Pew’s Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has now added a weekly new media report on what the ol’ blogosphere is blathering on about. That’s you and me, sister. Or what most people indexed by Technorati and Icerocket are talking about, anyway. For example, we seem to have focused a lot on Obama’s inauguration. (Wasn’t that three months ago? Time doesn’t fly when the Republicans are insisting on their old partisan ways.)

And here’s a hasty conclusion from the first week’s report: We bloggers really need to be reading Global Voices in order to get our gazes up from our American innie navels.

[Tags: pew blogging new_media citizen_journalism ]

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… in the dark, threatening, and one-sided.

Thus, the RIAA is appealing the decision to let a hearing in its suit against a file sharer — Joel Tennenbaum — be webcast.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has filed a brief in support of webcasting the hearing, in which it says:

“The record companies have long maintained that they brought these lawsuits against ordinary users to start a national conversation about peer-to-peer file-sharing,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “What better way is there for the public to learn what the record companies are doing than by seeing for themselves what happens in these lawsuits?”

[Tags: riaa eff tennenbaum nesson download copyright copyleft ]

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David Pogue, the NY Times’ tech-for-the-people guy, did a little experiment when giving at talk in Las Vegas: To demo Twitter, he live-twittered a request for hiccup cures. It’s an amusing list of tweets, with a twist in the road in the second half…

[Tags: david_pogue twitter ]

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I recently in passing lamented the lack of links from the new Whitehouse.gov to George Bush’s version. Matthew Battles has pointed me to the archive of it. He also points to the version right after Bush’s 2001 election, which is hilariously bellbottomsy in aspect.

[Tags: egov e-gov e-government ]

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Steve Schultze explains how the FCC got into the business of regulating the Internet in this Radio Berkman interview. I’m the interviewer, so I’m biased, but I think Steve does a great job talking us through this, so that Title I vs. Title II, etc., is clear at last.

[Tags: berkman stephen_schultze steve_schultze fcc telecommunications internet net_neutrality ]

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I’d like to be able to jump to a date in Google Calendar by typing in a date, because paging through 15 months takes precious seconds that could otherwise be spent in scratching myself. I was hoping that typing a date into the search field would work, but it doesn’t. In fact, searching for something like “5/8/08″ gives results that seem random but undoubtedly have an inner but unhelpful logic.

[Tags: google google_calendar lazy_sob ]

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Hoeing
by John Updike

I sometimes fear the younger generation
will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this
simple exercise.

The dry earth like a great scab breaks,
revealing
moist-dark loam –the pea-root’s home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.

How neatly the great weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never rendered thus the world
fecunder.

[Tags: john_updike poetry poems ]

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CALI and the Berkman Center have launched the Legal Education Commons, a place for law educators to exchange info with Creative Commons licenses, of course.

[Tags: berkman law_education law_school education commons ]

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I overslept and thus came in at the end of the panel at DLD on women in the industry. The room was packed. A man in the audience (was it Ben Hammersley??) followed up on a panelist’s claim that an EU requirement that 30%of some government body (sorry to be vague; I couldn’t hear so well) made a real difference. The man asked for some examples of the difference this had made in policies.

In the course of her answer, the woman in her perfect English said that she didn’t think women were more peaceful than men. Germany has female fighter pilots, she said, and “Condoleeza Rice was a woman.” Even before she realized her mistake and corrected herself, the audience tittered.

Not a big deal. But I’m curious about why the crowd found this funny, or why it made the crowd anxious. Had the panelist made some other small mistake in English — “Rice are a woman,” “Rice a woman is” — no one would have laughed. It would have been rude to. It was the content of her mistake that caused the laugh, as if the very possibility of changing gender makes us nervous. Or possibly it was because we think power could turn a woman into a man. I don’t know.

Or maybe I’m just a little cranky from a late night, a fantastic dinner, and just a little more wine than I should have had.

[Tags: women's_rights gender dld dld09 ]

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Martin Varsavsky is interviewing René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom here at the DLD conference. [Live blogging, Missing stuff. Making mistakes.] [Disclosure: I am on the US board of advisers of Martin's Fon company, and theoretically have some options in it.]

Obermann looks forward to gaining the spectrum required to let mobile phones achieve broadband speeds (= several Mb/sec, I believe he said). He compares European and US markets: The US is more focused on consumers. US users use 1000/mins a month; Europeans use a fraction of that.

Martin: Are consumers better off in the US or Europe?
A: They’re better off with T-Mobile.

Obermann says he expects DT to grow in the next year. Last year they restructured and took $4B in costs out of their structure.

Martin: How are currency fluctuations affecting you?
Obermann: Having the Euro is a great thing. Last year, the weak US dollar cost us money.

Martin: I thought pricing minute would disappear in the ’90s. But it hasn’t. Also, crossing borders still costs money. Will minutes and roaming disappear eventually?
Obermann: I thought mobile Internet would be here in 2002. Sometimes we overestimate the ability of the industry to adapt to customer changes. Second, minutes will disappear. But, roaming occurs in imbalanced markets: not everyone is on the same page. Competition will make roaming more user-friendly.

Martin: Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Facebook as an operating system or telecommunications platform, not a social network. Do you think of the customers of T-Mobile as being part of a social network?
Obermann: They think of themselves as members of multiple social networks. Last year 14-15 billion messages were transmitted over T-Mobile. Social networks will be more integrated with telecom platforms. E.g., you can now send messages from Facebook to T-Mobile users [I think]

Martin: Do you want to buy a social networking platform?
Obermann: No, we want to play with many of them.

Audience: Payment over mobiles is still hard. Will it get easier?
Obermann: Micropayments over mobile is technically possible, and can be supported by technical service processes.

Martin: Do you look to higher people with entrepreneurial experience?
Obermann: Yes, big time.
Martin: Are you retaining the key execs of the companies you acquire?
Obermann: Yes.

Audience: Can you imagine, say, YouTube paying you to transport their content to your users?
Obermann: We help our customers get access to whatever they want on whatever device they want it. We don’t want to be monopolists.

Martin: Is the future of video fiber optics or better mobile networks?
A: Both. In the next few years, you’ll see such an increased demand for bandwidth that mobile access will be relatively scarcer and scarcer. It will be hard to cover everything with mobile. The amount of available spectrum will not work. It has to be a hybrd approach.

Audience: When will we see the unlimited, all-you-can-eat program, if the demand is going to increase?
A: Even today, the markets are more more and more aggressive with bundles. In fixed line you see 25-year-old pricepoints. Hopefully billing will become easier…
Martin: It did happen in the fixed world.

Martin: Netbooks are exploding. This is the first time telecommunication operators are selling computers…
A: My mobile as 16GB. Netbooks were one of the hottest selling devices in the past few months. Also, dongles turn laptops into mobiles. The Internet mobilization will have a bigger impact on people’s lives and work than the Internet so far. [Tags: dld dld09 deutsche_telekom dt rene_obermann martin_varsavsky mobiles ]

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I have not been atDLD before. Quite the aggregation of folks. Very interesting crowd, and excellent sessions. Unfortunately, I’m so jetlagged that I’m drifting in and out of alertness.

[Tags: dld ]

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Video games have gotten one rev away from awesome. While the graphics on PC games are not yet truly photo-realistic, they are good enough that, in the hands of superb graphic artists, they are not only immersive, they are stylistically interesting. Bioshock is a terrific example of this. Far Cry 2 is realistic enough that you want to pull over and watch the scenery now and then. The new Call of Duty is visually good enough that killing Nazi and Japanese soldiers was too gruesome. The human figure, facial expressions, and even dirt and dust are getting very close to being good enough for drama.

So, here’s the movie I’d like to see using these tools. It’s a drama, possibly a mystery. Multiple narrative threads and interdependencies. All set within a single city, or in sites that I can teleport between (unless travel becomes more rewarding than it is in most games). I want the characters to enact the plot. And I want to be free to wander around the city, eavesdropping. I want to be a ghost, a disembodied eye and set of ears, a camera, moving around the room where characters are now interacting, choosing where to look and who to listen to. The first time through, I’m not going to be in the right spots at the right time. Eventually, though — and perhaps with some guidance from the plot or extrinsically (”Go here now!” arrows) if necessary — I will see and hear everything, and I will understand what happened.

I don’t want to interact. I don’t want to choose my own ending or help characters find the key or move the crate. I want to watch a movie, but be completely free to move through its settings as I want. And, perhaps the software will let me record the movie as I’ve seen it, and share my path with others.

I wouldn’t know how to write a movie like this. Maybe it can’t be done in a way that makes for a satisfactory experience. But I’m curious. I’d like to see one. [Tags: movies video_games theater art narrative ]

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James Surowiecki has a piece in the New Yorker that finally got me to understand why Obama is including a tax rebate in his stimulus package. It’s not the mere pandering to the Republicans that I thought it was. It actually sounds pretty smart.

And while you’re there, you might as well read Atul Gawande’s argument for building our health care system on what we have, rather than sweeping it all away and beginning fresh.

Then finish it all off with the dessert wine of Mariana Cook’s 1996 interview with Barack and Michelle Obama, in which the future president expresses love’s swing of mystery and familiarity. Just in case you weren’t gushy enough about the two of them.

[Tags: economics obama michelle_obama health_care health_insurance health_reform new_yorker infohist james_surowiecki atul_gawande mariana_cook ]

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Nicholas Lemann has a terrific piece in the Jan. 26 New Yorker that says that personal characteristics are not enough to make someone a great president. To achieve that status, Obama “has to create institutions that will outlast him.” His examples are the United Nations, NATO, and social “legislation and regulation that affect very large numers of people and are built to last politically and economically…”

One could certainly point to health care as possibly being of that status, especially if Daschle steps up the game so that it’s more than reform ‘n’ extend. It’s also possible that building a new world role for America could put Obama in the Hall of Great Presidents even if no official institutions come out of it. Likewise if his action on global warming and all around greenness changes not just our policies but our assumptions. But let me suggest another place Obama could do something monumental. Yes, the Internet. And, yes, I do understand that this is not as important as world hunger and poverty. Nevertheless…

There are two basic ways a government can use the Internet. First, it can automate and improve existing processes, greasing the gears of government. From this, one gets efficiencies, cost savings, shorter lines, and occasionally frustrated citizens who can’t find anyone to explain to them why nothing happens when they click on that link…

Second, the government can use the Internet as a way of increasing the intimacy of government. This itself can be divided into three parts: Intimacy among members of the government, among the citizenry, and among the government and the citizens. (Note: All of these divisions are messy and overlapping. What else would you expect?)

Intimacy implies three things: We know one another better, we trust one another more, and we care about one another more deeply. (And even though talking about intimacy among government workers is somewhat creepy, I’m going to stick with the word.)

The first category — intra-government intimacy — is the least interesting and least urgent. It would entail taking advantage of the various social networking technologies, and perhaps thinking anew about the trade-offs between security and knowledge, as is happening in the intelligence community … [added a few minutes after posting] as with social software experiments already underway throughout the government. Maybe Hillary Clinton can experiment with letting some branches of State twitter. [Note, minutes later: Micah Sifry points out that people at State are already twittering, and there is a social network in place.]

More interesting are the ways in which democracy can become more intimate among citizens and between citizens and government. Intimacy there both provides new tools for action and reinvigorates democracy itself.

I am not suggesting that we set up a Bureau of Intimacy that comes forward with a 94-part plan. Rather, if we recognize that we have this opportunity, our government and we ourselves can start doing some stuff. Like what?

The lowest hanging fruit at the moment is WhiteHouse.gov. It’s a big step forward from the previous occupant’s version (and, by the way, where is the link to the archive of that version?), but it’s trying to convince us that Obama is swell. Ack. The White House is ours, not any president’s, and WhiteHouse.gov ought to be ours as well. That doesn’t mean we get to write it ourselves. Rather, it ought to be thought through from the point of view of what we, the citizens, want and need.

One easy change: Get the blog right. Right now it’s press release stuff. No comments. No links. In other words, it’s only a blog because it says it is. How about hiring a couple of bloggers who will take the point of view of citizens writing from a unique vantage point: The freaking White House. What’s it like? And how about some vigorously argued pieces from officials? And, why not stir in guest bloggers for a week at a time, people who actually know how to blog? (The rules might be something like: It has to be family-friendly, and it’s about the White House, not about the individual blogger.) As the blog gets more confident, it could start engaging more with what the blogosphere is saying. They could even turn on comments at some point.

Another relatively easy change: Start allowing officials to engage in the blogosphere.

Slowly, the administration might want to introduce social networking services designed for citizenry. This doesn’t have to be on the scale of Facebook. And it probably wouldn’t be introduced by the government because we’re more likely than the government to come up with the right system. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisers of the Open Resource Group which is offering open source conversation software for each Congressional district. Who knows?)

But we don’t have to wait for a good citizen networking site to open. We can make our democracy more intimate through many small steps. Intimacy can become pervasive. For example, transparency is usually touted as a requirement for accountability. But it also can be seen in the light of intimacy: Transparency leads to intimacy if we have the tools by which we can make sense together of what we now can see.

Intimacy sounds like it’s about feel-good democracy. It’s not. Real intimacy is built on truth, and truth worth a damn requires trust. This is not the trust of a buyer and seller but of people who care about one another. Truth, trust and caring are in a reciprocal relationship. They are, one might say, intimately related. And, if they do result in our feeling good about our democracy, literally only the most cynical will object. [Tags: http://www.openresourcegroup.com/ ]

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Even if Justice Roberts hadn’t flubbed the oath, I’d still count this as Day 2. The Inaugural day doesn’t count, does it?

So, how’s it going so far? I’d say pretty damn well.

When Hillary Clinton arrives at the State Department she tells the workers that she loves nothing better than a good debate. They cheer, and you realize that on top of everything else, George Bush totally sucked as a manager.

In case there was any doubt about this, I have friends in the Justice Department who have been demoralized for years. Now they’re eager to get to work.

Hillary cheered at State. Holbrooke heading out to Afghanistan and Pakistan. An unabashed preference for science. Closing Gitmo. Planning with the military the withdrawal from Iraq. Making open access to information the default, not the outcome of a lawsuit. Limiting the implicit corruption of the revolving door. The Internet to be kept open.

Obama is making it look easy. As easy as saying, “Yes, waterboarding is torture.”

My daydream: George W. Bush is in in his new home, sitting in his penny loafers, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper’s articles about Obama’s first day. “So that’s how you do it,” he thinks. “So that’s what a president does.”

What’s the opposite of disappointment?

[Tags: obama ]

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Gene Koo has a great post about why Obama’s speeches don’t produce sound bytes. Gene calls them “non-reductive.” The speeches are too complex for soundbytes. Obama’s soundbyte failure is, as Gene says, a strength, although he points out that politically Obama has also benefited from the ability of others — Will.i.am, for example — to produce soundbytes on his behalf.

I loved yesterday’s speech. I’ve loved it each time I’ve heard it. I liked it even more when I heard it on the radio, free of distractions. And Gene gets at why. The speech actually says something. It takes us through a set of gates to get to where we need to be. Gate 1: Yes, times are hard. We have to look at that squarely. But there is hope, based on some real things. Gate 2: We are pushing past the old contradictions that formed our idea of what is possible. Not big government or small government. Not security or liberty. Not Republican or Democract, black or white, Christian or Muslim or Jew or Hindu or non-believer (yay for the shout out!). Gate 3: Together, we are strong and resourceful and imaginative. Gate 4: We share, and should return to, our abiding values. Call them hope and virtue.

There was more in there. But, there was nothing I would take out. And there was also, therefore, little I would excerpt in pursuit of a soundbyte.

[Tags: obama inauguration #inaug09 gene_koo speeches ]

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A site called Christian Colleges has posted a list of top 100 open courseware courses in theology and philosophy. Open courseware, of course, are real world courses recorded for distribution over the Net. MIT has blazed this path, and this particular Top 100 list is dominated by courses from that school, with Notre Dame showing heavily as well. The Online Education Database has its own, more generic, Top 100 list.

Open courseware is a fantastic idea. It will only spread further and further, because it wrings significant extra value — value perfectly aligned with most educational institutions’ mission — at relatively little extra cost. And while simply recording a class without paying attention to the needs of those watching afterwards is suboptimal, we’re getting better at it. In any case, I don’t mean to carp. Less-than-perfect open courseware is a zillion times better than no open courseware. And we’re just beginning this. Open courseware will change, and it will also change how courses are taught in the real world. Here comes atomization, the Long Tail, network effects, backchannels, and, OMG, spam and undoubtedly porn and …

The most obvious missing piece has to do with metadata. Right now, there is a relative scarcity of open courseware, so sites like iBerry aggregate the known offerings. But, as recording and posting courses becomes the norm, we will have the problems of abundance. And then we’ll want the usual — and perhaps some unusual — ways of filtering to find exactly the courses we want to invest in. For undertaking to listen to a course is not a trivial task. Listening to the first three minutes may lead you to dismiss a course that would have changed your life if you’d made it to the third lecture. We need tags, ratings, reputation systems, trust mechanisms, social networks, and ways to talk with our fellow auditors. And the sites that do this for us well will take on some of the role, value, authority, and standing of universities themselves.

(And now y’all get to tell me about all the sites I’ve missed that do exactly that already.) [Tags: open_courseware ocw education ]

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This is the poem Derek Walcott wrote for Obama. Read it out loud twice. I dare you. I couldn’t get through it the second time. Too weepy. This is a beautiful, beautiful piece.

Forty Acres

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

[Tags: obama derek_walcott poem inauguration #inaug09 ]

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#1

3 joys: 1. We elected a black man. 2. We love that we did. 3. That man is Barack Obama.

#2

Exec summary of speech: The oldest values beat the old politics. We move ahead together.

[Tags: obama inauguration politics #inaug09 ]

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Within minutes, the new WhiteHouse.gov went up. (Here’s the before and after.) The first blog post (yes, blog post) promises communication, transparency and participation. At the moment, though, there’s no way to participate, including no comments on the blog. I do admit that it’s not obvious how best to enable conversation on this site. (There’s a page that promises more participation.)

All the original content is copyright free, of course. Third-party content is posted under a CreativeCommons license.

[Tags: white_house obama president_obama e-gov e-government e-democracy ]

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I am delighted to note that I have removed the following from this page’s sidebar. Forever:

[Tags: obama bush inauguration ]

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I seem to be tweeting away in my eagerness to see the last of Bush and the first of the rest of us. Not to mention That One.

I tweet as dweinberger. Also, you can search for the tag #inaug09 to find a whole bunch o tweeters.

[Tags: inauguration obama president_obama twitter tweets #inaug09 ]

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danah boyd has posted her doctoral dissertation online. Here is the abstract. (I haven’t yet read the dissertation, but I’m pretty confident it’s great.)

“Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices – gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices – self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties – persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability – and three dynamics – invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private – are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

[Tags: danah_boyd internet_sociology sociology teenagers social_networks networked_publics myspace facebook ethnographics berkman ]v

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Yesterday I had to explain to my startled children why their dad just about jumped out of his seat with joy when Pete Seeger showed up on stage. To those not of a particular generation and of a particular swipe through that generation, it is indeed a mystery…

I was born in 1950 to parents who agreed more about politics than anything else. My father was a WWII vet and a graduate of Harvard Law who, rather than going into private practice, went to work as a lawyer for the New York State Labor Relations Board. He believed working people needed the power of unions to fight exploitation. And he was right.

My mother was a folksinger — she taught guitar but did not have enough confidence, or I imagine, my father’s support, to perform — starting in the early 1950s, before the the pop acculturation of that form. Folk music back then was a mix of art, anthropology and politics. During an era of smooth, mass market, commercial singers — think of a Perry Como Christmas Hour — the folklorists were out in the fields, preserving the raw, bottom-up songs of the least among us. Folk music stood in the fields against the great lawn mower of commercial entertainment.

A labor lawyer and a folksinger. My parents were the very definition of what others called “commie symps” (communist sympathizers). Pink, not red. They had no love for Russia, but they also saw America’s sins for what they were: Racist, misogynist (my mother but not my father was something like an early feminist), crass, bullying, and sexually obsessed with atomic bombs. They believed in America’s stated principles and promise, and had the ACLU membership cards to prove it. But they had also lived through a time when lynchings went unpunished, and Joseph McCarthy had twisted the legislature around his accusatory finger.

Pete Seeger was of my parents’ generation. In our household, he was the example of what a patriot looks like. A man of the people. Someone who had suffered for his political views in the McCarthy years. A hero who had stayed true to his ideals. A person who felt connected to the worst off, who appreciated their culture and who worked for their aspirations. A quiet person who never boasted. A character who never bowed to fashion or the expectations of others. A singer happiest in a small circle of like souls. Someone whose life and songs celebrated the greatest of America’s democratic ideals: The ineffable value of the ordinary person.

So, when Pete Seeger came out on stage in his rainbow Smurf hat, to sing before our new president, our new black president, I lost it. What my parents would have thought. What Pete Seeger must be thinking. But most of all, the proof of how steeply history can arc.

Pete Seeger: American patriot.

[Note: This post is also up at Huffington. Feel free to comment there.]

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
words and music by Woody Guthrie

[Note the second-to-last verse, the one that begins "As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there." It's a lot of people's favorite — dw]

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

I’ve roamed and rambled and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding

This land was made for you and me

Chorus

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

[Tags: obama pete_seeger inauguration inaug09 barack_obama patriotism folksongs ]

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Obama’s letter to his daughters in Parade Magazine this morning wasn’t particularly well done. But I choked up. I’m watching Bruce Springsteen at the concert right now. I’ve never particularly liked him, and I’m not knocked out by this. But I’m on the verge of tears again. Jon goddamn Bonjovi just made me cry.

I’m in a bad way.

I don’t need any reminders about the troubles we face or Obama’s flaws and weaknesses. I know he’s just a guy with two legs and an empty pair of pants when he wakes up. Really I do.

But for months I’ve felt, well, a surge. I can’t even tell you what the feeling is. All I know for sure is that it makes my throat tight and my cheeks wet. And it’s too much to be attributed to one skinny young guy. And certainly it’s not all directed at him.

But don’t you feel it too? It’s as if we’ve been given permission, let go, released. Let’s not say from what. Not today.

Into what? Not sure. But it’s been there all along, waiting.

At least, that’s what it feels like to me.

[Tags: obama inauguration hope ]

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I hope someday an historian writes a book called The Interregnum that looks at the period between the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis had us huddled waiting for events to resolve have I had such a palpable sense of history. But now, instead of parsing every car horn as the start of a nuclear siren, I am ready for hope.

The stew of emotions is rich.

Hope itself is encompassing. It isn’t even an emotion. It’s a full-body experience, including cognition, anticipation, dedication, and spirit. In this case, hope is social. It’s not me trusting looking into the eyes of my Maker. It’s us relying on us.

Then there’s patriotism. I’ve always been more interested in the reasons that justify patriotism than in patriotism itself. But now I’m proud of how we are responding to this person we improbably elected.

There’s fear. I want my children to have the same opportunities I’ve been privileged to have. That is far from guaranteed. It isn’t even likely.

But The Interregnum will make for compelling reading most of all because it is the story of two people who could not be more different as people and as leaders.

Although I’ve been furious at President Bush for years, I had no idea I’ve actually been holding some back. I didn’t think I had any more to give. But then George Bush began his round of farewells.

Whatever someone says s/he is is exactly what that person is not. If your boss says, “I’m all about honesty,” then your boss is a liar. “For me, accountability is the main thing” means your boss is a swindler.

Bush told us he is all about compassion.

As Bush has put forward his self-explanation and justification in this past week, it’s become clear how incapable he is of seeing things from someone else’s point of view. With millions of refugees created in Iraq, he says his mistake was in posing in front of that “Mission Accomplished” sign. In the face of Katrina’s refugees, Bush thinks his mistake was not arriving on scene for his photo opp earlier. As Jon Stewart said, “You have no idea why people are angry at you, do you?”

I don’t think this is due to narcissism on Bush’s part. I think it’s part and parcel of his lack of intellectual curiosity. He’s a tiny man on a vast stage who simply can’t think past himself and what he sees at the moment. It doesn’t matter how large the stage becomes, his tiny circle of light never expands.

Bush provides us with the final and perfect exemplar of how our American idea of leadership, in politics and business, has gone wrong. We’ve taken leadership as a personality trait. Bush thinks he’s a leader because he made unpopular decisions and stuck by them. Leadership to him is a matter of character. If that’s all leadership is, then we’re better off without leaders — people empty of anything except a random resolve to do something and then keep doing it.

What’s missing is the idea that leaders need to be responsive to the reality of the world, the reality of the conflicting needs of the led, and the reality of suffering. Leaders may sometimes need to draw a clear line, but they must always recognize that the simplicity some decisions require masks an awful complexity.

In the interregnum, Bush has revealed himself as a buffoon blind to the tragedy he has hosted, while Obama has been showing us what leadership is about by bringing us to what is best in ourselves — as individuals, and, most of all, together.

I am ready for release from the shame and anger of the Bush years. I am so ready for the interregnum to end. [Tags: bush george_bush obama barack_obama leadership leaders politics governance ]

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Ethan, in a long, careful, and superb speculative piece, wonders if newspapers have been propped up by the fact that advertisers couldn’t tell just how over-priced the ad space in newspapers has been:

Basically, there are two ways to explain the disparity in online and offline ad cost. One is to argue that paper ads are, for some combination of reasons, ten to a hundred times more effective than online ads. The other is to argue that advertisers are better at pricing online ads than offline ads.

So, if we lose the irrational pricing of offline ads, how are newspapers going to support expensive, investigative journalism? Or, as Ethan puts it.

What if the model that brought us Upton Sinclair and Woodward and Bernstein – impression advertising – can’t bring us into the future because it’s based on uneven distribution of information and bad math?

And Ethan’s answer is: We don’t know yet.

Great, provocative piece.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman journalism newspapers media advertising ]

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Harold Feld is very happy that the stimulus package includes “only” $6 billion for broadband to underserved areas. He puts it this way:

There’s an old Jewish joke about how a Frenchman, a Pole, and Jew saved Napoleon’s life. Napoleon asks what they want as a reward. The Frenchman says his family were aristocrats before the revolution and he wants his family lands restored. “Granted,” says the Emperor. The Pole says he wants Poland liberated and her pre-partition borders restored. “Granted,” says Napoleon. The Jew says: “I want a real nice piece of herring.”

Napoleon stares, turns in disgust to one of his attendants, and says “get this man a nice piece of herring from the kitchen and then get him out of my sight.”

The Frenchman and the Pole turn to the Jew and laugh “You could have asked for anything! You idiot, that’s the Emperor of France! And you asked for a nice piece of herring!”

“Ha,” answered the Jew. “You think you’re so smart? I’m actually gonna get my herring.”

That’s about how I feel about the broadband stimulus package. Sure, I’d love to have had the feds build fiber out to every home. But I always knew that wouldn’t happen. Worse, I figured that any HUGE pot of money would invariably end up chock full of goodies for incumbents with zippo oversight. ….

But a reasonable set of grant proposals, properly targeted, can do a boatload of good. Consider Mark Cooper’s community hotspot approach, for example, or the work of ongoing projects such as the Mountain Area Information Network in rural North Carolina or the Lawndale Community Wireless Network in Chicago or any of thousands of projects in hundreds of communities working to bridge the gap between connectivity and digital exclusion…

[Tags: harold_feld broadband stimulus herring jewish_jokes ]

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Nature Magazine, which should be the stodgiest of the stodgiest, continues to show an admirable flexibility (stopping short of doing the full open access Monty). It’s now created Scitable, “a collaborative learning space for science undergraduates.” It’s got articles, online class tools, teacher collaborative tools, student collaborative tools, discussion areas, consultable experts… I haven’t yet gone through it all.

This initial implementation focuses on genetics. Nature is planning on expanding the topics.

On top of all that, it’s great to contemplate how blase we’ve become about the primordial value of collaborative tools. Collaboration is the new greed.

[Tags: nature_magazine education collaboration genetics teaching ]

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I twittered a pun last night of which I am oddly proud: “If I ever ran into Heisenberg, I wouldn’t know if I should wave or point.”

JohnJoseph twittered back this rim shot.

[Tags: puns rim_shots heisenberg ]

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Charlie Nesson has successfully argued that the next hearing in the countersuit against the RIAA’s prosecution of Joel Tenenbaum ought to be webcast live. Judge Nancy Gertner decided that, yes, the an Internet case about the Internet generation ought to be available on the Internet. This is highly unusual. Thank you, Judge Gertner.

David Ardia, of the Berkman Centers Citizen Media Law Project, explains it all…

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Last night I installed a new, blank hard drive on my MacBook. I installed from Time Machine, which went quite well. (I physically installed it, booted from a Leopard system disk, partitioned the disk via Tools > Disk Utility, restarted with the Time Machine external disk plugged in, went to Tools > Restore from Backup, chose the latest backup, and came back three hours later.) The process resulted in a painless transfer. Everything was working (as far as I can tell) except for the internal web server; my browser told me that it could not connect to http://127.0.0.1. I tried lots of things, including editing my httpd.conf file, following Webby advice (how could I go wrong?). Despite multiple restarts of apache, via Systems Pref and the terminal, no dice. (BTW, I’m running Leopard 10.5.6)

My friend Billo, diagnosed the problem almost immediately: I had no apache2 directory in /var/log/. So, I made one, changed the permissions, and a minute later, it was all up and running. (Thanks, Billo!)

In case you are feeling adventurous, here are the various commands to use in the terminal. (Note: I’m not good at this stuff. I’m likely to be giving you bad advice here. Most of it is pretty much non-destructive, though. I think.)

To restart the web server (=apache2): apachectl restart (Apachectl is in /usr/sbin/)

To create an apache2 directory in /var/log:

cd /var/log/
mkdir apache2
chown root apache2
chmod 755 apache2

It may take a minute or two for things to start working. If they do, when you go to http://127.0.0.1 in your browser, you should get a default page telling you that apache is working. And you’ll probably have to log in as root in the terminal to get permission to do this stuff.

Good luck. And, most important, don’t blame me!

[Tags: mac os_x apache restore_from_time_machine web_server leopard ]

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A year ago, 49 state attorneys general — by the way, shouldn’t the abbreviation of that be AsG, not AGs? — who were worried about child safety on social networking sites, commissioned a study of the problem. The Internet Safety Technology Task Force was established and chartered with gathering data about child predation and children’s access to inappropriate material. John Palfrey (a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center), was made the chair, and Dena Sacco (a former assistant US attorney) and danah boyd (an Internet sociologist) — both also Fellows at the Center — were co-directors. Now the task force has issued its 280 page report.

After looking at every piece of research they could find (compiling an 85-page list of sources), the study has come to nuanced conclusions that I’m about to un-nuance. First, the fears that motivated the report are overblown. There is child predation on the Net, and everyone ought to be concerned about that. But there isn’t as much as we thought, and our kids usually handle the occasional creepy solicitation better than we thought. Second, although there is obviously easy access to all sorts of disturbing material on the Net, it’s not as as in the faces of our kids as we thought. Third, child-to-child bullying is a bigger problem than the sponsors of the report initially thought. Finally, there’s a long list of things we need to do to address these problems — because, to repeat, the fact that there’s less raping of children going on than sensationalists have suggested doesn’t mean that it’s not still an issue — but there are no single technological fixes. In particular, the expected fixes of age and ID verification are not a universal panacea and, because of their risks and downsides, should not be mandated for all social networking sites.

This is an important report because it is relentlessly based on data-driven research. The task force believes it has considered every piece of peer-reviewed research published and more. Its conclusions come in response to all the known data.

I interviewed John Palfrey and Dena Sacco about the report on Monday, for a Radio Berkman that will be posted today at Media Berkman.[Later that morning: Here it is.] If I say that I think it came out well, you’ll understand that that’s because of John and Dena’s eloquence.

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Report: Obama Meets Unconditionally With George Will, Bill Kristol, David Brooks

From TPM.

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Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has published a guide for bloggers, twitterers, and other citizen media folks on the rights and restrictions of those documenting the inauguration.

[Tags: citizen_media journalism blogging inauguration berkman ]

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Andrew McAfee, the Enterprise 2.0 guy, is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. He begins by defining the term as “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.” This technology tends to be emergent, bottom up, etc. [NOTE: I'm live blogging, making mistakes, missing stuff, creating typos, etc. Reader beware.] He contrasts this with ERP systems that are top-down, highly specific, etc. “The huge shift” is that the 2.0 tools “make an effort to get out of the way of the users at the front” but then allow structure to emerge.

“The Net is the world’s largest library. The problem is that all the books are on the floor,” he says, citing an old saw.

Companies are interested in what’s going on because they’ve used Wikipedia or their kids are on Facebook. But companies want to know what the tools are and how they’re different. Also, they ask, “Why do I care?” What’s in it for me as a pragmatic businessperson, they ask.

To answer these questions, Andrew points to what a knowledge worker’s view of the enterprise is, from the inside. At the core are a small group of people with whom she has strong ties. Then there’s a larger group of people with whom she has weak ties. Then there’s a set of people the knowledge worker should be tied to, but is not. [He draws concentric circles.]

Three points.
1. We spend a lot of time strengthening ties that are already strong.

2. The weaker and potential ties are hugely important. (He cites The Strength of Weak Ties.)

3. Classically inside orgs, “we’ve had lousy technology,” particularly at the outer two rings. How do you keep track of your weak ties? (One solution, he says, is the Christmas-time newsletter from acquaintances.) Corporate directories try to highlight expertise to enhance the third ring, but they don’t work well. Instead, people work their networks.

There’s a fourth ring: Where there are no ties. Strangers who are not going to form any professional bond. But 2.0 enables them to come together for “powerful outcomes.”

Now Andrew looks at prototypical technologies available for each of the four rings. (He notes that these technologies are useful only at those rings.)

1. Strong ties: Wikis, Google Docs, etc. About 2/3 of traditional folks do this by sending email attachments around, but no one is happy about it. Example: VistaPrint Wiki: 18 months, 280 registered users, 12,000 topics, 77,000 page edits.

2. Weak ties: Social networking software. Various social networking tools let you link up networks, e.g., Tweets that point elsewhere. E.g., Facebook at Serena: 90% penetration, 50% active users. Helped with new hires.

Potential ties: Blogosphere. Blogging is “narrating your work.” Add a search engine and you can find others interested in the same things. E.g., Intrawest. Andrew points to a post about radiant heated floors, with some helpful commenting, etc. [Great example.] Another example: The 16 US intelligence agencies have installed 2.0 tools, such as Intellipedia, blogging, tagging, etc. This gives access to a pool of info, but, more important, makes connections among brains.

4. No ties: Prediction markets. E.g., Google’s Prediction Markets, inside of companies. These work even when you don’t have that many traders. “Why do we even have forecasting departments in companies.”

Q: Say more about Google prediction markets?
A: [Andrew gives some examples. He talks very quickly.]

Q: [gene] Would prediction markets work less effectively if there weren’t pollsters and forecasting departments? Is this Web 2.0 stuff layered on top of the traditional stuff?
A: Yes, the traders on the Iowa poll are looking at polls. Good point.

Q: Why are these trader markets accurate? Why do we still use polls?
A: Hayek in the middle of the 20th century, when intellectuals were enthralled with collective, said that they had it work. A market’s pricing system is a brilliant system for aggregating and transmitting information, said Hayek. These trader markets work because a massive number of traders express their own preferences, values, beliefs. Polling will become less important. And, yes, people try to manipulate these markets, but so far the attempts don’t work very well.

Q: What does this say about science, e.g., the change from using randomized control trial for doing science? E.g., you could run a wiki instead and process the data…
A: So, why doesn’t Merck just set up a prediction market for whether a drug will work. But the FDA wouldn’t accept it.

Q: [me] If you look at an enterprise as a power structure, how does this play?
A: I ask this of companies all the time, and they tend to say they don’t see it. But it’s probably because they’re not looking deeply at enough. In the intelligence community, they’re explicitly moving from “need to know” to “responsible to share.”
Q: [me] Although in a rigidly and explicitly structure org like intelligence, there isn’t as much jockeying for power by working the network…
A: [Andrew tells of the use of social networking to gain prominence and position in the intelligence community.]

Q: How public, how shareable should this info be?
A: That’s one of the first concerns management teams express. But people don’t need Web 2.0 tools to walk outside the org with confidential info. Web 2.0 does increase the number of people who have access to the info. But, the intelligence community, for example, understands that there’s a risk to not sharing as well. Too many companies close down their connections too much; they tend to stay at the level of the strong ties. That forecloses the possibility that someone in the other part of the organization might have a contribution to make. E.g., Innocentive anonymized problem statements and posted them on the Net for anyone to work on. Eric Raymond: With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Q: What kinds of technologies are likely to be deployed? What types of businesses? What problems?
A: Companies are proud they’ve set up wikis for strongly tied groups, but they’re often walled gardens. Unsurprisingly, tech companies are usually the first to adopt these technologies. It’s not that E2.0 is sweeping all companies, without hesitation or doubt.

Q: Bad behavior?
A: Sure. But there’s also frequently some moderation of bad behavior, in part because inside the org, identity is the default. People generally know how to behave already. “My collection of horror stories is very very thin.”

Q: [doc] Isn’t it really very early. More versions? Fanning out of versions? What?
A: Inside the enterprise, it’s very early days. E2.0 is a prediction. Web 2.0 is much more the norm on the Web. So yes, early days. I find the rise of the Semantic Web as Web 2.0 really really speculative. 2.0 is about people. Web 2.0 is another geek utopia where the machines are in charge and people are out of the way.

Q: I was selling social software solutions to companies in Korea 7 years ago. But after 2-3 years, employees didn’t want to use them because they’re in addition to their work. Is this short term?
A: Socialtext makes a distinction between tools you use in the flow of your job or above the flow. If it’s in the flow, it’ll preserve. If you’re serious about it in your organization, put incentives and measurement in place. Some people I respect say that this is 180 degrees wrong.

Q: When will we see a divergence between those who use these tools and are winning, and those who do not and are not?
A: I’ve been doing research on this. Is IT separating winners from users? Is it irrelevant to competition? It turns out that the more IT an industry consumes, the more winners have been differentiated from users since about the mid 1990s.

[david horvik] There were attempts to drive social tools inward, but the winner was LinkedIn, which is remarkably outwards facing. Are mainstream social products going to be brought in to the enterprise. As for whether investing in IT drives winners, there’s a company selling IT to banks. You’d think this is a bad time. But the banks want optimization and efficiency. The only question is how long it takes for something to be recognized as working. It’s interesting to ask when these social media will become recognized? Is twitter replacing blogging? etc. It evolves so quickly.
A: A lot of the management teams I talk with want the pace of technology to slow down. But that’s not going to happen.

[pistachio] Twitter will be big in enterprises. No?
A: Yes. Great tool for strengthening weak ties and potential ties. And Twitter got the asymmetry right. [I.e., not everyone you follow follows you.] And it’s so lightweight to use — 10 seconds to send out a tweet?
Q: What are companies going to see as the issue?
A: They’ve had to internalize so much. It’s weird and frightening to someone who just wants to make dogfood. It’s going to take longer than 6 months.

[posted without proofreading. sorry.] [Tags: berkman andrew_mcafee enterprise_2 0 business twitter social_networking social_media ]

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From the Pledgebank:

The pledge, created by Suw Charman-Anderson, reads: ‘I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.’ The 1000th person has signed the pledge, just moments ago!

And since signing the pledge doesn’t forbid you from blogging about a woman in tech whom you admire before then, let me express my admiration for Suw, a force for openness and equality in tech, a blogger, a founder of the UK’s Open Rights Group, an advocate for unleashing the power of socially connective software inside of businesses, a Welsh language enthusiast, a great person to have an open-ended conversation with, and someone who entirely escapes every attempt to sum her up. Thanks, Suw!

[Tags: ada_lovelace_day women_in_tech gender suw_charman-anderson suw ]

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Can anyone point to a good history of the brain that goes through the various ways we’ve thought about it, particularly in the West, from Aristotle thinking it was designed to cool the blood, up through our modern idea that it’s an information processor?

[Tags: infohist brain ]

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Jay Rosen explains beautifully both why the media maintains its limited range of acceptable views and what’s shifted. Jay gives us a great frame for understanding this, drawing on Daniel Hallin’s work.

[Tags: media jay_rosen journalism daniel_hallin ]

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Hal Roberts, at the Berkman Center, blogs that he’s found that three suppliers of tools that allow those in China to circumvent the government’s restrictions on the Internet — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — are selling information about the behavior of their users.

The sites freely publish anonymized data for people doing research on Net trends, but they will also sell you identifiable information … if you pass their smell test. Hal points to one company’s faq:

Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?

A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.

From hands considered safe to the hands of totalitarians with a grudge is a distressingly short distance.

Hal concludes:

This sort of thing demonstrates that there is no way to eliminate points of control from a network. You can only move them around so that you trust different people. In this case, Chinese users are replacing some of the trust in their local Chinese ISPs with trust in the circumvention projects through which they are proxying their traffic. But those tools are acting as virtual ISPs themselves and so have all the potential for control (and abuse) that the local ISPs have. They can snoop on user activity; they can filter and otherwise tamper with connections; they can block P2P traffic.

So, yes, the Net routes around restrictions. But those routes themselves are subject to all the weaknesses to which we are heir. [Tags: berkman china censorship hal_roberts tor ]

[January 15: Rebecca MacKinnon spoke with some of the principles and blogs their explanations.]

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