Everything Is Miscellaneous
September 29, 2009
Broadband interview: Surveying users
At BroadbandStrategyWeek.com I’ve posted an interview with John Horrigan, the director of consumer research. He’s responsible for finding out why people adopt broadband and why they don’t.
Let’s just see what happens
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I twitter as dweinberger
A "page-turner ... makes the consequences of the changes clearer than any work before", Frankfurter Allegemeine Complete list of reviews, good bad and indifferent (with some commentary from me)
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Herkko Hietanen: Network Recorders and Social Enrichment of TelevisionHerkko Hietanen, a Berkman Fellow, is giving a talk about TV. “Television is really broken.” It’s not providing what consumers want: programs when we want them, where we want them. It lacks interaction with other viewers and with broadcasters. It has ads. It’s geographically limited. If you had to pitch TV to a venture capitalist, it would have a hard time getting funding.
Herkko gives a brief history of the highlights. VCRs were an early attempt to fix tv. This frightened the broadcasters, who took it to court, where — in Sony vs. Betamax — they lost. The court said the manufacturers were not responsible for infringing uses because the devices had non-infringing uses, and personal use was declared a fair use. Satellites extend over-the-air (OTA) broadcast. Community antennas were first set up by stores selling TV sets. Now cable is dominant. But contracts limit core innovation. “If you’re afraid you’ll piss off your content provider, you’re not going to do something that’s good for the consumer.” There has been some innovation in the core. On-demand video. Time-Warner “LookBack” lets you view any show on the day it’s broadcast at any time during that day. Cable also provides a whole lot of channels. But, “Intelligence in the middle stops innovation at the edge.” The industry has litigated against just about everything innovative. E.g., Cablevision want to launch a service that would centralize storage rather than putting it in the set-top boxes. Just about everyone sued Cablevision for copyright infringement. The court saw that every user would have their own copy of a saved show. The court decided it doesn’t matter where the copies are stored. Herkko says it’s too bad it didn’t go to the Supreme Court so we’d have a definitive decision. The problem with mythtv, Herkko says, is that it’s not user-friendly. [I spent 1.5 yrs trying to get MythTV to work, and failed :( Wendy Seltzer, seated across the table, has been using MythTV for years.] Tivo is easy but not all that easily hackable. You can’t share TiVo’ed shows, you can modify the code in the box. ReplayTV got sued for having a skip commercials feature, and went bankrupt. Herkko points to living room clutter as another problem with TV today. Herkko looks forward to PVRs getting connected to the Internet, because connected users create social networks, and they start to innovate. “We want stupid networked records and intelligent open client-players.” We want connected and tagged shows. We’ll have interactive TV for real, including gambling. Social groups could recommend what to watch. This all creates privacy problems. E.g., an MIT study discovered they could identify gays by analyzing their social networks, with a high degree of accuracy. At some point, users will probably start sharing their resources, cluster their recorders. Why should everyone record the same show over and over? Why get it from a central recorder when your neighbors have a copy? Of course, this is what got Replay TV into trouble, Herkko notes. He thinks that the social interaction around shows will happen before and after the show, because people won’t sit with a keyboard in their laps. [Since I'm on the backchannel as I listen to him, I guess I disagree.] What about ads? Adding social networks would mean that people could watch ads they actually want to watch. Overall: TV can be fixed. Social networks. Socially-oriented recorders. Q: This is a compelling vision of the opposite of the Net. The Net is smart at the edges and dumb in the middle. TV has been the opposite. You seem to hope that the future will invert so consumers can get what they want. But consumers have never gotten what they wanted. What will change it? Q: When you were talking about the keyboard in your lap, I think that’s wrong generationally. Q: You’re talking about what the cable companies will do. But then there’s the stuff in the IP world: mythTV, Boxee, etc. That’s where the exciting stuff is. Q: If the Internet arises to bypass the core, will the quality decline? Will it be more like YouTube style? Q: There are a lot of forces driving the centralization of TV. With that comes control against innovation at the edges. Is TV going to change or be changed by people sharing content from the edges? Q: What is your main research question? Q: Don’t we need non-Net neutrality to ensure that the video experience over the Net is good enough to inspire innovation in that space? Q: The picture you’re painting is not very TV-like. It’s not broadcast, not one-directional, the business model doesn’t work, we’ll be using our computers…So, it seems like you’re dissolving what TV is. Rather talking about the “social enrichment of TV” [the title of Herkko's talk], we should be talking about the visual enrichment of the Internet. E.g., how do you see Hulu, which has some community features.
Tagged with: broadcast • everythingIsMiscellaneous • mythtv • television • tv
September 28, 2009
Sidewiki: Google at the centerI agree with Jeff Jarvis’ critique of Google’s Sidewiki. Sidewiki is ThirdVoice yet again. Both let you write and read comments on a site — actually on the site — so long as you have the proprietary client. ThirdVoice failed mainly because it couldn’t get enough people to install its client. (Of course, one could ask why enough people weren’t interested in this.) Sidewiki might succeed because it’s part of the vastly popular Google Toolbar. And, as Jeff says, that means it might succeed because Google is using its near ubiquity as a center of the Net. Which is troubling. For example, again as Jeff reports, insofar as the commentary on his site about his Sidewiki post occurs in Sidewiki, Google now owns the comments on his post. Troubling. I think there are reasons to doubt Sidewiki’s success. As more people add comments, we need good ways to sort through them, to eliminate spam, to decide which types of comments are useful to us. Google is promising us algorithms. But algorithms won’t know that I don’t particularly want to read comments about my friend Jeff’s character, but I am particularly interested in what technologists are saying, or about Net politics, or what my friends are saying, or about how to hack Sidewiki. Sidewiki has its uses. I’d rather see it connected to social networks, and I’d rather see it provided as an open source browser add-in. But I don’t know who should own the comments and what the control mechanisms should be. This is one of the edges of the Web that defies easy answers because it’sso hard to tell what is the center and what are the sides.
Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • google • jeff jarvis • sidewiki • thirdvoice
September 27, 2009
Harold Feld responds to Richard BennettHere’s Harold’s response to Richard Bennett’s thorough-going critique of Net neutrality and the end-to-end principle it seeks to preserve. An excerpt:
I am very interested in this debate and will likely post more pointers. My overall concern is the misalignment between the access providers’ interests — they are financially structured to want to sell us content — and our interest in preserving a Net as open to innovation and ideas as we can. I look forward to the discussion among those (like Richard and Harold) who know much much more about this than I do.
Date: September 27th, 2009
September 26, 2009
Richard Bennett on why Net neutrality gets it wrongI have only so far read the 5-page executive summary of Richard Bennett’s argument against Net neutrality, but this looks like a piece to be reckoned with by all in the Net neutrality debate. Here, for flavor and substance, are two key paragraphs from the summary:
I look forward to learning from the discussion this look at the history of the architecture of the Net is going to engender…
Tagged with: net neutrality
September 25, 2009
Cluetrain on TwitterTim Beyers at FastCompany has put together an article about Cluetrain’s reaction to Twitter. After all, we’re the “markets are conversations” people, so how do we feel about Twitter and its conversations getting valued at a billion bucks? It turns out that the four of us think different things about Twitter, as Tim indicates in this brief article. My own view is overall quite positive, but compound. I don’t think Twitter is “closer than anything we’ve seen before” to an ideal conversational medium. Twitter conversations are pretty weird because of the brevity of tweets, but mainly because of the asymmetry of the conversation: If the people you’re talking to respond, their responses go to people who may not be following you, and you may not see their responses. That’s not a criticism. It’s simply to say that Twitter conversations are weird, and not the closest to some Platonic ideal of conversation. It all depends on what you’re trying to do. Twitter is fantastic at some things, but not at everything. And it’s fascinating in all sorts of ways: as a social system, as a news propagation system, as a recommendation engine, as a reputational ecology… In fact, one of the aspects of Twitter I most admire is its ability to work at multiple scales. As Chris Locke points out in the article, at Oprah-scale Twitter functions just like another broadcast, star-based system. But Twitter also works 1:1, 1:2, 1:100, and so on, functioning differently at each scale. That’s true of the Internet over all, but is not true of any (?) other medium. So, I find myself both more positive about Twitter than a casual reader of the FastCompany article might think, but also less enthusiastic than one might take it as saying.
Broadband. Trust them.At last, that brave band of oppressed companies who have been granted near-monopolies to deliver over-priced, under-performing broadband to the entire USA (exempting the parts they don’t find particularly profitable) have managed to scrape together an organization to give voice to their position. BroadbandForAmerica.com is finally going to air their views about why de-regulated near monopolies are the best and only way to bring affordable, open Internet to everyone in the country — views that until now have gone unheard, except from their hundreds and hundreds of lobbyists. Why, the industry could barely put together a mere $765,000 to send to John McCain’s campaign! The site itself seems innocuous. Their history of the Internet nods in some appropriate directions, including to Al Gore and to students who have innovated on the Net. (It oddly leaves out Tim Berners-Lee.) Of course, it’s actually a paean to private industry that cleverly equates the role of creative individuals who have contributed mightily for free and the incumbent infrastructure providers whose financial incentives lead them to prefer to tilt the field against cash-starved start-ups. The closest the organization comes to stating its actual intent is in the wording of the print ad they’re running. Hmm. On the open medium of the Internet the organization hides its purpose, but in the controlled medium of print, they come close to stating it. How unexpected! So, welcome to the Web, BroadbandForAmerica. Now — after your long list of rules of discussion, followed by a forum that is only soliciting happy stories — how about engaging in some honest, forthright discussion? [Later that day:] Here’s a New Yorker interview with Julius Genachowski about Net Neutrality.
Tagged with: att • broadband • comcast • lobbying • marketing • net neutrality • telecommunications • verizon
News is a river is a blog…WLEX-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, an NBC affiliate, has turned its news site into a blog. It actually contains news produced independently of what goes out on broadcast. Very very interesting. It’s a different way of slicing the news, with much debt to Dave Winer’s river of news idea, and it’ll be fascinating to see how and in what ways it’s useful and how it changes our idea of what news should be.
September 24, 2009
This just in…to Twitter.CNN’s breaking news service on Twitter (cnnbrk) has 2.7M followers. Here are all of its posts since August 24, a month’s worth:
Breakdown: Total: 38 I grant that there’s some subjectivity (=total subjectivity) in deciding what’s actual news. Nevertheless, Google News Timeline will show you at least some of the other events that happened during this month. And this query at Google News will list the 6,600 articles CNN.com posted during the past month, of which these 38 are not the most important, except by some radical redefinition of importance, of news, and of CNN’s dignity.
September 23, 2009
Interview with Blair Levin kicks off new FCC seriesI’ve started a series of interviews with FCC folks and others about the progress of the Broadband Strategy initiative. The site is BroadbandStrategyWeek.com. The first interview is with Blair Levin, who’s in charge of the efforts. The site is in beta, and I screwed up a few things about the video: I sat too close to the camera, etc. But, I’m in beta, too. The project came about because I volunteered to do whatever I could to help the Broadband Strategy initiative move forward. I’d met Blair at a get-together. He suggested that I do this series and promised access to his team. He also agreed that this series is completely independent (except, of course, for the fact that it depends on access!) and that I have complete editorial control. I got the Supernova conference to agree to pick up some of the production costs, all of which go directly to Sean Fitzroy, the producer of it. Most of the interviews will go up unedited. I reserve the right to edit, but will not edit out material because it’s controversial. I may well want to edit out some questions that go nowhere, or stumbles that require a re-do of some sort. In the Blair Levin interview, the only edit (besides the splicing together of my camera’s output with the FCC’s, of course) was to move a joke Blair told at the end to the section to which it referred. All of the videos are in the public domain (CC0), so you don’t have to ask permission to reuse them, mash them up, etc.
Date: September 23rd, 2009
Ellen Degeneres should go open sourceBy the way, if Ellen Degeneres wants to respond in a reasonable and constructive way to the lawsuits over her use of song snippets to dance to, she could always start using Creative Commons-licensed music, with a nice plug for the open-hearted musicians making our lives more tuney.
September 22, 2009
Call-in on Web ExceptionalismI’m going to be on a call-in webcasty thing tomorrow (Thursday) as part of the Supernova series. You can see it here or call (347) 945-6578. It starts at 1pm EDT (Boston) time. The topic is: Is the Web really exceptional? Or is it Yet Another Communications Medium? Or something else? I’m probably going to say that it’s exceptional – that is, unique – in some important ways:. It’s hard to find another medium that works well at virtually every scale. It’s hard to find another medium that lowers the hurdle to global communication so far (although posting something that’s accessible to the world hardly means that the world will access it). And hyperlinks are unique and important. Of course, it’s not clear what the consequences are of those exceptional characteristics.
[berkman] Clay Shirky on the future of newsClay Shirky is giving a lunchtime talk at the Shorenstein Center, which may be a joint event with the Berkman Center.
p>The commercial structure of the newspaper industry means that it’s not enough for them to run at a profit. Advertisers had been forced to overpay because there weren’t other waysto reach people for display ads or coupons. This gave the newspaper enough capital to do long-term investigation; mere profitability wouldn’t have allowed this. The advertisers were overcharged and under-served. That is, they couldn’t influence coverage. Neither the overpaying and the underserving is true of the current market. The new market is efficient and so the price of advertising plummets. “We may be seeing advertising priced at its real value for the first time in history.” And if you want to sell a bike, you don’t go to the people who print news and crosswords; you go to Craigslist. As Bob Garfield says (says Clay), it turns out that people will go to sites that do nothing but post ads. The news is now disaggregated and is re-forming itself around actual user desires. The aggregation is going from server-side to client-side. “The decision about what to bring together in a bundle” is made by the consumer, not the producer. We should worry about echo chambers, although it turns out that people are interested in serendipity. But people are not interested in the omnibus approach. The number of people going to the NYTimes home page is going down because people go straight to the article. The bundle is put together more by other readers. None of this will be reversed by increasing the commercial viability of printed newspapers. “This doesn’t mean all newspapers go away. It does mean a lot of them go away.” “Newspapers will play a less significant role in accountability than they have in the past, which leaves us with a giant hole.” A big problem: Every town of 500,000 or less “sinks into endemic civic corruption” because no one is watching. He refers to how a story in the Boston Globe went worldwide not because of the Globe but because its audience passed it around. “The public created itself.” “The penumbra of reuse around the article created an enormous amount of its value.” An article on a similar topic (priest pedophiles) in the early 1990s didn’t spread the same way, because the forward-and-recommend infrastructure didn’t exist. If there were a pay wall around the later article, it would have forestall its effect and value. First, “We need the public good of accountability journalism.” Some newspapers are trying to get an anti-trust exemption to establish a pay wall for the sake of the public good. But that will destroy the village to save it. We should be looking at ways of balancing the cost of producing good journalism and the public good that comes from reuse. There are three ways to create things accessible to the public. Private companies. NGOs. Social/peer production where people get together and do it. #3 had been confined to picnics, etc. Now it’s becoming a big part of the ecosystem. E.g., Pro Publica. Wikileaks. Open source. “The Internet makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain…and social models much, much easier to sustain.” “We’re seeing a re-balancing of the landscape” where all three of these modes of production will be operating. We want experiments across all three of these. Also, we don’t want to replace newspapers. Newspapers have a single point of failure problem because they do 85% of accountability journalism. We don’t need a single point. We need someone who does 5% and then repeat that 15 times. “It’s a shift from one class of institutions to an ecosystem as a whole.” Clay says he wants to distance himself from the utopians and optimists. “I think a bad thing is going to happen.” People don’t take seriously that things may get a lot worse for a while. He doesn’t think there’s any way to get out of the coming of public corruption. Between the printing press and the Treaty of Westphalia there were a long 100 years when people didn’t know what to think. “Our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough … and hasten its end.” But there’s not simple and rapid alternative to 20th century newspapers, in part because what held papers together was “so crazily contingent.” “I believe that newspapers are irreplaceable in their production of accountability journalism.” Some think we should therefore spend whatever we have to in order to replace them. Others say we should be “transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of overlapping models of accountability journalism.” “The next step needs to be vast and varied experimentation.” Q: Alex Jones: I don’t agree that newspapers are ready to be abandoned. In the priest pedophile story you cite, the Catholic Church was brought to heel by the viral information but also by the institutional power of the Globe. As you imagine this future, do you see in this array of smaller entity an institutional power that can bring institutions of power to heel? Q: How about magazines? Q: The revenue base is shrinking but it’s also much easier to acquire information. Q: What’s the model for something like Pro Publica, which is not reaching the ordinary joe? Q: How does The Economist fit? They’re growing. Q [bill mitchell]: As you describe your three models — commercial, public, social — what in each of them really holds value for the public at large. What might they pay for, whether in donations, contributing their own journalism, etc.? Q: The story on Randy Cunningham required figuring out how to take the database of info and turn it into a story. Who’s going to do this? Q: The NYT says it has 800K readers who have been with them for 2 yrs, and they pay $700/year. Is that sustainable?
Wrong on Net neutralityDylan Tweney has published a piece in Wired, where he’s an editor, warning that the FCC’s proposed Net neutrality rule may spell the end of the “unlimited Internet.” I think he’s quite wrong. And whoever wrote the headline, really botched it. Dylan’s argument is that bandwidth isn’t unlimited, so the access providers need to manage traffic. If the premise of the piece is that bandwidth isn’t unlimited, then there isn’t any “unlimited Internet” to end. And if he means that the era of getting as much Internet as you can eat is over, well, it never existed. I pay my access provider for an always-on connection with a cap on how many bits per second that is far lower than what I could actually eat if allowed. And access providers can manage traffic without doing so on the basis of the content of the bits. In fact, they already do manage traffic by selling different tiers of service; Net neutrality has no problem with that. The comments on the piece get at the problems with it. (And, btw, despite what some of the commenters allege, I’ve known Dylan for years and he’s personally honest and very smart. We just disagree.) (Pardon my plugging again my piece at Npr.org. My editor insists.)
September 21, 2009
Net neutrality, One Web Day, and a moment for joy[MINUTES LATER: Npr.org just posted a different piece of mine about Net neutrality. It says that we wouldn't need a NN rule if we got our infrastructure right.] I know there are lots of arguments about Net neutrality. I understand that there’s vagueness to the term, that there are times when we may want access providers to discriminate among bits, that it’s possible there will be unintended consequences. But, I want to say two basic things. First, beyond its practical effects, there’s a symbolic importance to Net neutrality. A Net neutrality principle states firmly that the Internet is ours. It does not belong to, and should not be controlled by, those who provide access to it. Now, that doesn’t mean access providers have no rights. But they should be gatekeepers only in the sense that they keep the gates open as wide as possible. There may be technical issues that require some discrimination but the fundamental and guiding principle enunciated by Net neutrality is, as Tim Bray says: Fat pipe, always on, out of our way. Second, a bunch of my co-religionists (so to speak) track the Obama administration’s actions on broadband and the Internet, and are seemingly in a state of constant agitation. The administration is not going far enough, is still too beholden, have hired some people from the other camp, is in bed with this lobbyist or that. I sincerely am very happy that these watchdogs are doggedly watching the Obamists. Thank you! But, on the eve of One Web Day, and on the day that the chair of the FCC has enunciated a Net neutrality principle, I want to say to them: Rejoice! Hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire, but roast a marshmallow or two as well. You’ve earned it. So, thank you, my friends, for your tirelessness. Thank you for saving the Internet. But also delight in having an administration that has brought in some amazing people, has opened up the processes in ways unthinkable just a few months ago, and is fundamentally with us and of us on these issues.
The Book: Terms of serviceMatthew Battles has written a proposed Terms of Service for books. It highlights the strengths of printed books, but Matthew is careful to avoid any reference to print vs. digital. In an email he writes: “Whether in print or pixels, the terms of the public sphere should be taken into consideration.” Amen.
Gmail now crashing two browsersWow. I’m impressed. For the past few days, Gmail has been hanging when I try to attach a file. It doesn’t matter what type of file it is or how big it is. More times than not, it hangs. The hang happens as soon as Gmail shows the bar that displays the percent loaded. I have to force-quit. This is with the latest version of FF and of Snow Leopard. (I use Gmail as part of Google Accounts, and I have https turned on.) I assumed this was a Firefox problem. I created a new profile and slowly added my add-ons back in. Eventually, the problem returned. Removing the add-ons I’d added did not take care of the problem. So, I switched to Opera. Nice browser. But I just had exactly the same problem. No add-ons. No Firefox. Same problem. Yes, I have run Disk Utility to repair permissions. Further, Safari so far has always been able to attach the very same files using Gmail. In fact, when FF or Opera have failed, they leave a draft of the message. I’ve opened up that very same draft in Gmail on Safari and have successfully attached the very same attachment. I am, shall we say, puzzled.
September 20, 2009
Some videosArt Kleiner on how to create cultural change in large corporations: Nadia El-Imam talks about whether the Web is changing who we are, starting with Couchsurfing as an example. Robin Chase, a founder of ZipCar, explains why she thinks mesh networks will connect people, cars, and the “smart grid.” [article here]:
Tagged with: business • change management • corporate culture • couchsurfing • culture • identity • mesh • networking
September 19, 2009
Stoopid anti-piracy sites, separated at birth?Wow. This condescending site from the RIAA looks surprisingly like the parody site that I and some friends did in 2004. Amusing. (I just reposted that second site at hyperorg.com, rather than at its original site.)
Order of Magnitude Puzzle: Bees per gallonYou win an Order of Magnitude puzzle if your answer is within an order of magnitude of the right answer. On the other hand, you don’t actually win anything. So, here goes: How many bees do you think are in a pound? (And isn’t the answer none if they’re all flying?) How many bees per gallon? The answer is in the comments. (Note: This is not a computation WolframAlpha can help you with.)
September 18, 2009
The temptation of storiesJournalism at its best is a way to uncover and communicate the truth, subject to all the usual human limitations. But journalism’s fundamental form, the story itself, brings a special temptation to manipulate the truth for economic or aesthetic reasons. The temptation is resistible to varying degrees, depending on the type of story (the temptations are greater for feature stories than for hard-core reportage of the day’s events), the nature of the journal, and the standing of journalist. Nevertheless, the temptation is there, built into the form itself. The very idea that there’s a story is itself a temptation. Maybe the story is on Facebook addiction or the rise in incivility. A journalist who goes back to her editor and says, “Nope, no story there” has disappointed the editor who now has to find another story to fill the hole in the paper newspaper or to feed the maw of the online publication. Not a big deal; it happens all the time. But if it’s fifth consecutive time that the reporter says there was no story there, it’s getting to be a problem. If it’s the reporter who has suggested the stories in the first place, as is often the case at many publications, she will be judged a failure because she’s wasted her time and gummed up the editor’s planning. It’s not like it’s supposed to be in science, where a failed hypothesis is as valuable as a proved one, even though of course every scientist would rather discover that a new compound cures cancer than that it doesn’t. A failed hypothesis in the world of journalism is a story that won’t run, that won’t bring in readers, that won’t give businesses a page on which to place an ad. There are real prices to stories failing to pan out. Reporters are thus tempted to make the story work. Even when the hypothesis of a story is true, journalists almost always reach a place in the story where they know what they want their interviewees to say. An interview is requested of a particular person to provide the “some experts disagree” statement or the “the implications of this are vast” verbiage. If that person doesn’t provide it, someone else will. Depending on the stage of the story, the interviewee may spark interest in a side issue or an approach the reporter hadn’t considered…resulting in someone else being called to provide the other side or the amplification. This happens at some of stage of the story even when the topic is interesting no matter what storyline it takes. For example, the death of Pat Tillman is interesting because it is instantly symbolic: Football star turns down a life of fame and wealth in order to defend his country, and dies a soldier’s death in Afghanistan. Beyond the basic reportage the day that it happened, it was bound to inspire journalistic stories. A reporter could enter with an open mind. Even so, she’ll enter with an open mind looking for an angle, which is to say, looking for a story. Is it a relatively simple narrative of an inspiring patriot who gave his life to support his ideals? Or was there “more” to it? That search for the “more” isn’t simply a hunt for unknown truths. It’s a search for a narrative that reveals the simple surface to be a veneer from which we will learn something unexpected. The reporter may have no idea what the more is, but once she gets a hint of it, she’ll be on it, and the narrative itself — if not personal ambition — will carry her forward. Maybe Tillman wasn’t as virtuous as we thought. Maybe his death wasn’t as straightforward as we were told. Maybe his story was of a life fulfilled or of a life wasted or of a life more complex than we’d thought. Maybe it’s about the government’s cynical use of him, or of the media’s own eagerness to find a hero. But something will emerge. And as it emerges, it gathers its story around it, and the reporter is off looking for the voices who will play certain roles in the story. Why? Because the story demands it. At the very least, the temptation journalistic stories is that of all story-telling, the basic way we humans make sense of our world. Stories, not just in journalism, are about the gradual revealing of truth. The surface wasn’t as it seemed. The ending was contained, hidden, in the beginning. What looked continuous was in fact disruptive. Stories have a shape, and story-tellers fit the pieces into that shape. There’s nothing wrong with that, except in an environment where there’s economic and social pressure to produce a story. Then the temptation is to get the pieces to fit. And that can corrode the truth. So can the simple fact that stories tend towards closure. They end. They’re done. Some circle of understanding has been drawn and closed, tip to tip. The story says, simply by ending. “This is what you needed to know.” There can often be truth in that, but there is always falsity in it. The world, its events, and its people escape even the best of stories. Stories are not going away from journalism, just as they’re not going away from history, biography, or how we talk about our day over dinner. They’re fundamental. Stories are how we understand, but they also inevitably are constructions, incomplete, and organized around a point of view. All stories are temptations. Journalistic stories have their own special and strong temptations because of their economics and because of the nature of the medium in which they’ve been embodied. Now those economics and that medium are changing, diminishing the old temptations but creating new ones: ::: Because we are increasingly turning to publications that explicitly take a stand, the temptation to include false views for “balance” is diminished. But, the preference for partisan media creates a new temptation: To over-state, in order to attract attention. [Guilty as charged!] ::: The old medium limited the length of stories, forcing unnecessary trimming except in very special circumstances. The new medium has infinite space so that stories can be right-sized. But it turns out that prolixity discourages on-line readers, so the new temptation is toward brevity. It’s not clear if that’s an expression of an impatience that’s always been with us or if the new medium constitutes a new temptation. ::: The old medium’s inability to embed links encouraged journalists to try to encapsulate the world in a single column of text. The new hyperlinked medium can tempt authors to gloss over points and contradictions because they’ve put in some links, putting the burden on readers who are (usually) lazier than the writers. ::: The economics of the old medium tempted publications to appear valuable by being a reliable source of the single truth. While they of course have encouraged discourse on controversial topics, their bread and butter have been stories that “get it right” and thus serve as a stopping point for belief. Stories are the bulwark of authority, and authority is the currency of the old journalistic economics. The new medium now can include as many stories as we want, from as many different points of view, connected by curators above the stories and by hyperlinks within the stories. The story no longer has to tell the whole truth. It’s just one of the stories. But, while that’s true of the ecosystem as a whole, the old temptation to be a single-source truth shop exists for individual online publications, whether they’re commercial or personal. Now, the form I’ve adopted for this essay, which is itself a type of story-telling, is one of balance: Old temptations matched by new temptations. It’s a form that aims at inspiring trust: “See, I’m presenting both sides!” And that itself can be corrosive. Indeed, in this case it is. While the old temptations are being replaced by new ones, the locus of truth is moving decisively from individual stories and publications to the network of stories and publications. The balancing of temptations misses this most important change. The hyperlinked context of stories creates not only new temptations to go wrong, but a greater possibility for going right.
Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • experts • journalism • media • narrative • narratives • truth
[berkman] Transforming Scholarly CommunicationLee Dirks [site] Director of Education and Scholarly Communication at Microsoft External Research is giving a Berkman-sponsored talk on “Transforming Scholarly Communications.” His group works with various research groups “to develop functionality that we think would benefit the community overall,” with Microsoft possibly as a facilitator. (Alex Wade from his group is also here.)
He begins by noting the “data deluge.” But, compuing is stepping up to the problem: Massive data sets, evolution of multicore, and the power of the cloud. We’ll need all that (Lee says) because the workflow for processing all the new info we’re gathering hasn’t kept up with the amount we’re taking in via sensor networks, global databases, laboratory instruments, desktops, etc. He points to the Life Under Your Feet project at Johns Hopkins as an example. They have 200 wireless computers, each with 10 sensors, monitoring air and soil temperature and moisture, and much more. (Microsoft funds it.) Lee recommends Joe Hellerstein’s blog if you’re interested in “the commoditization of massive data analysis.” We’re at the very early stages of this, Lee says. For e-scientists and e-researchers, there’s just too much: too much data, too much workflow, too much “opportunity.”
Q: You’d be interested in Dataverse.org.
Q: Some cultures will resist sharing…
Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • microsoft • open access • publishing • research • science • standards
Interview about e-gov ‘n’ stuffUlrike Reinhard has posted a video interview she did with me yesterday in preparation for the Reboot_D – Digital Democracy conference in Germany. We talk about e-gov, transparency, and whether the Web is a “third place.”
And, while I’m on the topic of videos, here’s a somewhat more lively one:
Tagged with: authority • e-democracy • e-gov • e-government • politics • transparency
September 17, 2009
Reuse metadata, don’t reinvent itJohn Udell has a lovely post talkingabout an interview with Ian Forrester of the BBC who cites Tom Scott using a phrase from Michael Smethurst: “The simple joy of webscale identifiers.” The point is that if someone has invented an identifier for an object and you want to point to it, use the existing identifier. That enables a namespace conglomerating that keeps information all huddled and cozy, rather than drifting apart on ice floes.
September 15, 2009
God of Carnage: EhI’m not sure if the following contains spoilers, since part of the problem is that “The God of Carnage” was so predictable that I’m not sure if we were supposed to know from the beginning what would happen. So, while I’ll steer clear of outright plot spoilers, I am going to talk about the general progression and strategy of the play, so don’t read any further if you’re thinking of seeing the show. On the other hand, if you’re thinking of seeing the show, you ought to read a little further just to give yourself a chance to change your mind. “The God of Carnage” won a Tony for best drama and for best actress for Marcia Gay Hayden. So obviously the experts saw something that I didn’t. I saw a play that from the beginning was obvious in its intent: Two couples would come unglued. Civilization would be revealed as a shiny surface believed in by liberals (obvious as soon as we learn one of the characters is writing a book about Darfur), masking the dog-eat-dog, name-calling bestiality waiting to break through at any moment. The play proceeds by giving each configuration of the four a moment, and each person a revelatory scene. By the book. By the book. The acting was pretty disappointing, especially given that the four stars — on stage pretty much for the entire 80 minutes — are Hayden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, and Jeff Daniels. Wow. I actually don’t blame them. The writing — or perhaps the translation — is just awkward. It’s stuff nobody would actually say, and not because it’s so clever. It’s stuffy language. The play was written by Yasmina Reza. I liked her “Art” better, although that seemed to me to be more superficial than it intended. Still, it at least was about something. “God of Carnage” isn’t. And although there are a couple of funny moments — Jeff Daniels on the phone — and some of the acting was enjoyable — Gandolfini smiling — I’m beginning to think that Yasmina Reza is the French Neil Simon, except more pretentious and not even as funny. (And please note that I am not a big Simon fan.)
Posts I stopped reading after three sentencesAs we were waiting for the Bolt Bus back to Boston, we watched the Beautiful People interviewing one another outside the Manhattan Center. A sign announced the G-Star Raw Runway event. So, I googled it and found an article at FashionIndie that began this way:
Date: September 15th, 2009
September 14, 2009
Broadband strategy public issue-raiserThe Broadband strategy initiative of the FCC has set up a site where anyone can pose a topic, discuss it, or vote it up or down. The top-ranked issue at the moment is a meta-issue: Revise the voting scheme on the site, to avoid gaming the system. That’s probably a useful suggestion. But it’s good in any case to see the FCC using modern tools to provide open fora.
Mobius BachBach’s Crab Canon is a string of notes designed to be played front to back and back to front. In this video, it’s turned into a Mobius strip and played.
September 13, 2009
From Technorati to WordPress tag namespaceThe excessively sharp-eyed of you may have noticed that I have recently switch from listing tags at the end of posts to using WordPress tags at the end of posts. Here’s why. Not that you should care. When tagging first took off, there weren’t a lot of good places to link your tags to. So, I chose to have them link to Technorati because Technorati was then the leading search engine for blogs. Plus, Technorati had taken the lead in making itself tag-worthy. Plus, Technorati was founded by a friend of mine — David Sifry — who I trusted (and still do trust) to do the Right Thing. Also, I was on the Technorati board of advisers (uncompensated), so I had some basic familiarity with the site and the the people. As a result, when you click on one of my old-style tags, it does a search for tags at Technorati and shows you the results. For example, here’s a tag to try: . A couple of years ago, Word Press — the blogging software I use — introduced its own tagging capability. Instead of my having to hand-create links to the tags I want to use (actually, I wrote a little javascript to do it for me), I can enter tags and Word Press will turn them into links that aggregate all of my own postings that I’ve tagged that way. At the bottom of this post, you can try out the taxonomy link. This is a further step into narcissism, for rather than seeing what the rest of the world has tagged “e-gov” (or whatever), you now see only my posts tagged that way. But I suspect that is probably what most users expect and want when they click on a tag at the bottom of a post. If you want to search all posts by everyone that have a certain tag, Technorati and other sites will do it for you. (By the way, many thanks to Brad Sucks for writing the scripts that extracted my old tags and auto-inserted them as Word Press tags. He says the scripts are too focused to be of general use, so don’t ask. But do buy his music.)
Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • tags • taxonomy • technorati • word press
September 12, 2009
Michael Geist’s Summa CopyrighticaMichael Geist, who has been leading the fight for sane copyright legislation in Canada, has posted his submission to the Canadian government advising on the shape of reform. What follows is by no means a complete summary. For example, I have skipped some recommendations specific to the proposed Canadian law. And I’m also certainly going to put many things inadequately. So, read it yourself. Please. First, why does copyright matter?
Then, “seven areas of copyright reform.” 1. Expand the “fair dealing” provision of the proposed Canadian law, thus expanding what we in the US call fair use. Michael advises against trying to enumerate all exceptions, but says that if they must be counted, they should include parody and satire, time shifting, format shifting, music shifting, and teaching. (I’m surprised that Michael doesn’t ask for exemptions (or expansions) for scholarly works and political commentary, but IANAL and I am definitely not a Canadian lawyer.) 2. When it comes to laws preventing the circumvention of anti-copying mechanisms, “The experience in the United States, where anti-circumvention provisions effectively trump fair use rights, provides the paradigm example of what not do to. It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure (TPM) if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright.” Also, don’t ban devices that circumvent if they have non-infringing uses. Also, create “authorized circumventers” such as archivists. Also, require DRM-ers to unlock their content for those who have a right to it. 3. “Canadian law should include an explicit safe harbour that insulates intermediaries from liability where they follow a prescribed model that balances the interests of users and content owners. The ideal Canadian model would be a ‘notice and notice’ system that has been used successfully for many years on an informal basis.” Also, reject the “Three strikes” provision. “Internet access is far too important to establish a system that would cut off access based on unproven allegations of infringement.” 4. Expand the right to make backups to all digital consumer products. And remove the statutory damages that in US bankrupts individual music sharers, rather than being applied to commercial-scale infringers. 5. Enhance the public domain. Don’t extend the length of copyright even further, you crazy bastards. [Ok, I'm editorializing here a little.] Also, eliminate the “crown copyright” that keeps government works out of the public domain. 6. Rather than introducing a special exception for education, Michael recommends “a more flexible fair dealing provision … that treats educators, creators, and all Canadians in an equitable manner.” 7. Prohibit restrictions on “core protections” that are “buried beneath the ‘I agree’ button.”
Date: September 12th, 2009
September 11, 2009
Is Hobbes the inevitable outcome of the Internet?I heard a speaker recently (he wants to remain anonymous) argue that because the Internet makes public our every regrettable photo and expression, we will see each other at our worst, and thus the Internet — and then the real-world social world — will become a Hobbesian struggle of self-centered individuals in a war of all against all. Nasty, brutish, short, and did I mention nasty? Since my overall mantra is “The Internet is more of everything,” I want to say, yes, that’s true, but it will also become more Rousseauian: more collaborative and sweet. But I do have hope that the sweetness born will be greater than the nastiness unleashed. And that’s for two reasons. First, there are reasons to think that the raw exposure of sins and self-embarrassments at Facebook and other such sites won’t have a directly proportional effect on the quotient of nastiness. It will certainly provide a greater trove for those who are intent in wreaking havoc on people, such as political operatives doing opposition research. But, society has a tradition of drawing lines of privacy based not on what we can physically perceive but on what we’re allowed to notice. In polite society, you can’t say “Who cut one?” no matter how bad the smell, and there are actual laws against peering into windows even when the shades are left open. So, we can expect that as we get used to the new opportunities for invading privacy, we’ll develop norms that rope off some areas and some topics so that even if we happen to have looked down the social media blouse of the woman next to us, we’re not allowed to comment on what we saw. Second, we generally don’t like the Hobbesian world. Neither did Hobbes. The state of nature he describes is so awful that, he says, it motivates humans to form societies and governments. Now, those who think they can win in the war of all against all may insist on acting in a nasty, selfish way, but we hem them in because they are dangerously assaholic. And there are times when it’s fun to be in the tussle, but we hem in those times and places, and try to lower the consequences. The fact we generally and deeply prefer a sweetly collaborative world to one in which everyone is trying to steal everyone else’s bread is a pretty good reason for hope that we will tend towards the sweet, with unfortunate and inevitable outbreaks of the nasty. As ever.
Date: September 11th, 2009
September 10, 2009
Fear of leadership, fear of governmentThis morning on NPR, Mara Liasson wrapped up her coverage of President Obama’s health care speech by saying something like: It’s unsure whether the speech will have the effect Obama wants, but if it does, it won’t be because of its soaring rhetoric but because of the details he gave. Are you sure, Mora? Are you sure that being inspired has no effect on political decisions? Is that why you dismissed the importance of public speech, of words, of vision? Was that a fact-based observation? Or was it perhaps because you feel you have to deny that you personally were so excited by President Obama’s speech that you felt that old thrill going up your leg, and that when he read from Ted Kennedy’s letter you teared up? Just like so many of us? Just like me? In any case, I thought it was a shame to end coverage of a beautiful, inspiring, moving speech with an explicit denial of the importance of what made it not just important, but great. Next up on NPR’s coverage was a report on the Supreme Court deliberations about exactly how obscenely corporations can pollute our democracy — merely pornographically or the full auto-erotic asphyxiation stranglehold — in which we heard the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court casually say “Are we being asked to allow the government — Big Brother — to…” The quote is approximate, but not the apposite reference to government as Big Brother. Does Justice Roberts really think the government when it regulates behavior is necessarily totalitarian? Yikes.
Tagged with: leadership • media • npr • obama • pack the court • politics • supreme court
September 9, 2009
Making the most of government dataThe Sunlight Foundation has picked two winning mashups in its contest:
September 8, 2009
Google Books metadata: Google respondsThere’s a terrific colloquy between Google and Geoff Nunberg in response to Geoff’s critique of Google’s handling of the metadata attached to the books Google is digitizing (which I blogged about here). It’s fascinating for its content, but also very cool as a conversation between a company and its market. Of course, it would have been even better if Google had initiated this conversation when it started its digitization project.
Tagged with: books • everything_is_miscellaneous • google_books • libraries • metadata
September 7, 2009
Internet architecture reading listHere’s the reading list for an upcoming session of Scott Bradner’s class on Internet Architectural Principles at the Harvard Extension School. Deep list, rich articles. For example. (Scott is one of the creators of the Internet as we know and love it.)
Minimalism and gamingOne side of effect of writing games for a lower common denominator platform is that it can force art in where effects lazily dominate. For example.
Tagged with: games
September 6, 2009
Data and metadata: Together againTerry Jones has an excellent post that lists the problems introduced by maintaining a hard distinction between metadata and data. Terry cites Everything Is Miscellaneous (thanks, Terry), which argues that the distinction, which is hard-coded in the Age of Databases, becomes a merely functional difference in the Age of Messy Links: Metadata is what you know and data is what you’re looking for. For example, the year of a CD is metadata about the CD if you know the year a Bob Dylan CD came out but you don’t remember the title, and the title can be metadata if you know the title but want to find the year. And in both cases, it could all be metadata in your search for lyrics. This is all very squishy and messy because the distinction is, as Terry says, artificial. It comes from thinking about experience as content that gets processed, as if we worked the way computers do. More exactly, it comes from thinking about experience as a set of Experience Atoms that then have to be assembled; metadata are the labels that tell you that Atom A goes into Atom Z. But experience is far more like language than like particle physics or Ikea assembly instructions. And that’s for a very good reason: linguistic creatures’ experience cannot be understood apart from language. Language doesn’t neatly separate into content and meta-content. It all comes together and it’s all intertwingled. Language is so very non-atomic that it makes atoms realize how lonely they’ve been. That doesn’t mean that computer software that separates metadata from data is useless. Lord knows I love a good database. But it also means that computer software that can treat anything as metadata depending on what we’re trying to do opens up some interesting possibilities…
Tagged with: databases • everythingIsMiscellaneous • everything_is_miscellaneous • fluiddb • knowledge • language • metadata • philosophy
Danny de Vito’s Twitter pic He’s tweeted twice so far, once that his nuts are on fire, and then promising a phone call to a friend when he hits 100K followers, indicating that perhaps he hasn’t looked past the “number of followers” portion of the site, but I have to say that I love his photo…
Evolution of EvolutionBen Fry posts an amazing visualization of the changes in the six editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species, based on meticulous work done by Dr. John van Wyhe and others. From Ben’s introductory text:
Tagged with: darwin • drafts • everythingIsMiscellaneous • everything_is_miscellaneous • evolution • metadata • science • transparency
September 5, 2009
BricolageEatBees has a couple of very interesting posts (1 2) about bricolage in Morocco. Bricolage is usually romanticized because it is a way those without resources can, through their inventiveness, make something out of scraps. But, EatBees writes about how a friend convinced him that as a integral part of Morocco’s economy, it isn’t just a sign of the culture’s inventiveness:
(Thanks to Jillian York at Global Voices and Twitter. You might also want to read her post about the sense of otherness Americans (and others) can feel in Morocco.)
Tagged with: bridgeblog • culture • economics • globalvoices • gv • morocco
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