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December 31, 2008

 

My daily affirmation

As 2008 amazingly still finds ways to get worse and worse right up until the ball drops, I pick up my spirits by setting aside a moment every day to think about what it would be like if we were facing the inauguration of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Ahhhh. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

[Tags: obama ]

Tagged with: obama • politics Date: December 31st, 2008

3 Comments »

December 30, 2008

 

Animal vids

Great set of user-chosen top animal videos of the year over at the Wired blog.

It makes you realize how inadequate our categories are for understanding animals. For example, is the gibbon “playing”? There’s no way we can answer that question, because if the gibbon could speak, we couldn’t understand it.

But the videos are durn cute!

[Tags: animals videos wittgenstein ]

Tagged with: animals • entertainment • philosophy • videos • wittgenstein Date: December 30th, 2008

2 Comments »

Net Neutralities defined

Ed Felten offers a brief and useful taxonomy of Net neutrality. The discussion in the comments is helpful, too. So are David Isenberg’s additional thoughts.

Before the anti-NN folks pounce on the admitted ambiguity of the term, I have two comments.

First, free speech is even harder to pin down and apply, but it’s still a principle worth supporting. (Preemptive defense: No, I’m not saying free speech and NN are equally important. I’m making a point about the logic of the argument.)

Second, as far as I’m concerned, the core of NN, and underneath all three of Ed’s flavors, is the idea that the network should be equally open to all ideas. Or, put differently, those who provide access to the Net should not be allowed to favor some bits over others. Put thirdly, no one should be allowed to decide for others what the Net is for.

None of these formulations are easy to apply. Even doing a first-in-first-out prioritization favors some bits over others. But, this is exactly the same sort of argument one has about free speech: “Oh yeah, Mr. Free Speecher. So you think spies ought to be able to blab state secrets, and there shouldn’t be laws against perjury…?” NN is the right principle. How it’s applied is a matter of justice and politics.

[Tags: net_neutrality ed_felten david_isenberg ]

Tagged with: digital rights • net neutrality Date: December 30th, 2008

20 Comments »

December 29, 2008

 

Open for Questions round 2

The Obama transition site has started up a second round of “Open for Questions,” in which anyone can pose a question, we get to vote on our favorites, and the transition team responds.

Here’s the first round.

I like the symbolism of this. It signals not only an interest in open government, but a trust in citizens, a willingness to experiment, and a desire to put technology to use. But, I hope this time they answer more of the questions.

[Tags: obama egov change.gov ]

Tagged with: digital culture • egov • obama • politics Date: December 29th, 2008

1 Comment »

Bill Kristol: Sounding vs. Being Controversial

Bill Kristol is affable. He’s a good guest on The Daily Show. But he’s been a disappointing addition to the NY Times roster of columnists.

For example, his second most recent contribution is vapid. It’s not just that it rambles so much that it achieves a Zen-like topical emptiness. When he alights for a moment on an actual issue, he’d rather be counter-intuitive than coherent. Here’s how it opens:

O.K., O.K. … you don’t have to. But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:

WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?

CHENEY: I did.

WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?

CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.

No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (”I thought he merited it.”) Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man. And a thoughtful one, because he knows that justice is sometimes too harsh, and should be tempered by civility.

Does that last sentence make sense given that Cheney is refusing to apologize for his lack of civility? Does Kristol really want to stand by a vice president telling a senator to go fuck himself? If I were the NY Times, I’d worry about a columnist that left readers wondering if he’s mistakenly left out a “not.”

His latest column is a series of things he likes about the planned inauguration. It’s nice to hear this sort of bipartisanship, but the column is really a series of cheap shots at liberals and Obama. And that’d be ok if the cheap shots were amusing or particularly insightful. Instead, it comes off as passive-aggressive and lazy.

It’s not enough for a columnist to define himself as out of place on the NY Times op-ed page. We need some content, some argument, something worth disagreeing with. Surely the Times can find a conservative columnist who gives a damn. [Tags: william_kristol bill_kristol ny_times nyt media ]


[Later] Call me fair and balanced, but here’s Glenn Greenwald’s appropriately scathing criticism of David Gregory’s softball questioning of the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Glenn doesn’t bother pointing out that Gregory went on to question David Axelrod mainly about Gov. Blago and Pastor Wright, and then remembered there was this little problem with the economy that was maybe worth mentioning.

Tagged with: media • nyt • politics Date: December 29th, 2008

1 Comment »

December 27, 2008

 

Informationalized conversation

In his important 1996 book, Using Language, Herbert H. Clark opens Chapter 7 by analyzing two lines of conversation between ” a British academic” and “a prospective student”:

When Arthur says “u:h what modern poets have you been reading -” he doesn’t want Beth merely to understand what he means — that he wants to know what modern poets she has been reading. He wants her to take up his question, to answer it, to tell him what modern poets she has been reading. She could refuse even though she has understood. To mean something, you don’t have to achieve uptake, and to understand something, you don’t have to take it up. Still, Beth’s uptake is needed if she and Arthur are to achieve what Arthur has publicly set out for them to do at this point in their interview. p. 191

My first response, and probably yours, is: Well, duh But that’s the point. The fact that Clark has to explicitly state that we ask questions usually in order to get a response is evidence of just how deeply we’ve adopted the information-based paradigm that says that communication consists of the transfer of messages from one head to another. Language is a social tool used by embodied creatures to accomplish complex and emergent projects in a shared world. The transfer of messages is the least of it.

[Tags: herbert_clark language information communications conversation ]

Tagged with: communications • conversation • infohistory • information • language • philosophy Date: December 27th, 2008

1 Comment »

December 26, 2008

 

Jason Linkins’ worst media moments of the year

Jason Linkins is once again snarkalicious.

[Tags: media_jason_linkins ]

Tagged with: humor • media Date: December 26th, 2008

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The Lincoln Memorial rededication

Like every New Yorker reader, I am perpetually behind. But I’ve been greatly enjoying reading issues from before the election. Knowing how it turns out relieves all the stress.

It also deepens the joy. Thomas Mallon has a terrific article (book review, actually) in the Oct. 13 issue, about how our view of Lincoln has changed over the years. For example, when the Lincoln Memorial was first opened, in 1922, Lincoln was celebrated as the Great Unifier, not the Great Emancipator. Here’s how the article concludes:

In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.

[Tags: lincoln slavery racism obama hope good_writing ]

Tagged with: culture • hope • lincoln • obama • politics • racism • slavery Date: December 26th, 2008

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December 25, 2008

 

Two order of magnitude quizzes: Crowns ‘n’ Crosswords

You win this type of quiz, invented by my friend Paul English, if you come within an order of magnitude of the right answer.

1. In Boston, the going rate for a dental crown seems to be $1,200-$1,600. That’s just for the crown, not for the labor. What is the dentist’s markup on the crown? That is, how much does the dentist pay the lab for it?

2. How much does the New York Times pay the creator of one of their daily crossword puzzles?

The answers are in the first comment. So is the prize for winning, i.e., nothing but the answer.

[Tags: quiz dentist crossword ]

Tagged with: crossword • dentist • puzzles • quiz Date: December 25th, 2008

3 Comments »

December 24, 2008

 

Christmastime for the Jews

I love mornings. The hour before my family gets up is so quiet and calm. No phone calls. Just a cup of coffee and a keyboard. Ahhh.

That’s how the days before, during and after Christmas feel to me as an American Jew.

Oh, I could do without the cultural assumption that we all celebrate Christmas. I could do without the decorations in every mall and in most towns. I could do without the endless cycle of Christmas jingles. Most of all, I could do without the secret belief that Jews really do enjoy all that Christmasy stuff. The truth is that this Jew does not.

But, at least it all culminates in a couple of days of quiet and calm. Christmas is a lovely time of the year for Jews in America, not because of all the decorations and the ho-ho-ho’s, but because it takes the Christians off the streets and shuts the whole place down. While Christians focus on the sweetness of their faith and deal with passive-aggressive fruitcakes, our calendars are empty and our cellphones are mute. Beautiful.

(PS: NBC has carefully removed the perfect SNL short, Christmastime for the Jews, by Robert Smigel, from YouTube for copyright reasons, thus immensely benefiting NBC’s bottom line. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Jerks. (And if NBC has in fact posted it, I hereby preemptively apologize.) [Ten Minutes Later: See Comments 1 and 2 for the apology])

[Tags: christmas jews ]

Tagged with: christmas • culture • jews Date: December 24th, 2008

9 Comments »

December 23, 2008

 

Radio Berkman podcast: Are we-media doing what they-media used to do?

On the Radio Berkman podcast this week, Persephone Miel, lead author on the Media Re:Public paper series, talks about what’s missing from the new journalism landscape. Then, Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, discusses the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. Finally, Jessica Clark, Director of the Future of Public Media Project gives her top five predictions for digital media in 2009. All in 25 minutes.

Radio Berkman will be back next year, thanks to Daniel Jones, the producer, who has been doing a fantastic job with it.

[Tags: berkman media citizen_media participatory_media we_media podcasts ]

Tagged with: berkman • digital culture • media • podcasts Date: December 23rd, 2008

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Newton TAB publisher sues New York Times Co. over Web site

The national media syndicate GateHouse Media owns 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts, and runs the Wicked Local local news sites. The Boston Globe is not part of GateHouse Media. The Globe has started its own local sites, such as this one in Newton, MA. The Globe’s local sites run lots of news from the Globe, but they also aggregate local headlines from other sources, including from GateHouse. Those headlines link to the original sites, of course.

So, GateHouse now has sued the Globe’s parent for copyright and trademark infringement, because GateHouse would prefer that no one know about or care about what it writes.

GateHouse is apparently unsure of how this whole Web thang works. Plus, the company’s lawyers skipped class the day Fair Use was discussed. Bad combination. Bad for GateHouse. Bad for the Web.

By the way, the title of this post is the headline from the Newton Tab, a GateHouse publication.

PS: There’s some feisty coverage of this in Cape Cod Today. [Tags: copyright copyleft boston boston_globe gatehouse fair_use ]

Later: Dan Gillmor raises good points, unsurprisingly. He usefully complicates the issue.

Later: Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has written up some preliminary thoughts. These are some topnotch lawyers and legal writers, so that’s the pond in which you’ll want to do your initial dives.

Tagged with: boston • copyleft • copyright • digital rights • everythingIsMiscellaneous • gatehouse • media Date: December 23rd, 2008

3 Comments »

Free the metadata!

The University of Huddersfield is making publicly available the metadata about the circulation of its books — 3 million transactions — over the past thirteen years. This includes a book’s ISBN, number of times it’s been checked out, by which academic department. (It does not include information about individual borrowers.)

BTW, the library used LibraryThing’s ISBN lookup service to derive some of the ISBNs, and it includes “FRBR-ish” data, i.e., other books that may be closely related.

(Thanks to Seb Schmoller’s post for the tip.)

[Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous librarything metadata ]

Tagged with: education • everythingIsMiscellaneous • folksonomy • libraries • librarything • metadata Date: December 23rd, 2008

1 Comment »

December 22, 2008

 

Four hands one guitar

Two of the hands are especially good. This is a fun video.

[Tags: guitar youtube ]

Tagged with: guitar • misc • youtube Date: December 22nd, 2008

1 Comment »

BugVonHippel

BugLabs has named a breakout board after Eric von Hippel, open innovation guru and Berkman Fellow. Here’s an interview with Eric, in which he says, among other things: “Users are becoming the dominant innovators”:

[Tags: innovation berkman eric_von_hippel breakout_boards open_source copyright copyleft ]

Tagged with: berkman • copyleft • copyright • digital culture • digital rights • everythingIsMiscellaneous • innovation Date: December 22nd, 2008

1 Comment »

December 21, 2008

 

Trippi on Obama’s direction connection

Joe Trippi is doing a chat at FireDogLake. Here’s one of his responses:

I think we are about to see the first “Connected” presidency. JFK was the first Television president — Obama will be first “connected” president — and congress is going to be the big loser in all this — because I think we are going to see a President directly connected to more Americans than any other President in history — and when 25 members of Congress are standing in the way of health care reform — they are going to find themselves standing between Barack and a hard place — between the President and millions of Americans organizing to pass his agenda. On the other hand the Obama administration is the Wright Brothers now — no one has ever done this before and there is a lot they could get wrong — being too careful and listening too much to the Washington establishment.

[Tags: politics e-democracy e-government joe_trippi obama ]

Tagged with: e-democracy • e-government • egov • obama • politics Date: December 21st, 2008

2 Comments »

Those darn squirrels

Here’s a cute photo of the squirrels in our neighbor’s house, which is quite adorable for him except for the squirrels.

three squirrels

[Tags: photos squirrels cuteness rodents ]

Tagged with: cuteness • photos • rodents • squirrels Date: December 21st, 2008

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Dead Chumby

Here’s what my Chumby looked like last Channukah when I got it:

new chumby

It was sort of fun, but priced about three times higher than its worth, at least to me. And, amazingly, the single most obvious widget — the one that might make it price competitive — doesn’t exist: Plug in a USB drive and have it show the photos that are on it. (It does show photos from your Flickr account.)

Anyway, my Chumby died yesterday, almost a year to the day I got it. I performed a Chumbectomy but was unable to resuscitate it. Here are its innards, for those of you who’ve wondered:

chumby insides

chumby insides

[Tags: chumby ]

Tagged with: chumby • tech Date: December 21st, 2008

1 Comment »

December 20, 2008

 

Tic Tac Two

Did I ever mention Tic Tac Two? It’s a version of Tic Tac Toe I invented about ten years ago (which probably means 15 years ago), that has only two twists on the original. First, you have to have two counters in a square to own it. Second, once per game each player can deploy two counters in a single turn. I suppose there’s a variant in which you can deploy the two in separate boxes.

Anyway, Tic Tac Two is more fun than Tic Tac Toe, although so is counting.

(Way back when, I wrote a program to let a computer play against a human. The only interesting thing about it — and I was very proud of this — was that the computer automatically played 10,000 random games with itself to determine what the winning moves are in every situation. Purely for flash, when it was going through this data-building exercise, I had it display its moves, so that it looked like that scene from WarGames, except in this version, Global Thermonuclear War looked a lot like Tic Tac Toe.)

[Tags: games tictactoe tic_tac_toe ]

Tagged with: entertainment • games • tictactoe Date: December 20th, 2008

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On air: My love-hate relationship with my Kindle

Well, hate is too strong a word. But so is love.

Anyway, here’s a segment I did for the public radio show [Tags: kindle ebooks amazon everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Tagged with: amazon • ebooks • everythingIsMiscellaneous • kindle • podcasts Date: December 20th, 2008

2 Comments »

December 19, 2008

 

Creative Commons panel

Last Friday, Berkman hosted a panel discussion among some of the founders and leaders of Creative Commons: Jamie Boyle, Joi Ito, Molly S. Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig. The conversation was guided by Jonathan Zittrain, who is brilliant at this and quite hilarious. Here’s the video.

Don’t forget to support Creative Commons.

[Tags: creative_commons berkman copyright copyleft ]

Tagged with: berkman • copyleft • copyright • digital rights Date: December 19th, 2008

7 Comments »

Support GlobalVoices

GlobalVoices needs your help. Need convincing? Check out GV’s bloggage about the Mumbai attack. Or, perhaps more important, check GV any day. The world speaks at GV. Worth a listen. Worth some support. [Disclosure: I'm a volunteer adviser.]

[Tags: berkman globalvoices gv global_voices blogs bridgeblogs ]

Tagged with: berkman • blogs • bridgeblog • bridgeblogs • globalvoices • gv • peace Date: December 19th, 2008

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RIAA flees

The RIAA has announced that it’s not going to sue music downloaders, although it’s holding open the possibility of suing the most egregious offenders.

I like to think it took one look at Charlie Nesson’s case and fled with its short tail between its legs.

This is good news not only for those who have felt the full, brutal force of the RIAA’s whim-driven prosecutions, but because it helps the clear the ground for a longer, more considered redressing of the balance of rights and values.

[Tags: riaa music copyright copyleft charlie_nesson ]

Tagged with: copyleft • copyright • culture • digital culture • digital rights • music • policy • riaa Date: December 19th, 2008

1 Comment »

December 18, 2008

 

Just when you thought there was no sheen left to wear down

Oh please oh please oh please go away oh please oh please oh please

[Tags: bush george_bush george_w._bush george_effing_bush barney christmas go_away_go_away_go_away ]

Tagged with: barney • bush • christmas • misc Date: December 18th, 2008

1 Comment »

Why I’m glad Rick Warren’s going to the Inauguration

NPR.org is featuring a piece I wrote (intending it as an on-air commentary) about why I, as a liberal, am glad that Obama invited Rick Warren to the Inaugural platform. Here’s how it begins:

I’m a liberal. Free the whales, tax the rich, I swear to you that not only do I drive a Prius, I turned in our Volvo for it. If you know any one of my political positions, you know them all. That’s how embarrassingly stereotyped I am. So pardon me if I take a moment to give some advice to my fellow liberals and progressives: Chill out, will you?

You’re already out criticizing our president-elect for betraying our side. He’s gone soft on wiretapping, on raising taxes on the wealthy, and now you’re having conniptions because Barack Obama has invited Pastor Rick Warren onto the Inaugural podium. The shame! The horror!

Rick Warren believes things that are anathema to liberals like me.

Rick Warren is against abortion choice and totally against gay marriage. I’m from Massachusetts. I’m totally for both those things.

But personally I’m delighted that Rick Warren was asked and he agreed to participate in the inauguration.

My lefty friends, you’re not listening…[more]

If you have comments about this, could you please post them on the NPR site? It’d be a personal favor. Thanks!

Tagged with: culture • politics Date: December 18th, 2008

12 Comments »

Media Re:Public from Berkman

The Berkman Center’s Media Re:Public project assessing the state of the media (old school and citizen/participatory) is now out. (The papers are here.)

The report points to six issues, which I’m paraphrasing rather crudely:

1. Traditional media are scaling back their reporting because they’re going broke.

2. Their webby equivalents are not replacing all their functions.

3. Online news sources are not uniformly reliable, and not everyone knows that.

4. Not everyone is online anyway.

5. Some of the functions not being replaced online are really important, but we don’t yet have good business models for them.

6. We don’t have good data about what’s really going on.

This status report tries to bring some empiricism to the cheerleading (guilt as charged). It also pairs up nicely with a 2005 report about a Berkman conference that brought bloggers and mainstream journalists together for 1.5 days of frank discussions.

[Tags: berkman media citizen_journalism blogging news newspapers participatory_journalism persephone_miel ]

Tagged with: berkman • blogging • blogs • digital culture • everythingIsMiscellaneous • media • news • newspapers Date: December 18th, 2008

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Memo to Bush: Authenticity doesn’t count

George W. Bush validates his presidency by saying that he stood by his beliefs even when they were unpopular. Ok.

But here’s a news flash for #43: It’s not enough to do what you think is right. It’s also important that you actually be right.

In fact, being unassailably convinced that you’re right is what the rest of us call “having a closed mind.”

Worst. President. Ever.

[Tags: bush george_bush george_w._bush george_effing_bush ]

Tagged with: bush • politics Date: December 18th, 2008

2 Comments »

December 17, 2008

 

My laptop, in good hands

The beautiful girl in the blue striped shirt is Jessie. The OLPC laptop she’s carrying is the one I donated through WavePlace. This makes me very happy.

[Tags: olpc waveplace ]

Tagged with: culture • digital culture • olpc • waveplace Date: December 17th, 2008

1 Comment »

Radio Berkman podcast: Free, national, and for five-year-olds

In this week’s Radio Berkman podcast, I interview Stephen Schultze about the FCC’s auctioning off spectrum to a national provider who would be required to use 25% of it for free, nationwide wifi. There’s only one catch: That wifi would have to only connect to sites and services that are safe for minors (defined as people between 5 and 18).

After we had recorded this interview last week, the FCC postponed voting on the proposal, and since it’s the baby of the outgoing Chair, it’s probably postponed forever. Still, the idea raises some really interesting issues. Steve and I focus on the free speech considerations, although the opposition from other spectrum-holders certainly could not have encouraged the FCC.

[Tags: berkman fcc wifi wi-fi spectrum free_speech censorship kevin_martin podcast stephen_schultze ]

Tagged with: berkman • censorship • digital rights • fcc • net neutrality • podcast • podcasts • policy • spectrum • wi-fi • wifi Date: December 17th, 2008

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December 16, 2008

 

Tubes then and now

Harry Lewis points to an odd coincidence: Today the NY Times editorializes in favor of Net neutrality and 100 years ago it was all about the pneumatic tubes…

[Tags: tubes ]

Tagged with: net neutrality • tubes Date: December 16th, 2008

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NYT likes the Internet

In the wake of yesterday’s repudiatathon of the WSJ.com’s misleading, inaccurate, biased, and wrong article on Net neutrality, the NY Times weighs in with a crisp, clear, and right-headed editorial.

[Tags: net_neutrality wsj policy nyt obama ]

Tagged with: digital rights • media • net neutrality • nyt • obama • policy • wsj Date: December 16th, 2008

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December 15, 2008

 

Shoes for industry! Shoes for the dead!

We now have the second iconic moment of the Bush presidency. This is how he’ll be remembered, if only because shoes seem to be so psychologically powerful: Khrushchev is remembered in this country for pounding his shoe on the UN’s lectern, and Adlai Stevenson is remembered for the hole in his shoe.

(NOTES: The first iconic moment was Bush speaking under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. And this post’s title is a Firesign Theater quote.)

[Tags: bush shoes politics worst_president_ever ]

Tagged with: bush • culture • politics • shoes Date: December 15th, 2008

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Google to WSJ: google “net neutrality” and get back to us

Stephen Schultze as usual has a helpful post on the WSJ’s misreporting of Google’s supposed violation of the Net neutrality principle that Google has long supported. Steve points to Google’s Rick Whitt’s reply and to an aggregation of posts that makes it clear that this issue is being spun — and rather clumsily — by the WSJ into something it isn’t.

David Isenberg provides excellent, fightin’ analysis, including the following:

In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.

cThe concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.

Since the edge caching Google is proposing is about access, not delivery, there’s no problem.

Net neutrality is not about everyone having equal access to the Net. Net neutrality is not about Google (or Microsoft or WSJ.com) being able to pay for fatter pipes, faster servers, or fancy-pants caching equipment that keeps the most-requested pages in memory and ready to go. Net neutrality is about not letting the carriers decide whose bits are more important than others once those bits have entered the network. It’s about the carriers not slowing down the Internet telephony bits from competitors or delaying your YouTube bits because the carriers think their “The Nanny” re-run bits are more important.

I do have to stand in admiration of whatever PR person pitched this story to WSJ. Masterfully done! [Tags: google net_neutrality ]

LATER: Scott Rosenberg on the inadequacy of the WSJ’s response. Harold Feld on what Google is up to. Tim Karr on the entrenchment of Net neutrality. Richard Bennett on why this is non-news (and why Net neutrality is non-neutral, or at least a myth).

Tagged with: digital rights • google • media • net neutrality Date: December 15th, 2008

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Twalala for Twitterflittering

Mamamusings points to Twalala, which shows you your Twitter stream on your iPhone (of which I don’t have), but includes what look to be some useful filters. For example, you can “mute” someone who perhaps is twittering some event excessively (= me). You can use Twalala in your Web browser, too.

[Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous twalala liz_lawley ]

Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • tagging • twalala • twitter • web 2.0 Date: December 15th, 2008

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December 14, 2008

 

Competition vs. Cupertino

From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words:


An automated spelling checker attached to a word-processing program is one of the curses of our age. In the hands of an inexperienced, over-hasty or ignorant user it readily perpetrates dreadful errors in the name of correctness. One example appeared in a piece in the New York Times in October 2005 about Stephen Colbert’s neologism “truthiness”: throughout it instead referred to “trustiness”, the first suggestion from the paper’s automated checking software. In September 2006 an issue of the Arlington Advocate included the sentence, “Police denitrified the youths and seized the paintball guns.” The writer left the first letter off “identified” and the spelling checker corrected what remained.

In 2000 the second issue of Language Matters, a magazine by the European Commission’s English-language translators, included an article by Elizabeth Muller on the problem with the title Cupertino and After.

Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn’t come from the firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen from “co-operation” (the standard form in British English) found that their automated checkers were turning it into “Cupertino”. Being way behind the computing curve, I’m writing this text using Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the language to British English, “cooperation” does get automatically changed to “Cupertino”, the first spelling suggestion in the list. For reasons known only to God and Word’s programmers, the obvious “co-operation” comes second.

Hence “Cupertino effect” for the phenomenon and “Cupertino” for a word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or timely proofreading.

A search through the Web pages of international organisations such as the UN and NATO (and, of course, the EU) finds lots of examples of the canonical form of the error. A 1999 NATO report mentions the “Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe”; an EU paper of 2003 talks of “the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes”; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for “improving the efficiency of international Cupertino”. And so on.

Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in The New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.

It could be worse. Leave out one of the “o”s from the beginning of “co-operation” as well as the hyphen and you might be offered not “Cupertino” but “copulation”. Now that would be an error to write home about. Or perhaps not.

Everyone loves these spellchecker prejudices, but I didn’t know they had a name. (Thanks to my brother Andy for the link.) [Tags: cupertino cooperation world_wide_words michael_quinion language spellcheckers ]

Tagged with: cooperation • cupertino • humor • language • spellcheckers Date: December 14th, 2008

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December 13, 2008

 

Ethanz on the danger of like loving like

No, Ethan Zuckerman has not come out against same sex marriage. Rather, the Christian Science Monitor has a perfectly wonderful article by Vijaysree Venkatraman about Ethan’s concern that we spend too much time on line reading that which confirms our views and hanging out with people like us. Nice photo of him as well…

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman global_voices serendipity homophily echo_chambers ]

Tagged with: digital culture • everythingIsMiscellaneous • globalvoices • homophily • peace • serendipity Date: December 13th, 2008

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Blown to Bits goes Creative Commons

Blown to Bits is an excellent, clear, thoughtful, fair, readable explanation of how the Internet works, the effects it is having on our society, and the effects we may want our society to have on it. And now, six months after publication, it’s available for free download under a Creative Commons license.

[Tags: blown_to_bits creative_commons copyright copyleft ]

Tagged with: copyleft • copyright • digital culture • digital rights • policy Date: December 13th, 2008

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Tagging the Twittersphere

Tweetag automatically creates tags for tweets and shows you the tag cloud for any term you’re looking for. At the moment, it only looks at the past 24 hours’ tags, a limitation the Belgian folks behind this hope to remove if they get a little money coming in.

[Tags: twitter tagging everything_is_miscellaneous tagclouds folksonomy ]

Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • folksonomy • tagclouds • tagging • twitter Date: December 13th, 2008

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Warlocks and Morlocks: A poem

Warlocks and Morlocks
don’t grok door locks.

[Tags: poem warlock morlock grok door_locks ]

Tagged with: grok • humor • morlock • poem • poetry • warlock Date: December 13th, 2008

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December 12, 2008

 

FTW

Every inspirational moment — well, 40 of them — you will ever need, all wrapped in one maudlin, ridiculous package:

All I can add is: Hang in there, baby

[Tags: victory mashup ]

Tagged with: cluetrain • entertainment • humor • mashup • victory Date: December 12th, 2008

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