complex special equipment involved, outside of some rasps, a keyhole saw, and a cash register. She’s had some specialized training, but are root canals really that much more complex than the range of procedures my general dentist can do, from reconstructing a tooth to diagnosing gum problems? Meanwhile, the endodentist is in danger of getting repetitive stress syndrome from doing the same motions — drill, scrape, fill, phone her broker — over and over.

Is it pure scarcity that drives the prices up? At those prices, why is there a scarcity? And why aren’t other dental procedures broken off and priced as exorbitantly? Or is this a residue of the days when root canals were so painful that people wanted to feel like they were getting their money’s worth? [Tags: endodentists root_canals capitalism health_care dentistry_crabby_after_a_root_canal i_don't_understand_economics ]

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“…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years”

That’s from a preliminary 70-page review of the literature on the topic. Actual research, not scare stories or assumptions. The draft was put together primarily by Andrew Schrock and danah boyd (of the Berkman Center), for the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. It of course finds some important problems — for example, “the Internet increases children’s risk of ‘unwanted’ (accidental or inadvertent) exposure to sexual material” — but “Threats involving the Internet have not overtaken other harmful issues that youth encounter.” There’s lots and lots of details in the paper. For example:

On the topic of sexual solicitation, studies show that things are either improving or have been shown to be not be as prevalent and distressing to minors as initially anticipated. Between 2001 and 2005, the proportion of youth receiving unwanted Internet sexual solicitations went down (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2006), although this decline was only seen among white youth and those living in higher income households (Mitchell, Wolak, & Finkelhor, 2007a).

The Task Force will publish its findings in January.

[Tags: internet child_safety ]

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I’ve come to look forward to Jason Linkins ultra-snarky live-blogging of the Sunday morning news talk shows. Very funny. Here’s today’s.

[Tags: news jason_linkins snark politics ]

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Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur are writing a book on innovative business models that’s due out in May. That seems to them to be too far away, so they’re thinking that maybe for $24 you could get a subscription to their book that provides:

* first & exclusive access to raw book content

* influence authors

* x installments of book chunks (in a non-linear order – as we write them)

* 50% discount off the final book (approx.)

* participate in exclusive book chunk webinars

* access to templates

* being part of the business model innovation community

Alex calls this idea a prototype and welcomes comments, as well as suggestions for what other benefits the authors might offer. (He does not require that you pay a subscription to read his blog and comment on this idea itself, however. Recursion is not always a good idea.)

I’m glad they’re floating this idea — because floating ideas rises all tides? — although I am skeptical. This doesn’t sound like a book that’s so urgent that people will pay a 50% premium ($24 + half off the printed version) for some number of out-of-sequence rough drafts. Of course, I could be wrong about that, especially since about a dozen people in the comments to Alex’s post have already said they’d sign up. But, since the authors benefit from comments from early readers, this business model also has a cost to the authors. It limits the community, but maybe it will also gel the community. We won’t know until we know.

These social projects are all in the details. In 2000-1, I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joinedcompletely in public, posting my current draft every night. I got some excellent commentary and during the dark days of writing that book I received encouragement that was quite important to me. But I inadvertently structured the engagement in way that discouraged readers. The writing process was Penelope-like, so I think I would have done better to have updated the site only when I had finished a complete draft of a chapter. Readers get understandably discouraged by commenting on a draft that is undrafted the next day.

I wrote the next book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, offline for reasons I can’t articulate, except to say that I felt that the book posed a challenge to me as a craftsperson. So, I blogged about the ideas in the book and floated pieces from it in various forms, but I composed the actual text with the door closed. I’m not recommending that. I’m thrilled by the fact that writers now routinely break out of the old “private ’til it’s published” constraint. But there are many ways to do that, as well as times when you shouldn’t do it. There may even be times when you should charge $24 for the service.

All ideas are good until proven otherwise. [Tags: business_models publishing writing Alex_Osterwalder Yves_Pigneur books media ]

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Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach are heading Obama’s FCC transition team.

OMG. This makes me so happy. Not only are they amazingly knowledgeable about the issues, they also share Obama’s political temperament: Strong beliefs, an ability to listen, a respect for others that is manifested as gentleness, and a practicality that carries them past mere ideology.

Change is coming to the FCC.

[Tags: fcc susan_crawford kevin_werbach obama net_neutrality ]

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From the AP (via my daughter Leah):

Amy Taylor filed for divorce when she discovered her husband cheating in Second Life — an online community where players adopt personas called avatars, mingle with others and teleport themselves into a series of artificial worlds.

“I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game,” Taylor told the South West News Service press agency. “It looked really affectionate. He confessed he’d been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks, and said our marriage was over and he didn’t love me any more.”…

[Tags: second_life marriage ]

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Craig Newmark has dropped by the Berkman Center to chat. He begins by asking us what we want him to talk about. A voice opts for the history of CraigsList.com. [NOTE: I'm live-blogging, typing quickly, not correcting typos, getting things wrong, missing entire paragraphs, etc.]

He says that he got a better education than he needed at Case-Western. In early 1995 he wanted to give back some of what he received, he started some mailing lists, including for events, AnonSalon (a fundraiser) and others. People suggested new categories, including apartments. He was using Pine for email, but it started breaking at 240 mailing addresses. He was going to call the list “SFEvents,” but people said they already call it “CraigsList” and that it’s a brand. Craig didn’t know what a brand is, but he stuck with it.

He says he was a literal nerd in HS. He was not on the AV Squad [I was] but he was on the debating team, which led him to delusions about the effectiveness of rational discourse. He says he’s now comfortable with being a nerd.

Eventually he realized he could turn emails into HTML, an instant Web-publishing solution. Over the next few years, he refined the software. If a task took more than an hour a day, he would automate it. At the end of 1997, he hit three milestones: 1. A million page views per month (he hit a billion in 2004 and now is headed toward 13B. There are 26 people at the company). 2. Microsoft Sidewalk asked him to run banner ads. He turned them down because “I am an overpaid programmer.” 3. People volunteered to help. But it failed because he didn’t lead. So, in 1999 he turned it into a business.

He hired Jim Buckmaster “who is a full foot taller than I am.” He’s a really good manager. “I suck as a manager.” The culture there is that people make suggestions, they listen, and they decide what to act on. Also, it’s continued to try to be simple. And they decided to charge people who are already paying but for less effective ads, so they started charging people listing jobs and real estate brokers. “They asked us to charge them to cut down on certain types of spam, and on the need to post and repost.”

He’s always surprised people are willing to pay for what he does for fun. He’s generalized it to nerd values, including: once you have a comfortable living, it’s more fun to change things than to make more money. His business model: “We can do really well by treating people well and doing some good.”

He says he’s now going to half time as a customer service rep, after 14 years of fulltime. You sometimes see ugly things in customer service, he says. E.g., they saw ugly racist stuff during the campaign. “That takes something out of you.”

“I’ve only regretted giving my email address out once.” It was when he was on The View.

Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. “It has to do with the culture of trust we have.” There are bad guys but they’re a tiny percentage. “People look out for one another.” E.g., you can flag abusive ads. If enough people vote for it, it’s removed automatically. “That’s a flawed mechanism,” but it works better than not doing it. As Jon Stewart says, (Craig says) you do hear from extremists, but that’s because moderates have stuff to do. You should treat people the way you want to be treated. Corollaries: Live and let live, and give the other person a break. Nothing profound, he says, but it’s hard to follow through. “We’re trying to listen to people still.” “We decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them.” (567 cities now.) Novel ideas are rare. Most of what’s on the site is based on community feedback, although the child care section was Craig’s idea.

“I have no vision at all, but I know how to keep things simple, and I listen some.”

“We’re a good example of how people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad.” On his way to One Web Day he realized, “I’m a community organizer. I’m more of a meta-organizer.”

Nothing about CraigsList is, in his view, altruistic. It’s just people giving another person a break. “I figured I should extend this to other areas.” E.g., “I help people smarter than me help figure out the future of journalism.” E.g., Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.

He’s also interested in grassroots democracy. Face to face is a better way of communicating but it doesn’t scale. On the Net, we get millions of people working together to make stuff happens. “This changes the nature of our democracy,” so that grassroots democracy can address the traditional problems with representative democracy. Craig thanks Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. Now we have this big grassroots infrastructure. What do we do with it? “2008 is the new 1776.”

All sorts of things are happening. “It used to be that the guys with money, power and guns got to write the history and our narratives about ourselves. With Wikipedia, everyone has a shot at doing that…It changes the whole course of human history.” We are at a “singularity,” he says. We’re living in a time like 1776. It’s happening faster because the Internet accelerates everything. “I’m trying to play a microscopic part in it.”

He’s involved with the SunlightFoundation.org. He’s working with ConsumerReports. He was involved a little bit in SF’s 311 number. “Mundane, but it’s part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government.” A bunch of this is in the Obama platform, he says, and we could see some of it next year.

Veterans have been treated badly by the White House, he says, so he’s on the IAVA.org board. To screen claims faster, maybe they shouldn’t care about fraud so much, since veterans and their families are suffering as they wait for their claims to be processed.

As a nerd, it’s a “crime against nature” to be involved in promotion or communication. But he does it anyway. For one thing, he likes the idea of more people getting involved in service. “I do have one message for the kids: Stay off of my lawn.” :)

“The Constitution will be restored on January 20.”

He says focuses on people who can get things done. He lacks patience for those who can’t get things done.

Q: Are there any ways Craigslist has gone in directions you couldn’t have imagined?
A: I never tried to foresee them so it’s hard to answer. I had to have my arms twisted to create personals. They’ve done much more good than problems. Like “missed connections.” I’ve been asked to perform marriages. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise. I have no vision. I’ve only responded to feedback. It’s all very surreal, but that’s life now.

Q: Why did CL succeed in the early days, as opposed to doing it over newsgroups?
A: Part of it was that everyone understood mail and Web browsers, while newsgroups were hard to used. And newsgroups were ad-spammed badly.We have a problem with spam, and last week we announced a suit against a company that sells ad-spam software. We aren’t litigious but we thought that was a good way to do it.

Q: Has it been a problem keeping CL simple?
A: Keeping it simple is a habit. There are times when we have to debate whether there should be a specific category, or should people have to register with a valid email on the message boards, but I don’t know how to do things except simply.

Q: What about the deal with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.. How consensual was the deal?
A: Jim knows the details. He felt strongly about it. There was genuine abuse of our site involving minors. We’re not law enforcement professionals, so we got advice from the real experts. There is that sort of abuse and we have to help out. We just started charging for erotic services and we’ll contribute all that to philanthropies. And how do you manage anonymity? Sometimes you need it, for whistleblowers. We tend to the anonymity side. But congresspeople want to know that an email comes from a constituent rather than a mass spammed email. We’re talking about ways to balance anonymity and authentication, but we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against an oppressive government.

Q: Does your exposure to some of the uglier aspects has led you to see a more expansive role for government?
A: I have become more balanced, but mainly because I’ve been doing customer service. The best label I can figure is “moderate Libertarian.” I’m looking for a better label. I’m increasing interested in private-public partnerships since I’ve seen market solutions don’t always work, like for health insurance. I’m in the Net neutrality debate and see people misrepresenting it on purpose. (He adds that most lobbyists are ok, and a small number are predatory.)

Q: You’re in many cities but it still seems to be geared towards regional breakdowns. On purpose?
A: Initially we just followed our gut. CL is like a flea market. People get together to do commerce, but really just to socialize. Penelope Green talked about our site being a market in the ancient sense: chaotic and vividly human.

[me] Why doesn’t your company have meetings?

A: We have some. But we minimize them. A meeting of more than six people is already going to be dysfunctional (small group comms theory). Effective communication is a meeting is tough. This also reflects my impatience, a flaw as a human being.

What will be the future of the Communications Decency Act?
A: This is the part of law that says that a site isn’t responsible for what people say on the site, so long as they take some reasonable measures. I think it will stay and possibly be improved.

Q: Have you had any negative interactions with the police?
A: Not really. Once the FBI called asking if we knew there was an ad for plutonium on our site. The result was that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The police just want to be treated decently and not jerked around. That’s our customer service idea.

Q: Why can’t people search for subsections?
A: Mysql chews up server time doing these searches. We have some ideas for how to do this, but there are bigger things they’re working on.

[Tags: craiglist craig_newmark customer_service community_organizer cluetrain berkman ]

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