Aargh. Steven Levy's excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!

The Times They Aren't a-Changin' explains itself this way:

It is the conceit of newspapers that each morning there are new stories to tell. Using the New York Times's own archives, unchangingtimes.com sets out to prove that everything news is old.

So the blog takes a current story from The Times and finds stories on the same theme in its archive. The result is a list of the mythic narratives of our culture.

The Berkman Center has received a $4 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (for four million, we spell out the entire name) to support the Center's tenth anniversary and beyond.

This is fantastic news. The Berkman Center is part of Harvard Law but relies on the kindness of others for financial support. From the Berkman posting about the MacArthur grant:

Over the past decade, through a series of grants, as well as substantive involvement in the center's work, MacArthur has been instrumental in the success of numerous Berkman efforts, such as: OpenNet Initiative, the Digital Media Exchange, Digital Natives, Global Voices, and the study of citizen media. These have led to numerous policy changes, two books, and two spin-off organizations -- one non-profit, the other for-profit.

Andrew Sullivan on how Hillary could come in third in Iowa:

One wrinkle pointed out by a reader is that when you examine the second-choices of Democrats in Iowa in the NYT/CBS poll, you find that Clinton is significantly behind both Edwards and Obama. Edwards gets 25 percent of the second choice voters; Obama 24 percent; and Clinton only 16 percent. I get the feeling that many Edwards and Obama supporters like each other more than they care for the Clinton machine. In caucuses, that can make a difference. Maybe she'll finish third.

Yesterday, my ISP required me to choose two "security questions" from a drop-down list of dumb choices: the name of my first pet or my favorite book, movie, food, or place to visit.

Why dumb? First, these questions assume I don't have an Evil Sibling who knows these things; the same is true, of course, of common questions such as where you were born and your mother's maiden name.

Second, they are guessable. Type in The Bible" and "Harry Potter" as favorite book and you've probably covered 95% of Americans.

Third, I don't have a favorite book, movie, food or place to visit. I don't even have a favorite non-fiction book, sf novel or funny book. As for favorite places to visit, I had a really good time in Italy, but I also had a really good time in Leiden before that, and I don't really know how to rank my sister's house on Thanksgiving versus that place fifteen feet in front of the Monet water lilies in the basement of the Musée de l’Orangerie versus Heaven if the Lord is willing to overlook certain transgressions (which, by the way, are also some of my favorite places to visit).

So, here is a list of similarly dumb security questions, although they are dumb in a variety of ways:

If asked to list US states, which would you remember last?

Who is your sixth-favorite novelist?

What word does the final scene in "Madame Butterfly" bring to mind?

Where exactly did you get the most lost?

Name the teacher who had the least influence on you.

What is your preferred way of organizing items? (Note: Do not choose "alphabetically.")

Who is your favorite child?

Guess a number from 1 to 1,000.

Elf is to wipes as happenstance is to ______.

if your house were on fire, what is the last thing you would remove from it?

What would be the trade-in value of your new car, you know, if you cleaned it up real good, got the empties out of the trunk, etc.?

Who is the next of your high school friends you are going to forget?

What is the answer to this question?

[This post is also running at HuffingtonPost.]

With its new advertising infrastructure, Facebook is being careful to protect privacy of information. But they are bucking — and perhaps helping to transform — the norms of privacy. At its most basic, Facebook is getting the defaults wrong.

The new ad infrastructure enables Facebook to extend their reach onto other companies' sites. For example, if you rent a copy of "Biodome" from Blockbuster.com, Blockbuster will look for a Facebook cookie on your computer. If it finds one, it will send a ping to Facebook. The Blockbuster site will pop up a "toast" (= popup) asking if you want to let your friends at Facebook know that you rented "Biodome." If you say yes, next time you log into Facebook, Facebook will ask you to confirm that you want to let your friends know of your recent rental. If you say yes, that becomes an event that's propagated in the news feed going to your friends.

Facebook has also created a new type of entity to allow non-people to have a presence in the system. So, a company or a character can now get a "page," but not a profile. It can have "fans" but not "friends." And the fact that you decided to become a fan of Cap'n Crunch is yet more information advertisers can use against you.

Facebook makes an astounding array of information available to its advertisers so that they can precisely "target" likely suspects. This is great for advertisers, and — given that the ad space is going to be filled up one way or another — it's arguably better for users to see ads that are relevant than are irrelevant. (The counter-argument is that targeting makes ads more successfully manipulative, not just more relevant.) Facebook is scrupulous, however, about not letting advertisers know the identity of those to whom it's advertising. So, Blockbuster might buy ads for all men aged 18-24 who have joined the Pauly Shore fan club, but Blockbuster doesn't know who those people are.

When Facebook talks about preserving user privacy, that's what they have in mind: They do not let advertisers tie the information about you in a profile (your age, interests, etc.) to the information that identifies you in your profile (your name, email address, etc.). That is the informational view of privacy, and Facebook is likely to continue to get that right, if only because so many governmental agencies are watching them. I also think that the Facebook folks understand and support the value of maintaining privacy in this sense.

Yet, I find myself creeped out by this system because Facebook gets the defaults wrong in two very significant areas.

When Blockbuster gives you the popup asking if you want to let your Facebook friends know about your rental, if you do not respond in fifteen seconds, the popup goes away ... and a "yes" is sent to Facebook. Wow, is that not what should happen! Not responding far more likely indicates confusion or dismissal-through-inaction than someone thinking "I'll save myself the click."

Further, we are not allowed to opt out of the system. At your Facebook profile, you can review a list of all the sites you've been to that have presented you with the Facebook spam-your-friends option, and you can opt out of the sites one at a time. But you cannot press a big red button that will take you out of the system entirely. So, if you've deselected Blockbuster and the Manly Sexual Inadequacy Clinic from the list, if you go to a new site that's done the deal with Facebook, you'll get the popup again there. We should be allowed to Just Say No, once and for all.

Why? Because privacy is not just about information. It's all about the defaults.

If a couple is walking down the street, engaged in deep and quiet conversation, it certainly would violate their privacy to focus listening devices on them, record their conversation, and post it on the Internet. The couple wold feel violated not only because their "information" — their conversation — was published but because they had the expectation that even though their sound waves were physically available to anyone walking on the street who cared to listen, norms prevent us from doing so. These norms are social defaults, and they are carefully calibrated to our social circumstances: The default for sidewalks is that you are not allowed to intercede in private conversations except in special circumstances. The default for showing up at a wedding party is that they can ask whether you're with the bride or groom's party, but they can't ask you to show a drivers license. The default at some schools is that your grades will be posted on a public bulletin board and at others that they will not. When we violate these norms, various forms of social opprobrium ensue. We even have special words for different types of violations: eavesdropping, being nosy, being a blabbermouth, etc.

Facebook is getting privacy right where privacy is taken as a matter of information transfer. But it is getting privacy wrong as a norm. Our expectation is that our transactions at one site are neither to be made known to other sites nor made known to our friends. We may well want to let our friends know what we've bought, but the norm and expectation is that we will not. Software defaults generally ought to reflect the social defaults. And when you're as important as Facebook — two billion page views a day — your software's defaults can nudge the social defaults.

Our privacy norms are changing rapidly. They have to because we've now invented so many new ways to be in public. That's why Facebook's move is especially disappointing. Although they are rigorously supporting informational privacy, they are setting the defaults based not on what's best for their users but on what's best for them. It's clearly and inarguably better for users to be able to opt out of the entire third-party system, but it's clearly more lucrative for Facebook to make it hard to opt out (not to mention making it an opt in system).

Businesses always choose sides, implicitly or explicitly. Facebook has been notable for being on its users' side. Not in this case. In fact, because this new ad plan invokes Facebook on other companies' sites, it feels like we're being ganged up on. Even worse, in this case the gang is so strong, it could reshape privacy's norms.

Science of the Invisible has run some blogs about education through two of the standard readability assessors. For some reason, this blog got included. The results: According to the Flesch Reading Ease Score, I write at the lowest grade level (8.14).

Jeez, I'd better write longer epistolary sentences, with an increased emphasis on epistemic autoimmunization, if I am to achieve — as I believe is valedictory and phenomenological — the ambulatory mastication that is providential, scatalogical, omnigorgantillious, and extrasartorially empathemistical for a phrenobombillicious monostochastically pseudopodomonious intralogomaniacasupplicant such as me.

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on copyright. He administers the Knight News Challenge and is the journalism program officer. He says he wants feedback about the way the News Challenge has been run. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, getting things wrong, etc. You can always listen to the entire thing at Media Berkman. Also, I'm posting before proofreading at all.]

The Knight Foundation was founded in 1950, he says. The founders believed that a good newspaper can pull communities together around information. But as newspapers lose readers and especially lose young readers, what happens to this function? Their mantra is now: "Serving the information needs of communities in a democracy." That's ultimately what the News Challenge is about. And it's led them to focus on physical, geographic communities. Voting, schools, taxes, etc., are all defined by geography. The Challenge looks for projects use digital information to build or bind community in specific geographic areas." They hope they can "lead the news industry into the digital revolution to help them gather new audiences, keep new audiences, and not only keep their perspective, but their important position." Newspapers may die, but losing the function newspapers accomplish would be quite bad.

He talks about the grants they've given. Some are designed to gather information: MTV is putting 51 youth journalists into the field to report on the presidential election for mobile media. They hope to find out if that's effective. At MIT, the idea is to study the information needs of communities, and to create new products and processes. Arizona State is creating an entrepreneurial center.

Some are designed to lead. In Chicago, they're hiring community organizers to train citizen journalists, and retain them. Also in Chicago, they're funding a project called "EveryBlock": Type in your address and find out everything going on there. They've also given three grants for games, looking at how to use games to explain ongoing stories, and whether they could be templated for newspapers.

Third, they hope to help the profession: The Berkman Citizen Journalism Law Project that looks at legal questions around citizen journalism. Village Soup is aimed at creating a free content management system for any citizen who might want to start a local newspaper. Northwestern is going to give nine scholarships to technology students to teach them journalism.

This year, Gary says, the number of applicants doubled to over 3,000. This year, when you submit an app you can submit it as open or closed. If open, the world can see it, rate it, and comment on it. You are allowed to incorporate the best of the comments and resubmit. They advertised the Challenge in ten languages, including through MTV globally. The number of young people and the number of international applications has gone up dramatically (from 15% to 40%).

This year, it's been a bit disappointing because too many people missed the point of being innovative; people took last year's winners and applied to a new content area. But the Knight Foundation's definition of innovation wants new ideas, not new applications. They are seeing lots of applications for Facebook, use of GPS systems, place-tagging for wireless (e.g., systems that tell the history of a spot as you pass by it).

Problems and issues: Should they judge innovation relative to the geographical from which the proposal stems? And what does that do to some of the international applications. Also, it's hard to make international grants to individuals because of the PATRIOT Act. And how do they monitor grants around the world? Also, the open submissions might create intellectual property issues.

Q: (ethanz) I'm thrilled the international outreach has gone as well as it has. To what extent are other funders looking at what you're doing with this challenge, and do you have funders deep in, say the former Soviet Union, approaching you so they can do what's innovative locally and that they can monitor?
A: Great way to go that we have not gone yet. International is a growth area for us. We don't know who might be good to work with in Russia. We've given grants to Internews and the International Center for Journalists, etc. They have programs throughout the world and they might be able to help us monitor, choose and administer.

(david ardia) The networking with other winners has been really beneficial. Did you anticipate that? Is there a way to develop that?
A: In October in Toronto we got all the winners together. I thought we would have such big egos in the room. But it was just the opposite. It was delightful to see. I was thinking, "Right in this room is the future of journalism."

Q: (cbracy) How many of the applications were open?
A: 40% I thought that was pretty good. There were an average of two comments per application. Some people did indeed resubmit.
Q: How will you evaluate whether that's been effective?
A: We'll investigate with the winners afterwards.

Q: [cmaclay] How do you get these ideas connected with the existing mainstream media?
A: We bring the winners to the conferences to talk with the traditional media. And we have a blog at PBS called "idealab." (Look for an announcement there tomorrow.)

Q: (max) Have you looked at providing incentives for those who apply openly?
A: We made it clear that you wouldn't be punished no matter which way you apply. I was afraid that someone would read an application in the open category and then apply in the closed category, maybe slightly modified. The advantage of submitting openly is that others can help make your proposal more complete.

Q: (ethanz) Do you think the curve of applications will continue upwards? How many years do you think the model of soliciting all proposals will work?
A: I think the amount of innovation is likely to be constant. Our goal is sustain it until it dies out. (We've been authorized for five years.) BTW, the Knight Foundation is having a conference in February to bring together community organizations to think about the role and importance of information to the community.

Q: (jpalfrey) First, the Berkman Center relies on grants, so thank you for your candor about how the decision process works. Why is more information better for democracy? And as you go international, are you aiming at a certain type of democracy? Are you willing to make grants in non-democracies?
A: Yes., we're willing to make grants in non-democracies. Most of the people in senior management at the Foundation came up through journalism, with the belief that the best way to combat bad speech is through good speech, etc. We're also willing to say that we don't know that more information is better for a community, so we're going to study the information needs of communities. There's one underway at the U of Missouri (co-funded by Pew) that looks at whether communities that have a lot citizen-generated media have higher levels of civic engagement.

Q: When you talk to communities, are you talking about ways for organizations to become publishers or how citizens can become content producers?
A: Part of the idea for this came from Dan Gillmor who said in an article that community organizations need to get involved in community information. As newspapers cut back on investigative reporting, citizens may have to take up more of the slack. We read it and decided it's exactly what we need to do.

Q: (me) What type of information do you prefer to fund? W/hich section of the newspaper?
A: The local section. "We're not looking to fund bloggers in this project or editorial cartoonists. We're looking to create an awareness of communities that newspapers are changing, with them some important roles that they perform may be changing. Wake up and smell the roses. You shold be trying to do something about this."

The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to "webbify" the Dewey Decimal System.

The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the "networked level," defined as "Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible." He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.

He proposes a scheme for URI's (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don't fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the "concept" designation.

Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one's captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn't intended to be self-standing, and I don't know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)

To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.

As Lorcan says, "This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of 'classic large-scale vocabularies' in a web environment." There's lots of info packed into Dewey's system. How can we best liberate that info?

Dan Gillmor has a piece in the Boston Globe Ideas section on how to bring at least a little life to the presidential debates. Well, it's not so much about making them lively as making them useful.

I'm holding a discussion this Wednesday at the Berkman Center about what copyright might look like if we designed it from scratch. My aim is not for us to design copyright from scratch, because copyright changing radically is a pipe dream. Nor is it really to come up with a proposal that could actually pass Congress, because it seems the only change Congress might make is to lengthen the term of copyright from 70 years after the holder dies to waiting until the dead creator telephones the RIAA and says s/he's ready to let it go. Instead, I want to use the discussion to explore the cultural and moral objectives of granting copyrights.

The discussion is open to everyone. It'll start at 6:30. We serve pizza. [map]

I know the title of this post sounds either (1) mystical or (2) like the English-like noise some spam generates, but if you use Keynote and installed Leopard, it might make some sense to you.

Anyway, Keynote has started crashing seemingly randomly. And crashing hard, plunging my entire MacBook into the Chime of Doom and the Blue Screen of Anxiety. App crashes aren't supposed to crash the entire OS, are they?

I did a clean install of Leopard last week, and therefore did a clean install of Keynote. I can't find a pattern to when Keynote crashes. Once it was when I was resizing an image. Another time it was when I pressed the "play" button. But it may be crashing during Keynote only because I've been using Keynote a lot. I was having similar crashes -- but usually not all the way back out of the OS -- rather randomly before upgrading to Leopard. If anything, Leopard has made it worse.

I've run memtest on my RAM for a full night after booting into single user mode, and it says all is ok. Disk Warrior also checks out fine. Yes, it does feel like a hardware problem, and bad RAM especially. But would memtest lie?

I'm loving my Mac. I am not loving feeling like my computer has degraded into a Windows 95 degree of stability.