Tucows is participating in the Canadian copyright consultation process. Rather than submitting a comment written in the usual lawyerly prose, Elliot Noss, Tucow’s CEO, asked me to write up something about copyright in my usual imprecise and incoherent prose. I like Elliot a lot, and I care about copyright, so I wrote about the argument that without strong copyright protection, creators won’t have an incentive to create. The piece is now posted… [The next day: I absolutely should have mentioned that this was a commissioned piece. I.e., Elliot paid me to write something, and posted it unaltered.]

[Tags: copyleft copyright culture canada everything_is_miscellaneous ]

13 Comments »

The RIAA has won a ruling that the DMCA’s provision that forbids backward engineering software to see how it work applies also to musical recordings. The ruling forbids any attempt to figure out the melody, arrangement, or chord progression of any copyrighted song, whether that figuring out is done mentally, at a keyboard, or using software. It also forbids graphical displays based on the music, including the psychedelic visualizations that come with many music players or the tapping of feet to beats embedded in a copyrighted work. An exemption has been made for those with perfect pitch, although they are not allowed to transmit or communicate the internal structures of music that they have mentally decoded.

The RIAA has also announced that it will sue to protect all who claim unique musical contributions to the culture. As a result, Pat Boone now owns the Motown sound, John Lennon owns singing above one’s natural range as a way of expressing emotion, Cat Stevens owns singing below one’s natural range for the same purpose, and Van Morrison has been awarded custody of any two-chord song to which musicians improvise while high enough on marijuana that they think other people are enjoying it.

An RIAA spokesmen expressed delight with the ruling and the new set of protections: “We think we’re now within sight of producing the last two or three original songs, and then the entire culture can call it a day.”

[Tags: satire copyleft copyright dmca riaa ]

4 Comments »

So, don’t listen to me when I tell you to get to Lenox to see Shakespeare & Co.’s production of Twelfth Night. Listen to the NY Times, which just gave it a rave review.

[Tags: shakespeare ]

1 Comment »

Doc’s got an excellent, provocative post about how our thinking about the Internet hems us in. I find myself nodding my head but also holding back just a little.

My head nods up and down to Doc’s overall point. We hear “Internet” and we think an infrastructure of cables and radio signals, when in fact the Internet is a set of protocols that can be implemented over anything from copper wires to carrier pigeons. We shouldn’t be surprised. We reify stuff all the time. For example, somehow bits themselves went from a measurement of difference to the “stuff” inside a computer. So, it’s practically inevitable that we’ll think about the Internet in overly concrete terms. It’s what we do. At least in the West.

And I certainly nod my head at Doc’s conclusion that we need to “re-think all infrastructure outside all old boxes, including the one we call The Internet.”

And I’m at 100% nod-RPMs when Doc talks about Erik Cecil “thinking out loud about how networks are something other than the physical paths we reduce them to.” In fact, I find myself understanding issues ever more frequently in terms of traditional structures becoming networks or taking on the properties of networks. E.g., news is a network, not a set of stories. Businesses ought to view themselves more and more as networks. Expertise is a property of a network. Leadership is a property of a network. Markets are networks within which conversations take place, natch. Networks are very much becoming our new paradigm. And, as Erik says, a network is not its physical path.

So, where do I diverge from Doc? I’m not entirely sure I actually do. But I think Doc feels we need to come up with a new framing of the Internet, whereas I see networks as a growing paradigm that will naturally reframe it.

The reframing is here; it’s just unevenly distributed?

Tags: internet paradigms

3 Comments »

That’s more or less the question that prompted Wired’s cover story, according to its author’s blog post:

The cover story of this month’s Wired started when the magazine’s editors asked me a pointed question: How can a site that’s so good be so bad? Serving a vast community at an irresistible price (mostly free), craigslist nonetheless seemed the antithesis of what a modern web business should be. Oblivious to innovation and stuck in a 1997 mindset, craigslist was hogging the sector and holding things back. When the editors invited me in to propose that I write the story, they wanted an exposé.

That helps the dissonance in the article. I read it feeling like Gary Wolf, the author, was out to get Craig, but couldn’t find anything negative, so he wrote a weird Attack of the Positives article.

Sure, Craigslist’s site design is cramped, prosaic, and old Webbish. Sure, Craig is quirky and eccentric. So? Instead of writing a piece titled “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess,” why not write one called “What Craiglist Gets Right,” because, Craigslist gets just about everything right: It offers a service of immense value to users, but prices it not by that value but by its cost. And there isn’t a thing on that cramped, prosaic, old Webbish page that isn’t for the benefit of the user. Craigslist is so much for us and about us that many of us feel it’s actually ours. That’s why we trust it — a classified ads site, for Lawd’s sake! — so much that we’ve built communities there. And the folks who run it, do it with the utmost humility, out of a sense of service.

Cripies, what more could you want? And yet we end up with a story that seems to want to be an expose … except the further it digs, the better Craig looks. So, Gary’s blog post helps to explain what happened. I wonder if the headline was Gary’s; the writers often aren’t even told what the headline will be. (This happened to me here: I don’t think copy protection is “a crime against humanity.”) I also found Bobbie Johnson’s posting about the Wired story to be helpful.

We could do with a WHOLE lot more Craigs.

[Tags: craigslist wired ]

19 Comments »

Senator Ted Kennedy always stood with the poor, the weak, those who need defense, and those who need a hand. He was the embodiment of what it means to be a liberal and of one important reason that we have governments at all.

You can tell me tomorrow about how flawed he was as a man, so long as tomorrow you also take up the work of his life.

[Tags: ted_kennedy ]

Later that day: Here’s Joe Biden’s moving reflections. They start about 2.5 minutes in. As Biden says, with Ted, it was never about Ted.

2 Comments »

The Encyclopedia of Life is encouraging citizen contributions to its experts-vetted pages, so far with what seem like excellent results. There’s a good article about this at Science Daily. After two years, they’ve got 150,000 species pages underway, with 1.4 million stubs awaiting drafting.

[Tags: crowdsourcing everything_is_miscellaneous science biology taxonomy ]

2 Comments »

Rock, paper, scissors isn’t just a children’s game. It’s also the history of writing.

First we wrote with chisels on stone.

Then we wrote with ink on paper.

Now we write with hyperlinks — cutting our pages apart and joining all the pieces with blue underlined words.

[Tags: misc ]

4 Comments »

At the English language version of Wikipedia now, changes to articles about living people won’t be posted until a Wikipedian has reviewed it. Those articles are now moderated. (See Slashdot for details and discussion.)

I am surprised by the media being surprised by this. Wikipedia has a complex set of rules, processes, and roles in place in order to help it achieve its goal of becoming a great encyclopedia. (See Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution‘, and How Wikipedia Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yatesfor book-length explanations.) This new change, which seems to me to be a reasonable approach worth a try, is just one more process, not a signal that Wikipedia has failed in its original intent to be completely open and democratic. In effect, edits to this class of articles are simply being reviewed before being posted rather than after.

The new policy is only surprising if you insist on thinking that Wikipedia has failed if it isn’t completely open and free. No, Wikipedia fails if it doesn’t become a great encyclopedia. In my view, Wikipedia has in many of the most important ways succeeded already.

PS: If you think I’ve gotten this wrong, please please let me know, in the comments or at selfevident.com, since I’ll be on KCBS at 2:20pm EDT to be interviewed about this for four minutes.

[Tags: wikipedia ]

5 Comments »

TechDirt reports that some doctors are having patients sign contracts that say the patients won’t rate the doctor online. Worse, the contract assigns to the doctors the “intellectual property” rights for anything the patient may write about the doctor. So, if the patient rates or reviews the doctor on a public site, the patient has violated the doctor’s copyright. This then enables the doctor to issue a DMCA takedown notice to get the site to remove the patients’ review.

Copyright. What can’t it do? Wow.

[Tags: copyright copyleft medicine dmca ]

4 Comments »

This is burning up the Internets, but it’s so very cool:

[Tags: robots ]

5 Comments »

My nephew Joel Weinberger wonders why computer games we loved when they were new, ten or so years later aren’t as much fun to play. If Doom was a great game in 1993, why isn’t it still a great game? (To refresh your memory, you can play the first level of Doom online here.)

It seems to me that it’s particularly games that simulate the spatial world that suffer from this sort of aging. I find it remarkable and a little embarrassing that Doom had me crouching in my chair in fear, and got startle reactions out of me. Now my body hardly responds to it at all, although it’s still pretty much fun to play through. It seems that when Doom came out, it was so much better than the preceding run-and-gun games that my body treated it as if it were one step away from real. Contemporary games (say, the latest F.E.A.R., or Bioshock, or Dead Space) are orders of magnitude more photorealistic, but they don’t get me crouching any lower or startling any higher. It’s as if the brain has a Constant of Realism that invests the current highest-end simulation with the same maximal amount of attachment.

[Tags: games computer_games ]

12 Comments »

This is from Martin Gardner’s upcoming book (!), as reported in WordWays:

Take any nine cards from a deck. Any nine. Shuffle as much as you want.

Divide them into three piles of three, face down. Pick up any pile, look at the bottom card, and remember it.

Assemble the three piles, putting the pile you chose on top (all still face down).

Spell the number of the card you remembered. For each letter, deal one card off the top of the deck, face down. So, if it were a three of clubs, you’d spell T-H-R-E-E, resulting in a pile of five cards. If it’s a face card, spell out its name.

Put the remaining cards on top of the pile. So, if it were the three of clubs, you’d put the four remaining cards in your hand down on top of the five on the table. Pick up all nine.

Now spell “OF” the same way, putting down two cards and putting the remaining seven on top.

Now spell the suit (e.g., C-L-U-B-S) the same way. Again put the remaining cards on top.

Spell “MAGIC” the same way. Turn the “C” card over. It’ll be the one you’re remembering.

This trick was invented by Jim Steinmeyer

[Tags: magic_tricks card_tricks puzzles martin_gardner ]

7 Comments »

Doc does a yeoman’s job (were there yeowomen?) pulling together some links in which copyright is debated. I haven’t made my way through all of them, but I can already recommend the post…

[Tags: copyleft copyright ]

4 Comments »

Flavorwire posts about a project studying microcommunities that takes online flamethrowers as its topic:

The premise is simple; to showcase kids and their homemade flamethrowers. However, the concept behind the premise isn’t as cut and dry. Not just a music video, the ode to flamethrowers and the kids who make them is also the focal point of a case study being conducted by the Web Ecology Project, Tim Hwang of ROFLCon/Awesome Foundation and Sawyer Carter Jacobs, bassist for Family Portrait. Together the research team, which formed while working together at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, are using the video to highlight the “often overlooked universe of micro-communities flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the web.”

I’m a Tim Hwang fanboy, so I’m looking forward to what the project comes up with. You can vote for including a panel on microcummunities (with flamethrowers as its example) at SxSW.

On the other hand, I’m old, so I look at the video and say “HOLY MOTHER OF CRISPIES, YOU KIDS PUT THOSE THINGS DOWN THIS INSTANT!!!”

Seriously, someone should take these kids to a burn ward as part of a Scared Flame-Retardant program. And then Smoky the Bear ought to give them a singed-knuckle sandwich.

[Tags: culture internet_culture flamethrowers microcommunities ]

2 Comments »

I’ve just sent out the August 18, 2009 issue of JOHO, my newsletter. (It’s completely free, so feel free to subscribe.) It’s all new material (well, new-ish) except for one piece.

[Tags: joho newsletter technodeterminism news journalism media cluetrain ]

2 Comments »

Amusing Dilbert today, for those who can’t resist a good taxonomy joke. (Thanks for the tip, Helena!)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous comics dilbert humor taxonomy ]

1 Comment »

Facing a budget shortfall, the town of Andover, MA, has decided to turn off 600 streetlights, leaving 900 on. How much do you think that will save Andover per year, according to the article in the Boston Globe?

This is an Order of Magnitude Quiz, which means you win if your answer is correct within an order of magnitude. It also means, however, that there’s nothing to win.

Click here for the answer

[Tags: puzzle andover ]

6 Comments »

RecapTheLaw.org has a Firefox extension that both gives access to public docket records and makes them actually publicly accessible. The courts charge for access to these dockets, including every time you search and for every page of search results. The system is called PACER. RECAP gives you access to PACER (and is PACER spelled backwards). When you use RECAP to view a docket through PACER, RECAP uploads it into the Internet Archive, since the docket info is in the public domain even though the courts charge you for accessing it. The next time someone goes through RECAP to find that docket, she’ll get it for free from the Internet Archive. RECAP also adds helpful headers and other metadata.

RecapTheLaw comes out of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Well done!

[Tags: law courts dockets ]

2 Comments »

My new MacBook Pro 15″ is a thing of beauty. But not everything is as I expected. Here are some notes on the transition, from my first few hours with it:

In the past, when moving from one Mac laptop to another, I’ve just connected the old to the new via Firewire, and the new one pulls over all your old data and settings. It’s like moving into a new house except everything is exactly where you left it. This time, something went very wrong. While the new one recognized that there was another Mac plugged in to it, it timed out in the transfer after just a percentage or two were done. Worse, it behaved the same way whether I connected via Firewire or ethernet (with two different ethernet cables and multiple restarts). It eventually restored from Time Machine, but even then there was a glitch: It said “About one minute remaining” for about two hours. However, once it was done, my new laptop has just about everything I wanted from the old one.

I saved an image of my Windows partition onto my Mac partition via the free WinClone app (thanks for the pointer, Max!), and it restored it back easily, although it complained that the 32GB partition I’d made wasn’t big enough … even though that was the size of the partition on my old Mac.

I’m enjoying the multi-touch; I’d already been using the two-finger scrolling, but four-fingered task switching is a natural.

I had to look up on the Internets what the F5 and F6 keys do: They adjust the backlight under the keyboard.

Note to self: After installing XP in a Boot Camp partition, don’t forget to boot into XP and insert the OS X disk so that it can load all those delectable drivers.

The gorgeous screen is so large I don’t think it will ever be simultaneously clean in every spot.

With the aluminum unibody, I’m not worrying so much about holding it by the left front, which in the plastic MacBook is where the hard drive is. The aluminum also heats up real good, which will be a comfort during those long Boston winters. (Possible new tag line: “MacBook Pro 15: For Men who Have Moved Beyond Sperm Counts.”)

A small disappointment: The model I have has two graphics cards, but you have to log out in order to make the switch. A larger potential disappointment: With a fully charged battery and not too much running (but wi-fi on), I’m only getting about 4.25 hours of battery life. It promised more. But we’ll see. I haven’t tried minimizing all the power draws.

2 Comments »

I received this today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TWITTER ATTEMPTS TO SHUT DOWN USOCIAL

Twitter has recently moved to shut down web promotions company uSocial.net, by claiming the advertising agency is “spamming”.

According to uSocial CEO Leon Hill, Twitter recently sent accusations via a brand-management organisation that uSocial are using Twitter for spam purposes. Despite this, uSocial say the claims are false.

“The definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false.” Said Hill.

uSocial believe the claims are due to a service the company sells which allows clients to purchase packages of followers to increase their viewership on the site.

“The people at Twitter who are sending these claims are just flailing around trying to look for any excuse they can, though it’s going to take much more than this if they want us to pack up shop.” Said Hill. “We’re not going away that easily.”

The service in question can be viewed on uSocial’s site by going to http://usocial.net/twitter_marketing.

Based upon this press release, uSocial is correct: It is not a spammer. Rather, it enables spammers. And then they spammed me to tell me about it.

uSocial also helps companies game sites such as Digg.com by purchasing votes. uSocial is thus explicitly a force out to corrupt human trust. So, screw ‘em.

(The uSocial site is down at the moment. Check this post by Eric Lander to read about the site.)

[Tags: spammers twitter marketing conversational_marketing ethics cluetrain ]

1 Comment »

Because one of our children needs a new computer, I’ve ordered a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro … for myself. Our child will get my current MacBook 13″. Don’t look at me like that! I’m more of a power user than our child is. And I’m older. Also, I’m paying for it. But mainly it’s a totally rational decision that happens to work out in my favor.

I know that setting up the new Mac will be simple. I’ll plug my old one into the new one (I’m getting a firewire cable that’s 400 on one and 800 on the other, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll connect through the ethernet ports) and the new Mac will suck the life force (= my user directories ‘n’ stuff) out of the old one.

What will really take some time is rebuilding my Bootcamp Windows XP partition: Reinstall XP, and reinstall the few apps I use. (I am still using Microsoft Money, waiting for the new version of Quicken for the Mac, which keeps getting postponed.) I’d much rather clone the old Bootcamp partition onto the new machine. So, I looked around and found Bart PE and YouTube instructions for burning a Bart PE boot disk. I believe I now have to make a disk image of my current Windows partition, save it onto a USB hard drive, and then, well, I don’t exactly know, but I’ll figure it out. Maybe.

[Tags: macbook mac windows os_x clone bootcamp ]

5 Comments »

I know I’m not the only one who’s finding WolframAlpha sometimes frustrating because I can’t figure out the magic words to use to invoke the genii. To give just one example, I can’t figure out how to see the frequency of the surnames Kumar and Weinberger compared side-by-side in WolframAlpha’s signature fashion. It’s a small thing because “surname Kumar” and “surname Weinberger” will get you info about each individually. But over and over, I fail to guess the way WolframAlpha wants me to phrase the question.

Search engines are easier because they have already trained us how to talk to them. We know that we generally get the same results whether we use the stop words “when,” “the,” etc. and questions marks or not. We eventually learn that quoting a phrase searches for exactly that phrase. We may even learn that in many engines, putting a dash in front of a word excludes pages containing it from the results, or that we can do marvelous and magical things with prefaces that end in a colon site:, define:. We also learn the semantics of searching: If you want to find out the name of that guy who’s Ishmael’s friend in Moby-Dick, you’ll do best to include some words likely to be on the same page, so “‘What was the name of that guy in Moby-Dick who was the hero’s friend?’” is way worse than “Moby-Dick harpoonist’.” I have no idea what the curve of query sophistication looks like, but most of us have been trained to one degree or another by the search engines who are our masters and our betters.

In short, we’re being taught a pidgin language — a simplified language for communicating across cultures. In this case, the two cultures are human and computers. I only wish the pidgin were more uniform and useful. Google has enough dominance in the market that its syntax influences other search engines. Good! But we could use some help taking the next step, formulating more complex natural language queries in a pidgin that crosses application boundaries, and that isn’t designed for standard database queries.

Or does this already exist?

Tags: search pidgin nlp natural_language_processing google everything_is_miscellaneous

3 Comments »

Jake McKee was the Global Community Relations Specialist at Lego. In his essay in the tenth anniversary edition of Cluetrain (subtle product placement, eh?) he tells how Lego learned to engage with its users, and how this was good for everyone. (Josh Bernoff writes about this here.) Lego was a great example of how a business can benefit by getting down off its high horse and playing in the grass with its customers. Thank you, Jake.

Now Jake is gone from the company, and Lego has become an excellent example of how to be a clueless, frightened laughingstock. A 14-year-old user used Legos to create a stop-motion homage to Spinal Tap, which Spinal Tap projected in concert and wanted to include in its DVD. Lego refused to give permission. As a company spokesperson said: “…when you get into a more commercial use, that’s when we have to look into the fact that we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.”

First, I am not a lawyer, but: No. The Lego logo wasn’t shown anywhere in the video, and it’s hard to believe that Lego could win a suit.

Second, No. How customer unfriendly can you get? You sell us something that enables us to create what we want, and now you say you get to control what we create? You won’t let us take photos or videos of what we create? Does Crayola get to tell us we can’t post photos of the inappropriate messages I write with their crayons, because it might hurt their image among their target audience of 3-9 year olds and cretinous participants in political debates?

So:

Top Five Inappropriate Items to Construct out of Legos™ brand Legos™, owned by Lego Systems™, a Lego Group™ company

5. Lego™ Mindstorms™ dildo

4. Lego™ ThePiratesBay ship logo

3. Lego™ world’s most ineffective and uncomfortable condom

2. Lego™ official Spinal Tap™ Mud Flaps

1. Lego™ giant upraised middle finger

[Tags: copyleft copyright drm trademark spinal_tap harry_shearer ]

12 Comments »

From my close, dear, intimate, personal, BFF, David Axelrod (Hi, David, you remember me, I was the one in row 32, on your left, that time you gave that talk…):

8 ways reform provides security and stability to those with or without coverage

1. Ends Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions: Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

2. Ends Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays: Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

3. Ends Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care: Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

4. Ends Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill: Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

5. Ends Gender Discrimination: Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

6. Ends Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage: Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

7. Extends Coverage for Young Adults: Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

8. Guarantees Insurance Renewal: Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won’t be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

Learn more and get details: http://www.WhiteHouse.gov/health-insurance-consumer-protections/

Yes, I know you’re probably one of the millions of people who got this email also, but I think it’s important to say these things, given that some of those campaigning against health care reform have taken lying to a new level of ridiculousness.

[Tags: hcr health_care obama politics ]

2 Comments »

Jason Calacanis has an excellent post making the case against Apple, from an Apple fan’s point of view. I’m basically with him.

Doc Searls has long said that the key to understanding Steve Jobs — and thus to understanding Apple — is that Job’s an artist. We understand when an artist wants to maintain complete, obsessive control over his creations, especially when they are as beautiful as some Apple products are. But it’s not just artistry at work at Apple. Apple tends towards totalitarianism.

You can see why in its computer architectures: Its products work because they’re relatively closed systems that run tightly controlled hardware, unlike Microsoft’s operating system that has to be able to work on just about every piece of hardware that comes along. And Apple’s stuff generally works beautifully. (I switched from Windows to the Mac about three years ago.) But the hardwired connection between the iPod and iTunes — only recently loosened — is there not to benefit users, but to meet the DRM needs of recording companies and to tether users to Apple. The hardwired connection between the iPhone and the App Store represents a disturbing direction for the industry, in which Apple acts in loco parentis to protect users from their own software decisions, and (apparently) to exclude products they believe hurt the business interests of their partners. The App Store’s success makes it particularly threatening; it’s easy to imagine Apple’s rumored tablet adopting the same strategy, then other companies following suit.

It’s not an unmixed picture, of course. The removal of the egregious DRM from iTunes is a step forward, and seems to have been a step Apple eagerly took, and the movement of the Mac’s OS onto Unix added admirable transparency. Plus, Apple makes some beautiful stuff that works beautifully.

I just wish that going forward, I felt more confident that Apple is on our side, not just as customers but as digital citizens.

[Tags: apple drm copyright copyleft computers microsoft jonathan_zittrain generativity ]

6 Comments »

There’s a terrific article by Carol Kaesuk Yoon in the NY Times about research that shows that humans around the world tend to cluster the natural world in highly similar ways, even using similar-ish names.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy ]

1 Comment »

From Dave Winer:

Four logicians are having breakfast. Waitress asks — Will you all be having coffee? The first logician says “I don’t know.” Second says “I don’t know.” Third says “I don’t know.” Fourth says “No.” The waitress returns with their coffees. Who gets coffee?

It does have a solution. The solution is not a cheat or wordplay or a sort of “lightbulb” joke anything extraneous to the puzzle. For example, it’s not “None of them, because logicians drink tea” or “None, because the first three were saying, “I don’t. No.” or “None, because coffee isn’t axiomatic.”

[HINT:]: Think about how each of the logicians would answer the question if she were going to order coffee or not order coffee.

I’ll put the answer in the first comment. [Actually, I changed my mind. I'll post the answer in a comment if no one else comments.]

[Tags: puzzles logic dave_winer ]

19 Comments »

With it’s new Fresh view, Delicious builds on the TweetNews idea of using links in Tweets (and other measures) as a way to find what’s newest and most interesting. As the blog post about it says:

Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood”  by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs (as ~81% of tweets do not contain URLs). Try clicking the ‘x Related Tweets’ link for any given story to see the Twitter conversation appear instantly inline.

It’s a welcome reslicing, not a whole new beast, but it seems useful.

[Tags: delivious everything_is_miscellaneous twitter news ]

1 Comment »

Thirty years ago, we were told that we should drive 55mph (or, in Europe, 42 euros per hectare) on the highway because that was the “optimal” highway speed when it came to squeezing miles out of gallons.

What is the current optimal highway speed?

And, for extra credit, what is the optimal speed on or off the highway? If I want to get maximum miles per gallon but don’t care how fast I go, how fast should I drive? Two caveats: Yes, I know this will be different for different cars in different conditions. And, no, zero mph is not an acceptable answer, no matter how true it is.

[Tags: puzzle mileage mpg cars fuel_efficiency ]

6 Comments »

Two more points from Kenneth Coleman’s lecture on teaching Shakespeare, at Shakespeare & Co.

First, he says that the four most-taught Shakespearean plays are all tragedies. The tragedies are — he says — about how men screw up the world. And in the four most-taught ones, the women generally kill themselves or are otherwise disempowered. We should be teaching the comedies, he says, because they’re about how women make the world livable.

Second, he objects to calling Shakespeare’s language “old English.” Actually, it’s young English, full of play, lacking rules, inventing itself.

Two excellent points.

[Tags: shakespeare women language ]

8 Comments »

Jeez, it would save me a lot of time if Keynote (or Powerpoint, if you insist) let me tag slides and objects in slides (especially images). I spend way too much time looking for that slide of a “smart room” or the one that shows business vs. end-user use of Web 2.0, or that photo of an old broadcast tower. (Later that day: Maybe I should add, having just rewritten the Wikipedia entry on Interleaf, that back in the early 1990s, Interleaf gave us exactly that capability.)

Instead, I have two hacks, both a pain in the butt. First, I keep a humungous file of slides I think I’ll want to use again. Second, I’ve started putting tags into the speaker notes by putting the tags in brackets. But I use the speaker notes to speak from, so larding them up with tags is sub-optimal.

And especially if you save Keynote files in the pre-2009 multi-file formats, then it’d be a snap for third parties to build tools that extract the tags and manage them. (I have a fussy home-made utility that extracts the text from the speaker notes and builds an editable file of them. If you want it, let me know.)

Tags are easy! Tags are useful! Let tags be tags!

[Tags: tags everything_is_miscellaneous keynote powerpoint metadata whines ]

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My family has gone to Shakespeare & Co. productions every summer for almost 30 years. We have taken the kids since they were nursing. Over the years, I’ve blogged about various plays we’ve seen, usually very positively. Shakespeare & Co. do lively stagings, with clear diction and no desire to have us sit still while watching A Classic. They are always entertaining and frequently moving.

We saw Twelfth Night this afternoon. It is the funniest production I think I’ve seen them do. If you are in or near western Massachusetts, I urge you to go. You will LYAO.

It was directed by Jonathan Croy, who we’ve enjoyed as an actor since seeing him as Bottom in A Midsummer’s Night Dream a few decades ago. He had us crying with laughter in the Pyramus and Thisbe play within a play, and we’ve seen him in just about everything he’s been in since. His direction of Twelfth Night is brilliant. Mainly it’s hilarious. But it was also at times quite moving. He finds every laugh, many bawdy, some hammy, and some perhaps not in the original — but Shakespeare would have approved, for, as always with Shakespeare & Co., this is not the broccoli Shakespeare you’re required to eat for your own good. This is delicious, hearty, deeply satisfying Shakespeare you can’t wait to get another helping of. This is Shakespeare after Shakespeare’s own heart.

Afterward, we went to a free lecture by Kevin Coleman, who heads the company’s educational program. His talk was informal, full of anecdotes. But by the end of the hour, he had made his point: Stop teaching Shakespeare in the schools. Instead, we should have students play Shakespeare. But not just put on performances after memorizing the lines.

He demonstrated one technique he uses. Students in pairs run up to a basketball hoop (he thinks Shakespeare should be taught on a playground, to convey the sense of play) dribbling an imaginary ball; one kid passes the ball and the other shoots a nothing-but-net shot, and then they high-five or otherwise exult. Next, he gives one kid in each pair a single line from a random Shakespeare play. They run up to the hoop. The one with the line speaks it loudly but flatly — “passing” it — and the other kid delivers the line to the audience. The combination of bodily movement and the fact that the line doesn’t have to be memorized gets the kids to find the heart of the line. This is way better than having kids read a play at home and then call on them to read a line from a page.

Kevin says that he then has them do entire scenes, each player being fed all the lines by a partner, without having read the play first. The players therefore can look at each other as they say the lines, rather than look at the script. They find the rhythm, the meaning, and the feeling. At Kevin’s lecture, we did the one line version, and the results were impressive. I could see it working for an entire play.

Kevin also argued against the “translation” process most teachers and Shakespeare books use, by which we ask students to re-express Shakespeare’s words in their own language. This seems like a way for students to appropriate the text, but it also strips out the beauty and resonance of the language. His example was the line when Romeo first sees Juliet: “What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?” When, with good intentions, teachers ask students to re-express that line, it comes out something like “Who’s the girl?” or “What’s the name of the fox?” Sure, that’s what Romeo is asking, but the translation loses everything. Shakespeare’s language gets turned into “French fries,” Kevin says.

Anyway, go see Twelfth Night.

[Tags: shakespeare lenox berkshires twelfth_night ]

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The NY Times has a terrific article about Media Cloud, a Berkman Center project (hats off to Ethan Zuckerman, Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, among others) that will let researchers track the actual movement of ideas through the mediasphere and blogosphere.

Data about concepts! What a concept!

[Tags: berkman media blogs memes research media_cloud ]

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The military is trying to devise policies to govern how our service people use social networking sites, according to a story by Julian Barnes in the LA Times. The article implies the Pentagon accepts that military folks are going to use these sites, and there may even be some good that will come from it, but the military is concerned about security. At the moment, the Marines have banned accessing Facebook, MySpace and Twitter from government computers, to make sure there’s bandwidth for more pressing military needs.

Not that anyone asked, but it seems to me that the military would do best by treating social networking sites simply as another place service people will be gathering, just like in coffee shops, living rooms, and bars, and should therefore be training them in the use of social networking sites, with clear penalties for violating security guidelines. Which may be exactly what the military policy is heading toward.

[Tags: military social_networking_sites social_media sns ]

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Today’s WSJ has a good article by Sarah Needleman on companies using Twitter as a public relations tool.

Obviously, companies are paying attention to Twitter because lots of people have joined it; if it were a startup with 500 users, big companies wouldn’t care about it. But the way the massness of Twitter works may be teaching companies a lesson about the Web overall, and about markets.

Traditionally, marketing views a market as the set of potential customers — roughly, the people who are or might be made interested in the company’s offerings, and who are in a position to make a purchase. Marketers then segment their market according to some defining characteristics relevant to how the company can pique their interest and move them to completing a sale. Which means that messages define markets: Marketers choose age or ethnicity as the defining characteristics (for example) only if they think that those traits carve off a set of people susceptible to the same message.

Now, Twitter has this odd property of being able to support multiple scales: It works if you’re Ashton Kutcher with two million followers or if you’re a college kid with four followers. For Kutcher, Twitter is a mass medium. For most of his followers, it’s a far more social medium. This ability to work easily and simultaneously at scales separated by orders of magnitude is distinctive of the Web itself. Oh, sure, you could organize a phone bank to reach two million folks with your message, but that’s the opposite of an easy and natural use of telephones. For the Web, it’s just what it does.

Marketers are among those not used to this sort of continuity of scaling. Traditional marketing has aimed for the efficiencies bigger scales bring. Even the 1990s interest in “personalization” was a type of mass customization. So, it’s interesting to watch as marketers try to adjust to this new, slippery environment. The companies cited in the WSJ article seem not to be paying attention exclusively to Twitterers with huge followings. That by itself is a useful webby lesson to learn. But will marketers figure out how to make marketing scalable up and down, without violating norms or sounding like dicks?

[Tags: twitter marketing business cluetrain ]

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The Discovery Channel thought I’d be interested enough in “Shark Week” to open an email from them about it. Apparently I was, but only in a meta way. Twenty-four years after Jaws, do we still find sharks so threatening that they get their own week of TV? Sure, they’re killing machines, but so are ant-eaters. Sure, they very very occasionally kill one of our own species, but so do woodpeckers, and death by woodpecker is way more grisly, not to mention time-consuming.

Besides, it’s Cold Cereal Week on Top Chef, so I’ll be otherwise engaged.

[Tags: sharks ]

On a more literary note, I just finished Richard Price’s Lush Life. Price is one of my favorites — great at characters, sentences, social worlds, and bruised moralities. Lush Life has the form of a police procedural, although in some ways it’s an anti-procedural. (I say no more, lest I venture into the spoilers realm.) My only disappointment with it is that Price he doesn’t go as deep into some of his characters as others; he often excels as a writer about race, but this novel the main white characters felt more surely drawn than the main black ones. Still, I really enjoyed it.

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