[DG] Jesper Juul: The affinity between computers and games

Jesper is going to talk about the affinity of games and computers. [Abstract]

Why do we play computer games? Well, why do we play games at all? The real question is: Why do games fit computers so well? Computers are an enabler of games the way cinemas enable story telling.

He gives a nuanced analysis of classical games. Then he looks at what happens if you remove one of the elements. For example, games classically have rules. Take away the rules and you can have freeform play. If you remove the fact that we place a value on the outcomes (i.e., we like to win), you can get Conway's game of life or watch a fireplace. So, this is a definition of games that — despite Wittgenstein — is useful since it provides a way to think about assumptions.

The elements of the classical model have been removed since around 1970. E.g., pen and paper role playing games don't have fixed rules and Doom doesn';t have a quantifiable outcome. The one thing that hasn't changed is the fact that the player feels associated with the outcome.

Games aren't tied to any particular media. They can be "transmedial." E.g., computer hearts is just like real world hearts, but John Madden Football isn't.

He concludes: Games have moved onto computers so easily because we have spent millennia driving the ambiguity out of games. He says, "Expanding the field of games is one of the computer's most important contriutions to human culture."

[DG] Edward Castronova: Virtual Worlds

Ted is an economist. He's the guy who wrote the paper about the economics of Evetrquest. You can find more papers by him here. [Abstract]

He surveyed users of Everquest, and got 3,619 answers. He applied some standard economic techniques to evaluate the economics of that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG, i.e., More-Peg). And, most entertainingly, he found that 20% of respondents said that they live in Norrath (one of the game's worlds) and visit the real world. The average of all respondents is spending 4.5 hours per day playing the game and have put a total of about 800 hours into their main avatar.

"This is a frontier." It attracts people who are stigmatized. It can greatly increase human well-being.

Ted reports on new, unpublished research. He wants to see if two characters sold at ebay have different prices because one is male and one is female. At a $400 typical auction price, the female sells at about a 10% discount.

Ted also tracks currency prices for the virtual world's money against the US dollar. At the moment, Korean bucks are worth less than virtual simoleons.

He says that the current model in which a corporation is in charge of the virtual world isn't working too well. Players are constantly pissed off and feel completely alienated from the governing body. It will have to change but he doesn't know how.

[DG] Greg Costikyan: Games in Crisis

Greg is talking about the severe pressure the game industry is under. Development budgets have increased in a Moore-like way but revenues haven't: A game ten years ago cost about $200,000 to produce; now it costs $2M+. App size has gone up two orders of magnitude in just a few years. Most of the costs are for graphic design. I.e., it used to take a one person-day to build. A Doom III level takes 2+ weeks.

But the industry feels it has to keep moving up. The audience has no "Indie game" aesthetic. And games are sold to distributors on the basis of brief demos that highlight the graphics. Actual gameplay is too hard to judge to play much of a role in the decisions. And, historically, supporting advanced hardware has increased sales, but (says Greg) that's because the hardware has sucked.

Games lose money. And it will get worse. Consequence: The field is driven by mega-hits. Over 89% of sales are generated by thhe top ten games. Publishers will continue to consolidate. And games will be more like other games; the most lucrative approach is to publish a sports game that has minor annual updates. And basing a game on a commercial character (or doing a sequel) reduces the risk. It has to fall into an existing category, with innovation only on the margins.

There is interest in independent game development because people are desperate for a hit. Also, mobile games are showing signs of life becausegames mobile platforms require much less develop time.

But, overall, says Greg, we're facing the "comicization" of gaming, marginalizing it as an artform. But, the field is wide open in terms of possible innovation.

Possible solutions: Keep costs down by having the games companies conspire to work together. Or find new sources of revenue. Or online distribution, which works for puzzle games (e.g. Jewel, Tetris) on Yahoo Games, etc. We will see a revival of shareware. And mods will survive, although there's no real business model. We need a parallel distribution channel for independent games, analogous to the indie music scene an d art house for film. Possibly we'll see "advergaming" as per WildTangent. And the academic environment is producing some interesting games.

Or maybe we won't keep pushing against Moore's Law once we have cinematic quality games. And then perhaps cinematic quality won't be required in every game: photography gave rise to abstract art, says Greg.

[DG] Micah Jackson: SelfObjects

Micah is providing a way to think about the self online and off. [Abstract]

Self psychology was originally developed by Heinz Kohut to deal with personality disorders. He talked about selfobjects, which are anything you encounter that you consider constitutive of you. Some are healthy and some aren't. Idealized selfobjects tell you how to be. Healthy ones might be a teacher or a hero. An unhealthy selfobject is destructive of your personality, e.g., Jesse James. A mirroring selfobject gives feedback to you, e.g., an audience that nods as you talk. A drill instructor might be both an idealized and mirroring selfoject.

What are online selfobjects?

An idealized electronic selfobject might be a computer (accurate, great uptime, logical) or Google.

An electronic mirroring object might be your program's ability to compile (if you're a programmer).

An electronically mediated idealized selfobject might be someone you know mostly online or online relationships (clans, guilds) you hold in high regard. Or the apartment on the TV show Friends.

An electronically mediated mirroring self objects might be comments on your blog.

Implications for real life: People who segment their online life from real life may appear significantly different when online. People who are more "integrated" may show online traits offline as well. And, of course, just because you use a technology doesn't mean that you take as a selfobject.

I am my blog. My blog is me.

[DG] The Happy Tutor

The Tutor begins by reminding us that his presentation is the property of the Happy Tutor. [Abstract]

His 19 aphorisms and one parable are essentially poetry. You can read a close version of them for yourself here.

Quite wonderful.

[DG] Robert Moore: Brand

Semiotics has been associated with a type of idealism (Rob says), dealing only with immaterial signs. Rob is going to see if there's a way of also anchoring it in the earth: something can be both a material thing and a sign (e.g., a communion wafer). [Abstract]

Everything is being branded these days. Brands are "unstable composite entities" joining a thing (product) and language. Brands don't become real until tokens of them (e.g., individual cans of Coke) are taken up and used.

Rob will give three pathologies of brand will illustrate the way they are composite and what their semiotics are: genericide, ingredient branding, and viral marketing. These will show us how names and things are vulnerable in different ways.

Genericide=when a court decides that a brand name is now generic. Consumers take over the brand and the product is a mere commodity.

In ingredient branding, the product, not the name, becomes invisible. E.g., Nutrasweet, Intel, Dolby. In this case, the mark, logo or brand name, is the only part of the product that is visible to the consumer. The marketing folks think that the consumer needs help in making the value of the ingredient product. The host and ingredient brands circulate independently, but lending each other value: if you've seen Intel Inside on a Dell box and then a Bob's Computers box, some of the value of Dell rubs off on Bob.

Viral marketing as in Hotmail means that the customer provides an "involuntary endorsement."

In synthetic worlds (chats, MMORPGs), people's interaction is mediated by names. We make ourselves available to one another via names. There is a chain of names from user name to IP address to social security to a real person. "Sooner or later, you strike meat."

Conclusion: Brands provide a new type of relationship among people. The semiotic vulnerabilities exist in synthetic worlds. E.g., a man in the real world was arrested for selling someone else's online property. So, there is something special about the earth after all.

[DG] Molly Wright Steenson: Imaginary Architects

Molly is going to talk about similarities between architecture during the Weimar period (1919-1933) and the Internet. [Abstract]

Just as architects in the Weimar period took their work into a theoretical and communicative sphere in order to forge their conceptions of modern architecture, information architects, web designers and content developers explore their ideas through blogs, comments and email lists.

During the 20s, there was a lot of utopian discourse around design. But Molly doesn't find much such talk on the Internet.

Molly uses Bruno Taut for her insight into the expressionist architecture of the 20s. He was all over the map, but believed that architecture could lead a revolution in art and thus in society. He formed "The Crystal Chain," which was in effect a paper-based mailing list to talk about such ideas. There was an exchange of "fantastic, beautiful letters."

Today there's some interesting conversation going on, e.g., Crispin Jones, Howard Rheingold, Derek M. Powazek The digital revolution has taken place, but not in the boardrooms. It's in how the Web "grows communities almost without trying." But not enough conversation is stretching the boundaries. We're in a time like Weimar when the contracts are boring. So, we ought to do what Taut recommends: become imaginary architects.

[DDG] Anne Galloway: Writing the Digital City

Anne is going to talk about "technologically augmented cities." [Abstract]

There have always already been four facets of "the real" that need to be considered when looking at the virtual. There's the real and the possible, and the ideal and the actual. The virtual is the ideally real. The abstract is the possibly ideal. The concrete is the actually real. The probable is the actually possible.

"The virtual is a real idealization. It's like memory or a dream or even intention. It belongs in the past, in a sense." (I hope she says more about the past.) The concrete is the present. The abstract exists outside of time. The probable exists in the future. Communication occupies all four quadrants. We shoujld be looking at movements between categories. Thus, we can't say that the augmented city is a real city or virtual city. Rather, we need to look which elements are actual, concrete, etc. And for whom and when? And that's what Anne is working on.

[DG] Biella Coleman: IRC

Biella asks: "Might the categories of the virtual and post-modern to describe social interactive space on the Net obscure more than reveal?" She's going to compare IRC and Carribean street culture. [Abstract] (Herpaper is here, at least temporarily.)

There have been two shortcomings in discussions of social interactions on the Net: 1. Proving that a community is "real" rather than looking at the community itself. 2. Lumping the Net into one universal bucket, missing differences.

Biella says (and I quote from her paper):

IRC and Caribbean street talk, both a result of diasporic realities, are public spaces in which clever word play, performance, and stream of consciousness conversation predominate. ...

Like the street, IRC is not really a "culture" but a public space with its own norms and conventions where people can drop in from time to time to see what is going on, engage in the topic of the day, get some work done, or just lurk. In both domains, stream of consciousness talk readily flows because of the multiple threads of conversations that occur simultaneously...

There are, of course, many ways the two are not alike:

Caribbean street talk unfolded under the heat of the sun, with bodies in full motion, tone and gesture being an integral facet of the linguistic play borne from a brutal history. Understanding the female domestic zone of the yard and the familial push for respectability is required to contextualize street talk and reputation building as part of a broader social world.

IRC's context is that of socio-economic privilege...

Why does this type of comparison matter?

The virtual may really not be as important of a facet in this case although really it is only through serious and sustained comparison that we can even arrive at a more clear sense of what is unique about this form communication

Slashdotted

My Wired article on DRM was slashdotted yesterday.

In response: No, I am not a Holocaust-denier. Yes, there are other examples better than the ones I used. No, I don't think all laws are bad. Yes, I am the biggest, stupidest jerk whoever walked the planet.

Glad I had an opportunity to clear that up.

[DG] Steve Himmer: Blogs as Literary Form

Steve is going to try to find what's characteristic of blogs. [Abstract] Is it the technology used? Formal properties? He wants to look at how we read blogs.

Novels ask us to read them through the interpretation of the narrator. Journalism asks us to read through the supposedly interpretation-free objectivity of the author. Blogs do both and neither. Blogs can only be read through the blog author. Readers have to discover the author. This isn't like interactive fiction, although both are labyrinths, because interactive fiction is done and finished whereas the blogosphere is always under construction. The entry points are dynamic and beyond the control of the author. The sequence is up to the reader. Readers can link to the blog or enter comments on the blog page, thus increasing the labyrinth.

To understand blogs we have to see them as text created by authors and readers, not by tools

[DG] Holly Swyers: Slash fiction

Holly is talking about slash fan fiction, which is fiction written by fans that extends a narrative series by describing homoerotic relationships, e.g., Kirk/Spock. She's interested in what this tells us about community, for the slash community (via mailing lists) is strong. [Abstract] The gen fan fiction writers ("gen" = general audience) are often outraged by the slashers rendering their heroes as gay. Slashers are generally sensitive to this and label their stories as "adults only." In fact, an entire vocabulary has emerged for specifying exactly the sort of offense might be taken. The communities consist of adults who treat one another respectfully. Holly says that this is a type of community that Robert Putnam missed in Bowling Alone.

[DG] Daniel Headrick

Daniel is talking about the arise of alphabetical order. [Abstract] Yes, it was an invention. Alphabetizing was highly unusual in the Middle Ages. E.g., in a book from the 11th century, the author had to explain exactly how it works. 150 years later, another author claimed he'd come up with a new way of organizing a list of words in the Bible. And the idea was then forgotten again. Again in 1604 an author had to explain the system to the reader.

There was a serious debate about whether it made sense to arrange encyclopedias alphabetically rather than topically, perhaps keying off the Bible's own taxonomical preferences. The debate depended on imagining a new type of reader: not a scholar who reads continuously but someone who looks things up. Cross-references were invented in the 18th Century to connect topics dispersed by alphabetical order.

"Alphabetical order remains an insult to logic." E.g., the 1987 edition of the Britannica tries to organize itself thematically as well as alphabetically, resulting in a bit of a hodgepodge. And on the Web there's no need to store things alphabetically. "We will soon no longer need to learn our ABCs." We've cut ourselves off from secular humanism and alphabetical order. "We now float free in the sea of information."

[DG] Seth Sanders

Seth's title: "Hebrew and Aramaic as Semiotic Technologies: Toward an Ethnography of Early Alphabetic Writing" [Abstract]

We aren't determined by our technology. What does shape us? If we've always already been virtual and involved in making worlds, what is new about digital genres? How does newness enter the world? Seth is going to look at how the alphabet began.

The alphabet was invented around 2,000BC. It contained about 30 consonants. What was the effect of the alphabet on the development of Western thought. Seth's old advisor, Cross, said that the link was ironclad. Static societies gave way to "alphabetic" societies. Because the alphabet is easily learned, literacy is democratized, encouraging challenges to authority.

But, says Seth, Cross underestimated the difficulty of learning the alphabet. It takes years, not months. And it seems not to have changed practice all that much. For example, documents were originally authenticated by writing in a list of witnesses, but for an extra layer of security, people could use stamp seals, a preliterate practice. Further, the new literacy seems not to have affected the practices of Socratic Greece. For example, plots of land were marked by rocks, not by recording deeds of any sort.

So does "semiotic technology" have nothing to do with the development of culture? No, it has something, but you need a fine-grained investigation. The first signatures weren't in alphabetic writing. Thus, the signing system is tied to the medium (handwriting on papyrus, thumbnail imprints in clay), not to the writing system.

We need to look to ideology, practice and medium to see how the new arises, not simply to the nature of the semiotic technology (i.e., the arise of the alphabet in Seth's example).

[DG] Theo van den Hout

Theo is talking about howthe Hittites (c 1650-1180 B.C.). managed their clay tablets. [Abstract]

He estimates that at any particular time in storage there were about 7,000 tablets being stored and managed. Fragments are identified by date and author. Stacks of shelved tablets were labeled by smaller clay tablets. And they sometimes copied onto one tablet the text of several related tablets.

Fascinating.

[DG] David Rosenberg

Rabbi Rosenberg is talking about the Talmud and the Internet. His question: Is the Talmud just like the Internet?

The 6th Century text is printed with commentary all around it. [Illustration] Traditionally it is studied by people in pairs, taking turns reading it aloud and then arguing over the meaning via reference to the commentaries.

The Talmud's hyperlinked presentation is like the the Internet. But the Internet is "insufficiently oral" and is much less fixed than the Talmud. Blogging is like commenting on the Talmud, but not every commentary counts as part of the Talmud.

He asks what difference it makes whether the Internet is like the Talmud? Are we saying that the Talmud is hip or that the Internet is holy (or both or neither). "Suffice it to say, the Talmud is not just like the Internet."

[DG] Questions

Q: (The Happy Tutor): AKMA, did you feel awkward sort of kind of giving a blessing to a mixed body.

AKMA says he did feel awkwardness since he's aware that not everyone wanted to be blessed. So he omitted the performance of the blessing he was talking about.

Q: (Me) Does AKMA's and Trevor's position make bodies subordinate to ID?

I don't trust myself to paraphrase their answer, but here goes: AKMA says that his position doesn't denigrate the body, but he also doesn't want to locate identity merely in the physical. Trevor says that the lump of flesh you drag around with you isn't the only type of body: communities are also bodies. I reply that there is something special about the lump of flesh: communities can't have sex, make babies, feel pain or die.

Betsy Devine says there's a continuum of physicality and presence. E.g., when she was young, families had a special viewing room in the church. Does that mean that the families weren't there for the Mass?

Alex says that digital IDs reflect things we already know about. What are we importing into our understanding of digital ID. (Great question.) What's going on with Digital ID is a continuation of our separation of identity from the physical. I say that that sounds like alienation to me. This is not a popular idea with the attendees because it's "value-laden."

Alex says: "When you live in a digital world, you need a really good chair."

[Note: This entry commits inadequate bloggery.]

[DG] Naomi Chana

Naomi's title is "Battles of Blood and Ink: Apophasis, Identity, and Naming Conventions across Digital and Theological Genres." Yikes! [Abstract]

Discussions of digital identity say that it's about making online interactions secure and safe, etc. But real world interactions have never been characterized by this. DigitalID folks say that there's a possibility of returning to a ideal state. They want to move digitalID from the impersonal to a rich, complex human context, as if it's obvious that a human context is a good thing. [Is this in question? Uh-oh. :)]

Some bloggers make up a pseudonym, some have multiple 'nyms, and some just use their real world name. Naomi uses a pseudonym. But many of us distrust people who have too many names. We associate names with identity. In fact, names come to stand for everything we know about the person's identity.

But G-d has many names. How can they resolve into G-d's singular identity? She's going to look at just one commentator on this: The 13th Century Jew, Abraham Abulafia. Naomi hands out a poem he wrote in which blood and ink are at war in his soul. Ink wins. This is an intellectual triumphalism, which is like the digital ID folks' belief that eventually there will be a perfect online IDs that mirror our RW IDs. (I'm doing a particularly crumby job reproducing Naomi's argument.)

Digital ID debates make normative statements about reality. They're assuming a metaphysics. "We shouldn't ignore the long history of philosophical and religious thought about the nature of identity."

[DG] Lacey Graves

Lacey is going to talk about blogging and Baha'i. [Abstract]

The middle ground between the individual and the ecollective relies on the same eneregy, as evidenced by the similarities between the Chicago weblogging community and the Baha'i youth organization. No East is a magazine and Fertile Field is a blog. Lacey has noticed similarities.

No East is a 'zine by the Chicago area weblogging community for creative people. Each issue has a theme (e.g., "the streets of Chicago"). So does Fertile Field, although its themes are related to Baha'i. Fertile Field is written by youths while No East is written mainly be people in their twenties.

Both weblogs and the Baha'i faith have provided a medium by which communities can form. (Lacey is careful to say that religion and blogging are not exactly equivalents.)

[DG] Trevor Bechtel

Trevor is AKMA's co-Disseminarian. He's talking about performance.

Performance requires focusing on a particular text.

It is a type of praxis

We pay attention to feedback: there are risks, and we're always strengthening or weakening relationships.

All three of these (text, praxis, feedback) situate us in our individual body. But they also brings us together as a social body. (Trevor uses the Eucharist as the paradigm of performance.)

The question for today is: Does performance also situate itself in virtual bodies? Trevor has been reluctant to accept this: a televised mass? Television isn't embodied. It's not interactive. [Trevor is about to give some spoilers for the new Matrix, so a couple of us leave for a few minutes.]

There's something "ontologically significant" about touch, as feminist thinkers have noticed, and there is no online equivalent to touch. (Someone says that we'll have digigloves, etc. Trevor replies that digitally mediated touch can't be the same thing as a real touch.)

We need to get better at giving a positive account of virtual embodiment. Here's Trevor's attempt: Blogs do allow us to become virtual bodies, to perform online in Trevor's rich sense of performing as something that leads to understanding. Blogs are more oral than other types of writing. They are interactive. The connect to others. They're hypertextual and form a web of social connections like the web when we take the Eucharist in that it creates a community. Identity sticks to blogs (a reference to AKMA's question).

Blogs are narratives. "If performance is the best way to understand who we are, then blogs are ways of extending these formative traditions and texts and genres. Blogs are stories." Trevor goes back to the three characteristics of performance — text, praxis, feedback — and finds all three in blogs.

[DG] AKMA: Digital Blessing

AKMA wonders what we can learn from millennia of thought about what constitutes identity. He asks: What does a digital blessing stick to? What is the who of the Web? And how does that affect the proposal for digital identities, e.g., Passport, Liberty Alliance,...

Biometric makers push the idea that physical characteristics mark you as a particular human. But that doesn't account for pod people. Blessings adhere not to the physical marks but to "something more" that AKMA's tradition calls "soul." "

Now AKMA brings it back to the digital world. Our digital identity is created by our digits — our fingers typing digits. (He later connects "fictive identities" with the Latin root for fiction: fingere. Cool.) Our fingers enact identity through the words we type. Our acts further substantiates our digital identity. Someone whose physicality is limited may find his/her online identity to be more real. We make ourselves online. But what are the characteristics and limitations of our online identities?

The key point: Our identities are already constituted nonsubstantially. Our online identies don't represent a new space and type of identity but is instead a recognition and embracing of what has always been at the heart of identity. It thrusts role-playing and authorial voice to the fore in the question of "true" identity.

So, "perhaps blessings stick precisely to our identity as we play them, blog them, confect them, mold, share and make these fictive selves physically and online..."

Wow. Terrific lead-off presentation.

[Great point. But it leaves me back worrying about ignoring the body as inessential to the identity. AKMA, am I missing your point?]

[DG] Digital Genres Introduction

Alex Golub has put together what looks like it'll be a really interesting conference. About 30 of us representing a few different genres of online creativity: bloggers, gamers, anthropologists, theologians, historians...

AKMA is about to present the first paper.

OSCOM: CMS Users Panel

This panel consisted of three people implementing open source content management systems, one trying to figure out what to do, a very smart guy from the W3C and, um, me.

Jennifer Lynch (U. of Missouri), has been implementing a Typo3 system. She and a colleague have built a substantial system in just a few months for a total cost of $5,000.

Marc Lavallee has been converting Boston.com to Zope. Twelve people have spent a total of 14 months (including a four month RFP process) building a system that will go live in ten days. He figures it is about a million dollar project, all costs included, a figure substantially lower than what it would have been had he been using commercial, proprietary software.

Hal Roberts from the Berkman Center has been installing a WebGUI system, which entails importing 175,000 static pages. He chose WebGUI in part because of its object orientation and because it lets you edit pages on screen, not in a separate editing mode.

Sam Quigley, of the Harvard Art Museums, is trying to figure out how to figure out which system to use. This raised the question of the value of consultants. I said I thought they could be helpful. Hal replied that it's continuing expertise that ought to be brought in house. The audience had diverse opinions. I personally don't disagree with Hal; in-house tech expertise can be crucial, especially if the project is big enough. But a consultant who keeps up with the field for a living can help match the application needs to the right application faster and better. (No, I do not consult in this field.)

Then Dave Winer sparked controversy — shocking, I tell you! — by saying that it's like the early days of word processing when everything was hard and expensive. It shouldn't be as technical as it is. It really should be a $200 solution, he said, that does the 80% of what actually needs to be done.

Hmm. I don't think the users on the panel could get what they need in that 80%. They're not looking for a desktop application like word processing. To them, CMS is a system, and it does something complex that will only get more complex. It manages documents and document fragments. It provides versioning. It handles permissions. It moves stuff through workflows. It worries about archiving and records management. It automatically lays out pages. It provides editing tools for content and for styles. It serves up personalized pages. It tracks hits. It enables cash transactions. It plops ads onto pages based on who's seeing them and accounts for every view and click. It integrates with the rest of the office software environment. And if it doesn't do all those things now, that's where it's headed.

We got a demonstration of why CMS will remain complex software. Someone in the audience asked if it'd make sense for his small college to get together with a bunch of other small colleges and come up with a set of app requirements so that they could share the cost of customization. The general sponse was: "It sounds like a good idea, but... " For example, Hal and Marc both said that their own installations were unique. Someone in the audience agreed. I pointed out that this reminded me of the SGML wars of the '80s when entire industries tried to build a shared DTD. It turns out that everyone's needs and vocabularies are different enough that trying to produce a common spec is extraordinarily difficult.

Now, it certainly can get easier. I spoke afterwards with Bob Doyle of CMS Review who is trying to come up with CMSML, a way of describing CMS features that would work for all content management systems. Bob knows that there isn't one ideal and perfect way of doing it, but believes that you could at least make it easier for customers and users to compare systems.

CMS is inherently tough and complex. Implementing a CMS system is always going to require someone with strong skills because it touches the way an organization thinks about and handles documents. It will always require looking at document processes, the social structure, and the power relationships in an organization. It requires understanding the legacy "document schema" and looking ahead to the near-term and long-term futures. CMS will resist commoditization for as long as I can see.

Which leads me to conclude: Did I misunderstand Dave's comment? Do we disagree about the definition of a CMS? Or do we just disagree? Unfortunately, I'm about to leave for Chicago - the Digital Genres Conference - so I'll be out of contact for the rest of the day...

OSCOM: Intellectual Property Panel

I was on a panel at the Open Source Content Management Conference 3 at Harvard yesterday and attended the prior session. Both sessions (exempting my own embarrassingly how'd-he-get-invited performance) were rich in idea and information.

The first session I saw was on intellectual property. the panelists were Mike Olson (Sleepycat), Larry Rosen (OSI), Aaron Swarz (Creative Commons) and Liza Vertinsky (Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks), moderated by John Palfrey (Berkman Center). Quite a line-up. Most of the time was spent on Q&A. Among the points that struck me:

Joseph Reagle of the W3C asked if you can you copyright a DTD or schema. And if someone uses someone else's DTD, is the resulting work a derivative work? Liza replied that the law around forms probably is relevant, and that you can't copyright a form.

A Harvard Law School professor in the audience (I didn't get his name, but he was terrific) said that the question reminded him of the Teddy Ruxpin case in which a provider of third party tapes for the semi-animatronic toy was sued for "contributory copyright infringement." (The kids who stuck the tapes into the bear were the actual copyright infringers, apparently.) In fact, at the Illegal Arts festival (?), someone prepared a tape of William Burroughs materials for Teddy Ruxpin.

Reagle followed up by wondering if all documents created with Microsoft Word count as derivative works of Word's XML schema.

Someone asked if it's legal to scrape content and display it. Aron said that it's legal to scrape. It's less legal to display scraped content.

And (someone pointed out), there's a difference between scraping up stuff marked for RSS feeds and just scraping what's on the Web.

Dave Winer commented on this from the audience. He said that Radio Userland doesn't have an option for turning off the RSS feed. "We wanted to promote RSS feeds. ... A few times a user didn't know it was producing and RSS feed and then saw his content on someone else's site...Generally once they understand that it's a feature of the software and it's deliberate, the problem goes away." But, he says at some point it won't go away for someone.

Dave and Larry disagreed about the implications of casual copying, e.g., sticking a cropped photo from another source onto your weblog. Dave says it happens all the time, and not just with photos, and that's just the way it is. Larry, getting all lawyer-y, agreed that it happens all the time but that there's risk there. Aaron interjected that the Google cache and the Internet Archive may be massive copyright violations, but they're so socially useful that they ought to be allowed to continue without prior restraint.

Then Charles Nesson (Berkman) asked a great, simple question: Has anyone ever tried to enforce the GPL?

No, it's never gone to trial.

Liza: Because there's no money in it.

Aaron: One reason is because the community is strong.

Larry: But I wouldn't be surprised if someday a company the sized of Microsoft were to challenge the validity of the GPL.

Yikes! The validity of the GPL has never been tested in court. Ulp.

The Internet Constituency

I've posted an article called "The Internet Constituency" that reviews the webbiness of the various presidential candidates' web sites. Only two show any promise, IMO. One of them I actually like: Howard Dean's, especially his staff's weblog. See, for example, the currently lead article on the Dean site which is an open letter to the FCC opposing the proposed rule change that would make it even easier for the media to concentrate itself into a ball so dense that no light escapes from it.

Here's the opening of the article:

The Republic of the Internet certainly has been downgraded since the day John Perry Barlow declared its independence in 1996. The Internet is not a nation, it's not a state, and it's not even a county. But is it at least a constituency? If so, most of the presidential candidates are campaigning there about as seriously as they are in Alaska: it'll be surprising if their campaign plane alights there even to refuel...with one encouraging exception.

(Disclosure: I've done a little volunteer work for the Dean campaign.)

Learning from echoes

Rebecca Blood, in her keynote at BlogTalk, worried that bloggers only read bloggers who agree with them, thus greatly limiting the potential for growth and understanding. Worse, only reading people who think the way we do can result in an "echo chamber" where the echoes seem to confirm our beliefs.

Rebecca used as her example the blogs for and against the Iraqi war. But that is one of the most divisive of issues. Is it true for less contentious topics?

I suspect it is to some degree. (Note: Joho the Blog remains true to its pledge to be 100% Research Free.) But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

It sort of has to be true because conversations need common ground. So, if it's a debate about software patents, the people involved in all sides of the issue will likely be fairly technical, sharing some assumptions about the nature of software and how markets work. Nevertheless, the homogeneity is what enables there to be vigorous debate.

Some degree of homogeneity is a condition not only for conversation but also for understanding and learning. For example, when AKMA upbraided me for something stupid and mean I said about Foucault, we were only able to talk about it because we share a base of presuppositions about philosophy. Because of that shared base, AKMA was able to show me where I was wrong and opened up Foucault in a way I had dismissed. Are AKMA and I Western, intellectual (in my case, add a "-wannabe") white guys who are carrying very roughly the same baggage? Sure. But are we also an echo chamber in which we can't learn anything? Nah.

Echo chambers definitely do exist. Sometimes they exist precisely in order to solidify opinion. But not every case of homogeneity is an echo chamber. Because we can only understand the new in terms of the familiar (which is the same as saying that understanding means placing something in context), agreement is the ground on which learning can occur.

Nevertheless, I find it impossible to resist Rebecca's conclusion that we - I - ought to be more adventurous and open in what we read and think about. Agreement simultaneously enables learning and tends towards complacency.

Hungarian interview

Here's an interview with me in Hungarian. I don't know what I said, but I renounce it all.

Xander and Anya (Buffy) in a chat

Here's a transcript of a moderately interesting online chat with Xander and Anya from Buffy from shortly before the show ended.

(Don't send me spoilers! The finale was on while we were away and we haven't seen it yet.)

How not to see Vienna

I've posted a review of the Knopf Guide to Vienna at Blogcritics. (I don't yet have the permalink to it. In fact, it hasn't quite shown up on the site yet, as of 9AM Boston time.) Let's say that it's not the strongest recommendation imaginable.

Guardian article

BTW, The Guardian ran a column of mine last week. It's on the DNS mess and Google URLs.

Those Silly Wieners

It is with great shame that I post this page of photos from Vienna. What am I, a 12-year-old??

Global Blogidays

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty blogs." 

Even Shakespeare thinks we all need a vacation.

So, here's my proposal: We all take the first two weeks of August off. All of us. Yes, you. You just remove your keys from the keyboard and find something else to do with your time.

Saturday, August 2 through Sunday August 17. "Through" means you don't start blogging again until Monday the 18th.

All in favor, swing your hammock to the left...

Brian Dear has a suggestion:

Dave Weinberger suggests all bloggers take the first two weeks of August off in a mass "blogiday". He's even got the logo you're supposed to attach to your blog during that time, to let everyone know you're taking off time when Dave is taking off time.

I say, keep on bloggin'! If the blogerati want to take off two weeks in August, fine. It's a great opportunity for other blogs to get some attention.

A suggestion to vacationing bloggers: rather than just showing a blogiday logo, how about providing some prominent links to a lesser-known blogs, ones they like but for whatever reason ones they haven't put in their blogroll. A sort of "while I'm away, I recommend the following fine blogs" followed by a list. Share your discoveries!

BTW, my RW vacation will be the last week of July and the first week of August, so it's not quite me suggesting everyone stop when I stop. Besides, do you really think I'm going to stop for 2 weeks?

[BlogTalk] More photos

Ulrich van Stipriaan has posted more photos of the BlogTalk conference in Vienna. (Through the miracle of bad lighting, I actually look like I have more hair than I do.) He also has photos of Vienna here, here. and here.

Frittering 2 pounds

I paid 2 pounds at Heathrow to pick up my email at a payphonish net terminal, but it won't accept an https address so I deided to waste your time instead.

[BlogTalk] Aggregator

JJ Merelo points us at an aggregator that is, I believe, aggregating the blogs from bloggers at BlogTalk (if a blogtalk could talk blog). I am under straitened Net conditions and haven't been able to try it for myself, however...

Go thou Hoketh-Poketh?

From David Wasser:

The Washington Post Style Invitational Contest asked readers to rewrite some banal instructions in the style of some famous writer.

The winning entry was "The Hokey Pokey" song as if written by W. Shakespeare.

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.

-- by William Shakespeare (Jeff Brechlin, Potomac Falls)

Still in Vienna

The BlogTalk conference ended yesterday. I think the great majority of the attendees considered it a success. It was focused on the effect of blogs, not their technology, and for me was a fascinating look at the cross- and inter-cultural way blogs are being taken up.

Today my wife and I are sightseeing. It's our last day here. It's a beautiful city, great for walking around. Today was Museum Day for us. The Secession has a Klimt frieze and some too-conceptual installations that made as much sense to me as the cooing of pigeons. Then it was on to the Oberer Belvedere, which was lovely.

Tomorrow is a travel day. Expect no new acts of bloggery to be committed on this page.

[BlogTalk] Jose Luis Orihuela

Jose begins with the parable of the copyist: After the printing press made scribes obsolete, monasteries switched from copying Bibles to making beer. "Thanks to the invention of the printing press, Europe has the best beer in the world." The question for the media is: What will be our beer?

He has ten theses about the effect of the Internet on media:

1. From audience to user.
2. From media to content: It's the content that counts, not the medium
3. From monomedia to multimedia
4. From periodicity to real time - we lose reflection but gain dynamism
5. From scarcity to abundance; now the scarcity is in the reader's time.
6. From editor-mediated to non-mediated.
7. From distribution to access.
8. From one-way to interactive.
9. From linear to hypertext.
10. From data to knowledge.

[BlogTalk] Dan Gillmor: Journalism and Weblogs

Dan is, of course, the business and technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and a blogger.

H says he's tired of the debate about whether blogs are journalism. It's endless and pointless. Some are and some aren't. They are their own form and they complement real-world journalism. As Doc Searls says, everyone now is a "stringer," i.e., a freelancer who occasionally feeds stories to newspapers and magazines.

Blogs are really making a difference to RW journalism, Dan says. For example, webloggers were the one who noticed Trent Lott's "nostalgia for segregation." He also points to the minute-by-minute weblog about the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was first to notice that the weather radar images seemed to show the debris path well before the real world noticed.

Traditional journalism says: "Here's the news. Take it or leave it." The conversation part has been limited to letters to the editor. Now journalism is becoming a conversation, Dan says.

Dan's basic principle: "My readers knore more than I do." He tells about the Joe Nacchio presentation at PC Forum. Nacchio was whining about running his monopoly. Dan blogged it. Buzz Bruggerman read it and sent Dan an email pointing to a page showing all the stock Nacchio was selling. So, Dan blogged it. The audience read it. The mood chilled. "Something changed in journalism that day."

Newspapers will be asking people to send in images of news events. Dan says that in the next earthquake in Japan, you'll see photos in the first 15 minutes from readers.

What about trust? Falsehoods travel faster than truths, Dan says. But, as Ken Layne said (Dan says), "We can fact-check your ass." Further, the subject of interviews can put the transcript of their interview onto their own website. The Defense Department did this when Bob Woodward was doing interviews.

Dan gets more and better info about Groove from Ray Ozzie's weblog than from their PR writings.

Big Journalism plays an important role we need to preserve. For example: investigative reporting.

Dan points to OhMyNews in S. Korea, an online newspaper that uses "citizen reporters" to supplement the staff writers. OhMyNews helped elect the new president who repaid them by giving them the first interview after he was elected. Dan also points to Nick Denton's Gizmodo, a report on gadgets. And Back in Iraq 2.0: a guy who said that if we sent him money, he'd be our reporter in Iraq.

He ends by warning us about the copyright cartel that's willing to degrade the Net in order to copy copyright "violations." "Some day, you may need permission to publish - or your page may load only after your ISP has loaded 'preferred content."

Question: How can people blog and listen at the same time?

Dan: I have a friend who calls it "continuous partial attention." We'd better get used to it.

Notable Quote (i.e., why we all love Dan Gillmor): "I learn more from people who think I'm wrong than from people who think I'm right."

[BlogTalk] Gilbert Cattoire

Gilbert is a French journalist. He was involved in 1995 in setting up Sarajevo Alive, a Unesco site that supported 30 journalists. More or less by accident, the team decided to let all the local inhabitants express themselves online, unedited. There was a tremendous response: 25,000 readers in the first 20 days. "The Internet is the warmest medium of all."

The audience is now influencing the journalist. We are moving from co-existence to conviviality,i.e., an active interest in and caring about one another. To participate is communicate and colalborate.

Gilbert announced that five years of work today have again saved the Sarajevo Online archives. You can see it here and soon here.

[BlogTalk] Ulrich van Stipriaan: Civil Engineers

Ulrich is a journalist doing public relations for the Technische Universitat Dresden's Civil Engineering department. (His presentation is here.)

He tried to get 50 faculty members to start up a weblog. It was difficult to cajole them into it. He wants them to write in a journalistic style, not academic.

He needed simple tools and thus turned to blogger.com, although he would like to be able to search and comment.

The site has been up for about half a year. It has a small following, but Ulrich is working on make it more valuable and more known.

[BlogTalk] Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy tells the story of how he had to fight the IT Department to build a usable page for the International Plan Genetic Resources Institute. He's very funny. He talks about showing the IT folks how great weblogging was, but they didn't quite see it that way. "I got permission from them to maintain my own web site ... on my friend's server." Jeremy set himself up far faster, cheaper and "webbier" than the IT Department could. (A draft of his presentation is here.)

Why was there such resistance to blogging? "I think it comes down to a combination of insecurity and a lust for power." They don't listen to their customers. "I'm sure there are exceptions. But I haven't met any in my professional life."

Very entertaining, and encouraging for anyone encountering the same resistance.

[BlogTalk] Updated List of Conference Bloggers

Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar
Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Adalbert Duda
Lilia Efimova
Sebastian Fiedler
Dan Gillmor
Scott Hanson
Haiko Hebig
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)
Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma
F. Matthes
JJ Merelo
Jose Luis Orihuela (also here)
Steffanie Mueller
Stephanie Nilsson
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw
Erik Stattin
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)
Ton
Fernando Tricias
David Weinberger
Phil Wolff
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Also, two students are live-blogging it, says the organizer, Thomas Burg.

Some photos of Vienna by Ulrich van Stipriaan. A few more conference photos here.

[BlogTalk] Phil Wolff]

Phil says the conference presenters have been well-prepared and studious. "We haven't had enough bullshit. That's what I'm here for." He has three predictions:

1. "Blogs will merge with other media." It's already happening. Blogs and wikis and who knows what.

2. "We'll have bloggers that aren't people." He points to Tivo's recording history: a reverse chronological log of the system's activities. He expects more apps to do this, including factory lathes and cars.

3. "We'll start blogging things that aren't bloggable today." Blogging tools will offer "pools of richer expression," new community services, etc.

He also predicts there will be a backlash against blogs once it goes mainstream.

(Phil says: We don't have a single voice. We're a chorus. On Monday we're a cranky SOB and on Tuesday we're a passionate fan of something.)

[Excellent bullshit! Really.]

RageBoy's Getting Married!

Be sure to go to the Amazon registry to get the lovely couple something that will help make their material lives as complete as their spiritual life together.

[BlogTalk] Lilia Efimova: The Stickiness Factor

Lilia did two online questionnaires with open-ended questions. She got replies from 62 bloggers and 20 would-be bloggers. The full study is here. She acknowledges that the bloggers came from her "corner of the blogosphere."

Is blogging mainstream already? Not yet. People have started weblogs to experiment, out of curiosity, etc. It's still for early adopters. [Especially for the Spanish-speaking world, according to yesterday's presentation :)] The rest of the results she discusses confirms common sense: people blog when they have something to say or want to clarify ideas; they don't blog because don't want to reveal too much or because they don't have time.

What can we do to help spread blogs and make people successful at them: Make better tools and support "emergent uses of weblogs." Educative marketing. Support would-be bloggers.

[BlogTalk] Henry Copeland

Exponential growth threatens the media, says Henry. (Here's the written version of his presentation.) The New York Times has 11M unique visitors a month, more than the 10.5M readers of the print version; they get 350M page views per month. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds does 1% of the page impressions of the NYT. This is a big universe. Advertisements get lost in the ever-expanding space of the Net.

We need new way of organizing media, he says. How? First, there's passion. Blogs generate passion. Look at Slashdot. But why? Because blogs are "proxy personalities." And they become little clubs with partisan members.

Second, there's what Henry calls "Hubness," in part to play on "hipness." "I believe that blogs, connecting broad audiences of individuals who are themselves pivotal communicators in their respective online and offline communities, are the hubs of the new information age." [From the written version.] The "coordination effect" is the need for people to know what other people are doing in order to decide what they ought to do. E.g., people don't like eating in an empty restaurant. Advertisers will tap into groups of bloggers who can move in a direction together. (He recommends a book by Michael Suk-Young Chwe. which I believe is Rational Ritual.)

[Oooh, he said the words "ad" and "blogs" in the same sentence! :) Excellent talk. Someday advertisers will indeed figure out how to use the Internet and it's good to hear studied reflection on the issue.]

[BlogTalk] Rebecca Blood

[I missed the beginning because I got off the subway at the wrong stop. Ach!]

Rebecca is being sobering and reflective about the drawbacks of blogging. We tend to read the sources we agree with. Weblogs form an echo chamber in which we shut ourselves off from opposing viewpoints. "An environment that creates the illusion that everyone agrees with you destroys the urge to investigate further."

She points to two sites designed to present different points of view. Slugger O'Toole brings out all viewpoints on the Irish conflict. Dialogue Now does the same for the India-Pakistan conflict.

[I think I largely disagree with Rebecca, while completing agreeing with her. The echo chambers occur around the most divisive political issues. But those are the exceptions in human discourse. Further, understanding and conversation require shared assumptions. Thus, conversations occur among people who agree with one another one way or another. Usually conversations make progress by arguing over the shades, degrees and details, which may look like - and sometimes be - "minutiae," as Rebecca calls it. Of course, her overall point that we should try to engage with those with whom to disagree is important and incontestable; the question is how well the echo chamber characterizes most of our blogging experience. It's an important question.]

I asked Rebecca about this in the Q&A session afterwards. She does see the clustering of homogeneous opinions even on less contentious topics.

[BlogTalk] Updated List of Conference Bloggers

Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar
Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Adalbert Duda
Lilia Efimova
Sebastian Fiedler
Dan Gillmor
Scott Hanson
Haiko Hebig
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)
Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma
F. Matthes
JJ Merelo
Jose Luis Orihuela (also here)
Steffanie Mueller
Stephanie Nilsson
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw
Erik Stattin
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)
Ton
Fernando Tricias
David Weinberger
Phil Wolff
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Also, two students are live-blogging it, says the organizer, Thomas Burg.

Some photos of Vienna by Ulrich van Stipriaan. A few more conference photos here.

[BlogTech] Demos

At 6pm, after a full day of stimulating papers - it's been a good day - most of us have stayed for a "birds of a feather" meeting that is in fact a tech demo session.

Marc Barrot shows a Web outliner he's developing. Very cool. It's based on OPML and is smart about pulling in photos (resizing dynamically for the frame) and even other outlines. You author locally and save to the Web. And there will be features to support group writing/editing. Looks beautiful.

Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower want to make it easier to find blog posts, so they invented a way for users in a group to share the topics their posts are about. They call this "K Collectors."

Matt shows the K-Collector client. It suggests available topics when you blog and lets you choose them by clicking buttons. The suggestions are currently based on looking for word stems, a relatively simple agorithm that could be supplemented with something more sophisticated. Easy News Topics is their public specification for the easy inclusion of topics in RSS fields. ENT is way of transporting topics across applications. (It's also OPML-based.)

The K-Collector server is an ENT-enabled RSS aggregator that can show different views based on the topics. You can show topics "related" to yours, and browse based on that.

Note from Matt Mower: "Although the topic roll part of K-Collector is OPML based, ENT is not (it's an RSS 2.0 module)." Sorry for the confusion.

Very cool. They've lowered the bar to entering topic metadata. My question is whether the bar can ever be lowered enough without it still being a bar, except within specific, disciplined domains?

[BlogTalk] Photos

Some of the speakers (Rebecca Blood in the front, Dan Gillmor in the back) at dinner last night in the Vienna Woords:

Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower, still together again:

Thomas Burg, the conference organizer:

Andrius:

[BlogTalk] Sebastian Fiedler

Sebastian begins by wondering if the usual educational assumption that learning is done to us by experts helps us become truly educated. He refers to some psychological theories of the 1950s that look to conversation as the way in which we build up an understanding of our self and world. (Sorry to be vague but I had a little incident and had to reboot.) Could conversation, he wonders, be a key to education?

Now he makes the transition to web publishing and weblogs as a "conversational learning tool." These give us the ability to reflect upon our public representations. There isn't a lot of data about this yet, he says. Think of personal web publishing networks as "conversational learning environments for self-organized learners."

[Cool idea. And I like the recasting of education as conversation. Of course.]

[BlogTalk] Martin Roell

Martin begins by pointing out, coyly, that there's a difference between speaking at a conference and weblogging: if he writes something boring, we can skip it, but if he's boring here, we can't. [Fortunately, he's funny, not boring.]

His topic is weblogging in business. His premise: Sharing information is boring. But doing what weblogs do - talk about what matters to us - is fun. Unfortunately, businesses think weblogs are warblogs, diaries or places where people put up cat pictures. And managers like things that can be explained simply and that promise great revenue at no risk. So, Martin wrote a paper. It presents a chart that moves from proof of concept to group weblogs to knowledge-logging. He recommends that a company start small, get some blogs going, and link them up.

[BlogTalk] Oliver Wrede: Discourse and Weblogs

Oliver Wrede sets up weblogs for university courses. He asks students to take charge of particular topics, stimulating posts.

Courses are linear and end when they end. Oliver would like to find a way to create loop so it won't come to a screeching halt. So, he's making a knowledgebase, feeding into new courses what's been learned from previous ones. In fact, it stimulates new courses. In fact, after the course ends, the weblog continues. 80% of the visitors come from Google searches.

See here and here.

He looks at the posts between Winer and Palfrey about blogging the NH primary. What isn't said in the posts are a set of background assumptions and context. Paul Ford, he says, has categorized a variety of "speech acts" (John Austin, John Searle) routinely round in weblogging, e.g., two opposing opinions posted in proximity are an "OppoLog." Two of his students wrote some software to map the links while indicating the type of links.

He points to a paper by Richard Seel ("Emergence in Human systems") that give the qualities required for business organization to be emergent. Oliver points out that they are the same qualities typical of weblogs.

[BlogTalk] Tricas Garcia et al.

Fernando Tricas Garcia and Juan JM Guervos talk about their Python-scripted tool, the Blogometro. They use it to analyze Spanish-speaking blogs.

There are about 1,500 postings a day. 1,160 blogs posted at least once during the last month. There are about 2,000 blogs. Much smaller than Poland but still a significant amount of activity. Among the popular links: Prestige. A popular blogger: MiniD. They say that, despite Clay Shirky, Spanish blogs don't follow the power law yet.

Conclusions: They're not yet clear about the size and extension of the Spanish blogosphere, but there are some clear centers.

Question: Why are there fifty times more weblogs in Poland than in Spain since they have the same population?

Milonas: Weblogs got a lot of publicity. It's a part of the youth culture. Also, it's cold in the winter.

[BlogTalk] BlogTalk Bloggers [Update]

Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar
Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Lilia Efimova
Dan Gillmor
Scott Hanson
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)
Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma
F. Matthes
JJ Merelo
Jose Luis Orihuela (also here)
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)
Ton
Fernando Tricias
David Weinberger
Phil Wolff
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Also, two students are live-blogging it, says the organizer, Thomas Burg.

[BlogTalk] Milonas, Polish blogging

[My running notes on Marysia Cywiñska-Milona's talk auto-erased themselves. Aarrggh. Excellent talk. Rough reconstruction follows.]

Maria is a Polish blogger. There are 100,000 Polish bloggers, 62% by women. 90% written from home, and a huge percentage are written by people younger than 20. So, why are so many young Polish women writing blogs, she asks?

She suggests that, psychologically, they are lonely and are willing to make themselves "nude" in order to get a response. She disagrees with what I said in my keynote: the Polish blogs are online diaries, without a lot of links. "Does this make us underdeveloped or just different?" she asks. (But, she later talks about how Polish blogs are dialogues and build communities, which was my point.)

Blogs are also popular because they're cheap to do in a co untry where dialup time is very expensive.

She ends by saying that, despite the stress at this conference, Polish blogs aren't about Knowledge and Stuff. "We like entertainment," she says, "Do you?"

[BlogTalk] Hossein Derakhshan

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger, says there are 12,000 active Iranian bloggers. [Wow!] He says the current regime is powerful and definitely not reformist: they've shut down 90 newspapers in the past 5 years. About 3/4 of the bloggers are men. There are about 50,000 posts per day. 27% are on general topics, 16% are personal, and politics is only 7% f the topics. The number of sexual blogs is unlisted, but 6 of the top 10 are about sex. (Source: PersianBlog.com) For some reason, Persian bloggers don't use blogrolls.

He says blogs serve many functions in Iran, including socializing and dating (many of the blogs express depression), connecting parents and children and exiles with their homelaned, introducing e-zines, producing serachable PErsian contnt, introducting new standards and technologies, providing pornography, inspiring writers (e.g., Rez Ghassemi's daily novel) and generating direct relationships with readers.

Weblogs are a great window into Iranian society, Hossein says: people are both hopeful and eager to try their freedom, and are feeling depressed and represssed (especially sexually).

Fascinating.

[Hossein says on his blog that he doesn't like the idea of live blogging because it's rude. Nevertheless, here I am, likve-blogging his presentation. Sorry, Hossein!]

[BlogTalk] Ethan Eismann: Sustainable Knowledge Production

Ethan is talking about the Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog (BIPlog). His research partner, Mary Hodder, blogs about intellectual property as part of a "knowledge community." Ethan is going to talk about communities of weblogs that are topic-based: Weblog Knowledge Communities.

The dynamics of a WKC is self-sustaining. As authors produce high-quality information, it attracts other authors. Much of this is driven, says Ethan, to build and maintain a reputation.

He provides some "best practices" for a WKC his research has found:

1. Determine your topic. "Write what you love."

2. Determine your blog team's size.

3. Analyze your audience

4. Determine your infrastructure

5. Decide on your mission

6. Define categories

7. Voice

8. Decide on an information architecture

9. Link!

10. Participate

[BlogTalk] BlogTalk Blogs

Here are the URLs of some of the bloggers blogging from Blog Talk:

Azeem Azhar
Gilbert Cattoire
Marysia Cywiñska-Milonas
Lilia Efimova
Dan Gillmor
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)
Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma
JJ Merelo
Martin Roell
Kieran Shaw
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)
Ton
Fernando Tricias
David Weinberger
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

[BlogTalk] Gernot Tscherteu, Christian Langreiter: Blogosphere Map

The Blogosphere Map is a tool for spreading the spread of ideas throughout a blogging community.

Browsing gives a "worm's eye view." We need a bird's eye view. Weblogs are a self-refererring medium. Weblogs are like the brain in terms of the density of interconnections that reflects not only events in the real world but also parses ideas and concepts that come from the blogosphere itself.

The Map supports the self-organization of the blogosphere, better than using complex ontologies. [He looks at Steve Cayzer who just spoke about the semantic web, but Steve favors the self-organizing of local ontologies, I believe.] He points to several tools, including blogwise.com and blogstreet.com, as examples of current attempts to map the blogosphere. He also mentions Daypop's word burst.

Now they're showing their Blosphere Map. It looks at blogs and measures similarity, including by looking at the links, and plots against time. In this example, they've been tracking 400 weblogs for a month. When looking for hits on "BlogTalk," red dots on a web of links indicate hits. The map indicates links in and out; Dave Winer's site is a central node. The red dots show up in sequence, representing the spread of the idea over time. A search on "salam" graphically shows his disappearance and subsequent reapparance. [Very cool. But how well will it scale?]

It's in beta. It will go public in maybe two weeks.

[BlogTalk] Andrius Kulikauskas

Andrius Kulikauskas, the Last Remaining Idealist, is talking about this "algebra of copyright."

Andrius needs things in the public domain in order to enable it to be used as micro-content. (Copyleft requires the inclusion of an 8-page statement.)

But how do you define a work and where do you post the rules and exceptions, Andrius asks. He wants to find a user interface design. He asks us to google "algebraic semiotics" to find ideas about this.

He presents a model that I can't reproduce here because it's graphical. Here's a link.

[Blogtalk] Friday: Steve Cayzer

Steve Cayzer from HP is talking about semantic blogging. He's working on an HP Labs project on the semantic web. "Blogging is cool but it could be even cooler...using semantic web techniques." (I enjoyed talking with Steve at last night's dinner.)

Semantic blogging would enable us to view blogs other than reverse chronological order, to do semantic navigation (made possible by attaching meanings to links), and do semantic queries, asking who's blogging on a particular item. To do this, we need a way to share meaning context. That means not just metadata but metadata described by an ontology, a formal way of structuring knowledge, e.g., a hierarchical classification scheme. The semantic web enables people to "create and share these ontologies in a decentralized way." Steve's t-shirt for the semantic web is: "Markup with meaning."

One benefit: When doing a search, you will find stuff even if it doesn't use any of the words you're looking for.

We already have emergent ontology sharing. E.g., the TopicExchange that uses TrackBack for a community to arrive at a shared, decentralized ontology.

Steve touts Semantic Web Advanced Development as a resource.

Question: The AI communities have been trying to create representations of human knowledge, but it seems that there's consensus that it's an impossible task.

Steve: Yes. The CYC project is often criticized for trying to do this. But the Semantic Web isn't trying to capture all knowledge in a single ontology. It allows small groups to create their own ontologies, and then enables them to be linked.

[It ought to be called "semantic webs."]

Live Stream from Blogtalk

The BlogTalk conference is being live streamed here. (Vienna is 6 hours ahead of Boston time.)

For what it's worth, I'm blogging this on the computer that's being projected at the moment, so this is a weird case of live meta-streaming blogging. Meta-live streaming?)

Live from BlogTalk, Vienna

Here it is Friday morning in Vienna and I haven't blogged since right before we left for Vienna on Tuesday afternoon. This is the longest gap in my blogitude so far.

The conference is about to begin and I'm the the first speaker, so this will be brief:

My wife (Ann) and I spent Wednesday getting here and napping. We ran into the peripatetic Dan Gillmor in the airport and went to a traditional Viennese restaurant with him Wednesday night. Thursday, Ann and I walked around after having coffee with the conference organizer, Thomas Burg, in a converted royal greenhouse. What a beautiful city! And so clean! It makes Toronto look like a college dorm room, it's so tidy. Thursday night was a BlogTalk dinner in a vineyard in the Vienna Woods, looking down on the city. Too much fun, too many good conversations.

Now Blogtalk is set to begin, the first European blogging conference. It's got a great line-up of speakers, and has drawn about 160 people, mainly not from Vienna, a testament to Thomas' skills and the interest in blogging.

Remind me to tell you later about my how-bad-can-my-German-be moment...

Multisubjectivity ... mit Schlag!

I'm heading off to Vienna in a few hours for the BlogTalk conference. I'm keynoting, but since my wife is coming, too, I'm also touristing. Looking forward to it. I've never been to Vienna before.

Since my topic is "Why Blogs Matter," I think I'm going to talk about "multisubjectivity," a term I thought I invented by which Google shows was actually coined by by Sugiura Kohei . Damn Google! Damn Intermenet!

Anyway, the idea is that:

Objectivity isn't really objective. We all know that.

It still beats subjectivity for a lot of stuff because objectivity at least gets out of the individual, isolated point of view.

But now blogs give us genuine access to a global range of subjectivity - multisubjectivity - which gives subjectivity the heft it's needed to make it a useful alternative to objectivity.

Obviously, there's much more subtlety required about when objectivity and subjectivity are useful. But that's the basic idea.

Comments? (Just don't expect much of a response: I'm on the road!)

The Archives Problem

Here's an anomaly that strikes a glancing blow against the pay-per-view model of Web publishing. (See the kerfuffle Doc initiated by suggesting that newspapers open their archives.)

The New York Review of Books generously has the entire text of Josephy Lelyveld's review of Sidney Blumenthal's Clinton book online for free. At the bottom is a link to the Letters to the Editors about the article. So far, so good.

The only letter to the editor so far is one from Lelyveld himself, titled "'The Clinton Wars': A Correction." To read it, you need to subscribe to the online version or pay $4.00.

That's just not right.

Google and Blogging

Here's an excellent piece by Neil McIntosh, a tech editor at the Guardian, on why Orlowski's article about blogs distorting Google is just hooey.

Bray on Natural Language

Tim Bray on Natural Language Processing:

Even if I could talk to my computer (an idea that's never particularly appealed to me...n), would I want to speak to it in full sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases? I think I'd want to grunt things like ?Yahoo, Berlin weather? or ?break line 238? or ?spam!?.

Death and Showers

In yesterday's issue of JOHO, I wrote:

[Heidegger] traced this back to our desire not to die, but somehow forgot to notice the fact that we're embodied: no one can die our death for us because no one can first take our shower for us.

In an interview published in today's Salon, Joss Whedon, talking about why Buffy has been acting more like a male hero this year, says:

It also came from "I've come back from the dead!" This is no small thing, no coming out of the shower.

Omigod, am I on the same psychic wavelength as Joss Freakin' Whedon? If only!

Meanwhile, my wife and I are upset that we're going to be on a plane tonight, unable to watch the last Buffy with our 18-year-old daughter who is tightly bonded to the show.

New JOHO

I published a brief issue of my newsletter, JOHO, yesterday. It's loosely based on some Matrixian themes. Well, that's the gimmick anyway.

It's available here.

Bray on REST

Tim "Co-Father of XML" Bray has written a clear, concise and understandable introduction to SOAP and the REST of the ways of talking to a Web server. The question is when it makes sense for a program to ask another program for information by sending it a URL or a more complex bundle of data. And this basic process is central to how we're going to build Web services over the next few years.

<asbestos>
I make no pretense of knowing who's right in the issues Tim raises.
</asbestos>

Note: Here's Tim's brief piece on why URI is right and URL is wrong.

RB's New Blog

RageBoy's got a brand new blog. It says it's actually a blog for both RB and Ann Craig, but so far it's all RageBoy all the time. But it's RB in fine form, funny right from the tagline...

One more presidential accomplishment

Here's something else W can add to his presidential resume: He is the first president to know how to roll a joint with one hand.

Flowerbox Wifi

That old memester, Nicholas "Mr. Bits" Negroponte, is at it again. In an interview in today's Boston Globe (here today, gone the day after tomorrow), he says that at an FCC technical advisory committee meeting he responded to the charge that there's no economic model for wifi as follows:

...I raised my hand and I said, "There's not only a precedent, there's a very strong economic model...flower boxes"

Think about it. If you put a flower box outside your house, you're first of all using your own money to buy the flowers. You're hanging it out there. You're doing it for your self-esteem, for the beauty of looking out the window and seeing he flowers, of decorating your house and making it look well. But it also, if everyone on the street puts nice flower boxes out, makes the street look nicer. [Caution: Snobbery ahead] It happens a little bit on Beacon Hill, it happens a lot in European cities.

Now the theory of flower boxes...could be taken to wifi. I put in a wifi system in my home for my own use, but it radiates out into the street. There's no incremental cost for me to let other people use it...If everybody does that, then the entire street has broadband.

Cool analogy.

He also predicts a rebirth of the tech sector in the field of "silicon biology."

On the radio with Doc

At noon EDT today, Doc and I are going to be on The Computer Show, "New England's longest-running technology talk show," on WOTW 900 and WGAW 1240. Looking forward to it...

Well, that was fun. The hosts asked us about World of Ends and we spouted.

By the way, Doc's written some mighty fine prose about why newspapers should put their archives online for free.

NY Times on Blogging and Privacy

Warren St. John has a good article in the NY Times today about what blogs are doing to privacy.

Me on O'Reilly on Radio

Here and Now has posted the audio file of my 8-minute segment about what emerged at the O'Relly Emerging Tech conference. I talked about emergence, wikis, social software and the Internet Bookmobile, as I recall.

Name Go Boom

NASA's Deep Impact crashes into the Comet Tempel 1, in July of 2005. Now you can have your name inscribed on a disk that gets incinerated in the explosion. It's a can't-fail gift for both the complete egotist or terminally depressed loved on!

[Thanks for the link, Mary Lu.]

WMD 404

Here is an amusing page. Note: Read it a little more closely before assuming that the link is broken.

An Evening at AKMA's

Last night I spoke to about a dozen people from Seabury-Western Seminary and the surrounding neighborhood in Evanston, hosted by the Rev. Prof. AKMA...which also means that I got to hang out with AKMA, Margaret and the 9-year-old peppy Pippa who announced at dinner: "My job is to entertain faculty." She does that mightily and deserves tenure and a promotion. I also met Si, whom many us already know from his blog; having two spatially disoriented, easily distracted people trying to meet each other in a crowded airport is like watching a bullfight between a blinfolded bull and a drunken matador. Thank goodness for cell phones. (And could I find a less apt simile for a pacifist, vegetarian, sober family?)

Anyway, I spoke for an hour about why the Web matters. The conversation after was great, and it was a pleasure talking with people who know technology but are rooted into something perhaps even more important. It was fascinating watching the seminarians applying this to their own realm of discourse.

Trevor Bechtel, AKMA's Disseminarian partner, brought it around to the sense in which one is or isn't embodied on the Web. He had been persuaded that the Web has to be a degraded form of socialilty because it lacks a characteristic some feminists have pointed to as essential: touch. But he's rethinking this idea not because he thinks touch is less important but because he is reconsidering the nature of touch. (I'm sure I'm getting this at least somewhat wrong, and possibly entirely wrong. But he'll correct me.) This led to a discussion of the nature of sign, symbol and the sacrament. For me, it was like listening to technoids talking tech over my head, an experience I enjoy for reasons I may never understand.

Lots more good discussion as well.

AKMA did the live blogging thang here. So did Tripp Hudgins, whose comments I find fascinating because of the way they appropriate what I was saying into Tripp's faithful context. (Note: Tripp's entry is broken into three headings; I did go on too long.)

I am NOT Spamacus

I've gotten several hundred notices of failed mail deliveries this morning. Someone apparently is spamming using various names at evident.com (my domain) as the return address.

So, let me be clear: I do not think your are inadequate "down there," if you know what I mean, and even if I did think so, I certainly wouldn't mention it to you, much less offer to help you with it.

Knowing Up from Down in Windows

In Windows, the command to tile windows horizontally causes them to stack one on top of the other while tiling them vertically puts them side by side.

Look, I know I have a problem with left and right, but I thought I was pretty good about up and down. Is Microsoft purposefully trying to drive me mad?

A Note to Spammers

Dear Spammers:

I am going to be gone all day, visiting AKMA and talking at his seminary. Should be loads of fun. So, if you could please hold off delivering spam until I get back, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you.

Four Color Maps in 3D

There was an interesting the Boston Globe recently about Four Colors Suffice, a book by Robin Wilson on the history of the famous 4-color problem: How do you prove that you only need four colors to ensure that neighboring countries are colored differently. (More important: Why is Greenland pink?)

The proof (according to the article about the book that I didn't read) was the first generated by a computer that couldn't be checked by humans: in 1976, a Cray ground through every conceivable variation and found none that required more than four colors.

I have a question for the mathematically inclined (i.e., people unlike me): How many colors would you need for a 3-D map? Or, if you prefer, how many colors would you need to ensure that blocks (of any shape) stacked in any arbitrary way have differently colored neighbors? I am so bad at 3D stuff that you could tell me the answer is 2 and I would believe you, just so long as you looked at me with those doe-eyes of yours.

The W Resume

Here's George Bush's resume, as reconstructed by Kelly Kramer. An excerpt:

Accomplishments as president:

Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.

Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.

First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.

Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.

In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.

Freedom to Read

The ACLU is backing the Freedom to Read Bill that would tell the government to back off from routinely watching what we take from libraries and buy from bookstores. As Cory says in BoingBoing, "let's get this bill passed and then take on the rest of the evil PATRIOT act."

Responses to Spike

Readers respond to the Salon article (for-pay content) that claims that the focus on Spike has ruined Buffy. I particularly like the one that argues that Spike has always been the outsider looking in, not the Cool Fonzie guy as the article claims.

It sure seems like Buffy's going to have to kill Spike in the last episode. But the show has been canny in the past about surprising us.

Norlin on Leeway

Eric writes in response to my Wired article:

the point that David misses is how much "DRM" enabling technologies can enable the "leeway" he speaks of..... The fact of the matter is that DRM enabling technologies are as *neutral* as the architecture of the computer ... As such, "DRM" can just as easily allow you to illegally trade files (piracy) as it can keep from trading files (hollywood) -- those are the extreme ends of it......and in between? Leeway.

This is certainly true if one looks at DRM out of its real-world context. As a technology, DRM is totally neutral. It enables artists and audience to negotiate agreements about how the artists' works are to be used. Maybe Metallica will offer one-time listening rights to its new CD and Bon Jovi will let you make copies on any device registered to you and Elton Jon will let you burn as many CDs as you want. That'd be great.

But...

DRM, as with any technology, has to be evaluated within our actual context. That context is a profoundly uneven playing field in which the enormous economic forces that have a virtual monopoly on the broad mainstream of American culture are using every anti-market (and anti-emergent) advantage they can to maintain their control. DRM in the abstract is neutral; DRM in the world that exists will degrade our experience and our possibilities. Not everything about it is bad, but enough is that we ought to oppose it.

(Eric has an article coming out at DigitalID world on this topic soon...)

AKMA on DRM and Space

AKMA has a nice rant about how little the RIAA gets it, in response to my Wired article. This is an issue that matters so much to so many people that occasionally I have hope that we'll beat the bastards down.

And speaking of beating bastards down, AKMA is declaring victory (ok, I'm overstating Prof. AKMA's position just a tad) in our battle long ago and far away about whether the Web is spatial. As I recall, my position was two-pronged (i.e., I speak with a forked tongue): The Web is a navigable set of places, and this is a metaphor that we can't arbitrarily revoke even if we don't like it. AKMA's position is — and with any luck I'll twist it beyond recognition in order to suit my own inimical purposes — that the spatial metaphor keeps us from coming up with new and better ways of understanding and using the Web.

AKMA points at a draft of an article by Dan Hunter, "Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anti-Commons." The draft — every page marked "Do not cite" and with Copy turned off in the PDF interface — argues that we do think of cyberspace as a place, but that this shouldn't guide how we legislate it; the rules of real space don't necessarily apply. (I agree 100%. In fact, Chapter 2 of Small Pieces is about this.) Hunter goes on to argue that the law, by treating the Web as a place, is creating an "anti-commons," by which Hunter means (roughly) a place in which "property rights" are over-asserted. His argument is long (118-pages), detailed and well-documented.

I got a lovely note from Dan Hunter. Sounds like he's up to some good stuff.

He also explained that the "Do not cite" notice was required by the "dead tree" publishers. I happen to hate the way Acrobat can keep readers from copying selections because it just means we have to type it in ourselves, and, worse, it's a harbinger of the future where "digital restrictions management" is enforced in software that wouldn't know a fair use if it bit it in its constricted little ass.

Ernie on Fairness

Ernie the Attorney reminds us that DRM isn't the only place we're seeing a clamping down on leeway, as my Wired article argues. No, Ernie says, it's the big trend in law. For example, judges are given "sentencing guidelines" to constrain them. Not to mention the Three Strikes abomination recently upheld by our highly respected Supreme Court.

Me in Wired on DRM

The new issue of Wired has a column I wrote on why leeway is more fundamental than rules. Conclusion: DRM really sucks. No, really.

Plus, you get to see an artist's rendition of my "face."

Why journalism counts

Jonathon blogs about a PBS Frontline piece on how systemic Wall Street investment corruption is. In an email, he writes "This research from PBS is the reason "real" journalism is important...". Sure, it could be done by a blogger, but it's important to have institutions set up that take doing this as their charge.

Straussian Government

Some pointers to articles about Leo Strauss' effect on politics at One Father for Dean. The Asia Times article actually mentions Heidegger. Wow! Are my seven years of grad school becoming relevant? Can I use this to bootstrap myself into a senior policy advisor position? Let's all hope not! (Thanks to Robert Walikis for the link.)

Did Spike Ruin Buffy?

Jaime Weinman has an unfortunately trenchant analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike, he contends, has ruined Buffy. Spike is the sort of cool guy who used to push around the geeks and outsiders the series used to celebrate. The show was better, Weinman says

when the focus was on four uncool people and their quest to rid the world of ... well, of characters like Spike.

Since I've been rooting for Spike ever since the shocking conclusion of last year's episodes (no, I'm not being snarky), and since I have a teenage daughter who roots for Spike for somewhat different reasons, I don't like having these particular scales pulled from my eyes. But I'm afraid he's right.

What's worse: I'm going to be on a plane during the series finale.

[Note: The Salon article is "premium", i.e., for-pay, content. Why not subscribe?]

Reminder: Prevent Further Media Concentration

Lawrence Lessig reminds us all to register our opinion about the upcoming rule change that will allow US media to be rolled up into a small ball that fits conveniently in Rupert Murdoch's pocket.

I blogged about this a few days ago, but it's important enough to nag y'all about.

Love that Rummy!

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

The Guardian, May 9

Renee's World

I did this. I don't know why. I actually like Renee Zellweger. It's mean. I'm not proud of myself.

Definitive Anagrams

WordWays, the increasingly odd journal of recreational linguistics, has an article by ANIL that consists of anagrams of words that define the words. He covers A-C in the current issue. Here are a few:

Abandon = A and no B

Ambidextrously = mix at L/R body use

Amphitheatre = a hear-them pit

Astuteness = taut senses

Awakened = a dawn "Eek!"

Billiards = I rid balls

Capture = crate up

Circular = I curl arc

Cogito ego sum = micro ego gusto

Cough medicine = Chug, I'm codeine

No, none match the classic "Astronomers = moon starers."

Have any favorites of your own?

At the WordWays site are some samples from the magazine, including some clever "word palindromes" collected by Will Shortz.

Mom

My mother was the life of the party. Here's a casual joke she liked. When a friend of hers was asked how many people his cabin cruiser slept, he repllied: "Sleeps four. Fucks eight."

Mom taught folk guitar starting in the late '50s, back when Alan Lomax and The Weavers were big and before anything was blowing in the wind. When folk music went mainstream and everyone was learning how to Carter pick, our house became the locus of hootenannies: teenagers singing "The Cat Came Back," accompanying themselves on guitars and banjos.

Mom was hooked into the Left politics of the War years and late '40s, and got a job at the center of the action, The New Republic. She would have worked her way up and threaded her way through that crowd, except she was randomly chosen as my father's war-time penpal, and they got married a couple of weeks after meeting in person. Never underestimate the power of hot sex. She eventually realized that she didn't like my father very much.

She was pretty much a conspiratorial pan-theologist, believing whatever the Establishiment didn't want us to believe, including that we are responsible for our own luck and health. She died about ten years ago of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking Luckies.

Internet Bookmobile

Jack Schofield writes in The Guardian about Brewster Kahle's heart-enhancing project, the Internet Bookmobile. Each van has a million digitized public domain books. Writes Jack:

"It takes about 20 minutes to print out a 300-page Wizard of Oz," says Kahle, "and if you have four printers, you can produce up to 30 books an hour. And you can do an edition of one, which is interesting. Harvard says it costs $2 to lend a book out, then put it back on the shelf, so it's cheaper to give them away."

Vanderbilt Comment

Dale comments on AKMA's and my Vanderbilt presentation. He was there in da flesh. (Nice to meet you, Dale.)

American Media: Now Made from Concentrate!

From MoveOn.org:

On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission intends to lift restrictions on media ownership that could allow your local newspaper, cable provider, radio stations, and TV channels all to be owned by one company. The result could be the disappearance of the checks and balances provided by a competitive media marketplace -- and huge cutbacks in local news and reporting. Good, balanced information is the basis for our democracy. That's why we're asking that: "Congress and the FCC should stop media deregulation and work to make the media diverse, competitive, balanced, and fair."

Register your thoughts here. (Here are mine: Increasing the concentration of media is bad for the democracy the the Congress and FCC are supposed to be safeguarding.)

Bad Taste Posters Taste Gooooood

Some real bad taste posters are at the satiric whitehouse.org (not to be confused with the pornographic whitehouse.com or the differently-pornographic whitehouse.gov).

Great Ad

Such a good Honda ad! And it only took 606 takes.

The Guardian on Social Software

Jack Schofield writes in The Guardian about the emergence of social software at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference. It's a good overview of the controversy over the hypiness of the concept.

Blog Marketing 101

So, a guy named Joe Smith writes to me to respond to my intentionally provocative statement that blogging is the triumph of the sophists. He thinks it's basically true because "much like the sophists of ancient Greece, modern bloging is given the weight of objective analysis without subjection to it."

Then he tells me the real reason he's writing is that he's trying to "get the word out on a music cd/video by an Indy for the peace movement. All the revenue (not profit, revenue!) goes to Unicef." It's by Fred Nassiri, whose biography reads like the plot of a Jerzy Kosinksi novel. I don't know anything about Nassiri, and the song, "Love Sees No Color," isn't my cup of herbal tea. But, what the heck, it's an interesting site if only because of the way it constructs a very public and commercial self.

Joe concludes his msg to me: "If you don?t want to post a link, I would love a few pointers on how to get the word out." Let's see. Joe engages me on a topic I raised in my weblog. He gets me thinking about a topic I care about. Only then does he pitch me on a site that is (ostensibly) well-intentioned, multi-cultural and charitable. You know what? I don't think Joe needs any help figuring out how to get the word out. He's played me like a trout. In the best sense.

Doom Review Fragged

Chris Green, who wrote the texture-mapping routines for Ultima Underworld, refutes Wagner James Au's attempt to give him credit at the expense of id software, thus rail-gunning Au's review of the book Masters of Doom in Salon. (My comments on the review are here.)

New SMARTness

David Isenberg is poppin' out copies of his telco-maverick newsletter like pizzas at an airport Pizza Hut. And, believe me, that's where the comparison ends. (Well, except that you can't consume either without staining yourself. [Note to self: come up with a less objectionable similarity.])

One new one is here and the other is here. I particularly appreciated David's summary, in the second of the links, of John Jordan's list of 12 shocks to the recording industry since 1990, reminding us that the industry is, to some degree, scapegoating the Internet.

Vanderbilt Lessons

Lessons learned from doing two 2-hour seminars with AKMA at Vanderbilt on the Internet and teaching (with blogs as a special focus in the second session):

Don't overstate the case against "experts." Scholars and teachers are likely to find the idea wrong and the rhetoric obnoxious.

Don't be a dickhead about having to walk for ten minutes in the rain.

It was a stimulating day and a privilege to participate in. In the morning, I talked for 15 minutes (i.e., 25) about the effect of the Web on self, conversation and knowledge/authority. On the last point, I talked briefly about knowledge as arising from human voices in conversation and about the new ability to have multiple subjectivities do the job that objectivity used to have to struggle to do on its own.

Then AKMA gave a grounded talk on introducing technology into educational systems, a sort of lessons-learned piece. He made three key points: 1) Change happens so fast that academics shouldn't be responsible for staying on top of it; it's more or less a full-time job. 2) Teaching well comes first and we still have lots to learn there. 3) We should learn from the technology how it can help us rather than make enormous top-down decisions with preconceived ideas about how the technology will be adopted and adapted. Find neat stuff, AKMA says, and fiddle with it.

That left a little over an hour for discussion. It tended more towards the broad questions, bouncing back to the practical and useful. Is the Internet primarily about information? Are information and conversation separable? There was some discussion of the nature of Web selves as written. (Afterwards, John Rakestraw, our host, pointed out that the characteristics of Web selves I'd mentioned - written and intermittent - are also characteristic of the selves college professors see if there is little classroom interaction.) We talked about the nature of reputation and authority. We talked about the reliability of information coming from strangers, some of whom might be marketing malefactors.

In the last ten minutes, three faculty members played back what we'd been saying in the Worst Possible Understanding mode: we're advocating "cults of personality" that determine what is to be believed according to how entertaining it is, resulting in a dumbing down of "knowledge" to a pre-fifth grade level. We only had a few minutes left, which concentrated the conversation but didn't let us get much past marking out territory: this is about whether knowledge is independent of human situatedness and whether expertise is an inner quality or has value only in play. It is, in short, an epistemological question. And AKMA, one of the very best expositors of Post-Modern hermeneutics, was champing at the bit to run with it. But then time was up. Aaarrggghhh.

The afternoon session was less formal and much more focused on practical issues. We showed a wiki (which one of the session members updated on his own as we were demo-ing it) and talked about how it might be used in a course, either having multiple contributors to a single page or having each student create and own pages that contribute to the overall topic. But mainly we talked about blogs. Lots of interest and lots of great questions. Particularly striking to me was the discussion about whether it's fair to require a student to publish a blog on the big, open Internet. Remember that Permanent Record your school principal used to threaten you with? Well, it's real and it's called Google.

It was, I thought, an excellent discussion that drew particularly on AKMA's strengths and experience with tech in the classroom. (Will someone please find him a job that combines theology, preaching, scholarship, teaching and being a tech guru for a college? Oh, and stand-up comic and candidate for political office.)

Live from Vanderbilt

AKMA and I are about to begin a two-hour discussion of tech and ed at Vanderbilt, moderated by John Rakestraw. AKMA has just joined us: I can tell without looking up because I just heard his thunderous laugh.

FWIW, my computer is hooked up to the projection system, so I guess we'd have to call this not just live blogging but real-time (limited domain) blogging...

Sophistry

At dinner last night in Nashville with AKMA and Vanderbilt's John Rakestraw, Peter and Chip (sorry about not getting the last names) when I used the term "sophistry" in a disparaging way, AKMA offered that he likes the Sophists. If you know AKMA well enough to spell his name, you know he couldn't mean that he likes those who are paid to teach people how to be persuasive on any side of an issue regardless of the truth of the matter, which is the picture of the Sophists we get from Plato. Or, perhaps in some post-Modern way that's exactly what AKMA believes. AKMA is full of surprises.

Unfortunately, our dinner conversation shifted away from the topic. So, now I'm eager to hear AKMA's defense of sophistry. And, in the spirit of being mindlessly and ironically provocative, I issue the following debate topic:

Resolved: Blogging is the triumph of sophism.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to a day of conversation with AKMA and Vanderbiltians about blogging, the Internet and teaching.

Audio Blogs on NPR

I missed NPR Morning Edition's piece on audio blogging. Here it is.

Gone Fishin'

It's off to Vanderbilt where AKMA and I are talking about why blogs are maybe gud for edukashun. Looking forward to it...

Does Metadata Work on the Web?

Interesting article in the latest issue of Information Research on whether metadata works on the Web. Terrence A. Brooks argues that the old assumptions about information retrieval don't map to the Web:

Web resources are characterized as evolving, not static, resources. They are more like loose-leaf binder services than time-invariant database records:

Further, Brooks argues, if common metadata schema were used, they would be exploited by spammers and other scum-based life forms, which is why Google won't tell us exactly how PageRank is determined.

He concludes that pages on the open Web are "poor hosts for topical metadata."

The CSS Question

Paul Philp harvests some good lessons from "The Great CSS Smackdown"

The Social Software Dust-up

Stowe Boyd jumps into the "Is social software just hype" kerfuffle. So does Ross Mayfield. If nothing else, the brouhaha is prompting some good writing...

More on Social Software from Jonathan

Jonathan Peterson follows up on his blog entry about why social software is taking off:

Cocooning, technology, commute times, and commodity McJobs all put tremendous isolationist pressures on individuals, anything that can lessen those pressures by enabling real, emotional, human, re-connection will thrive.

I concur.

Defense of Doom

Wagner James Au reviews David Kushner's new book, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, for Salon, and he has a big chip on his shoulder. While Au likes the book — " excellent, ripe with vivid, you-are-there details tracking the rise of id Software" — he is just plain pissed off that Kushner thinks Wolfenstein and Doom were breakthrough games, especially when compared to his own favorite:

To anyone who played "Ultima Underworld," the comparison reeks of travesty. For everyone else, no doubt, the distinction must seem academic. Even many Blue Sky veterans don't seem all that exercised about claiming their rightful credit, as the first and best.

Here's how Au gives id's games their due:

... for what they were, well-made, if unaccountably morbid shoot-fests, they weren't horrible.

"Weren't horrible"? Oh, where to begin...

Wolfenstein and then Doom were each technical breakthroughs. Ultima may have been the first game to let you look in any direction (Wolfenstein didn't let you look up or down), but it played like shit on the computers of the time whereas Wolfenstein flew. John "God" Carmack's genius was in squeezing performance out of machines. Wolfenstein was the first 3D (or 2.5D as Au has it...fair enough) that let you run through a large world without the machine getting in your way. Playing Ultima, on the other hand, was like trudging up a very long hill.

Doom upped the ante considerably: fully 3D, reasonably-animated (albeit sprite-based) enemies, effective use of lighting effects, and good enough AI, all within a gaming world through which you could run without pause or hesitation.

And there's another thing: The gameplay of Wolfenstein and Doom were breakthroughs, too. Doom in particular was scary as shit. Rooms went dark and baddies leapt out at you. The growling of the beasts still creeps me out.

Clearly first person shooters don't appeal to Au. Fine. And just as clearly, what's really motivating Au is the death of Looking Glass Studios, the creator of quieter 3D games such as Thief, which he attributes to the twitch-and-flinch appeal of games like id's. (Au wrote about this in an earlier issue of Salon.) But he's just plain wrong when he says that id's games didn't bring us closer to the "utopian vision" of a "play space for freeform imagination and social experiment." Au writes:

...this is precisely what they did not do. Their games were allowed to be 3D worlds only insofar as you were moving fast and killing stuff in them -- and you were allowed to be interactive in them only insofar as you were moving fast and killing stuff.

This is true of id's games. That's what they do well. But id is important because it showed the possibility of making visually-convincing, responsive 3D spaces that can be populated by the stuff of the human imagination. And that is indeed a transforming capability. Many of the games set in 3D worlds have been shoot-'em-ups because, well, this is America. But some have been more than that: "No One Lives Forever" and its sequel are better pieces of pop culture than any James Bond movie made in the past twenty years. And the Thief games that Au prefers, glorifying domestic robbery instead of intergalactic war, themselves are part of id's legacy.

Au doesn't have to like id's games. But Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake each were such audacious leaps in interactive graphical worlds that you could practically hear the collective gasp of gameplayers worldwide. I hate to see that achievement belittled.

Jonathon does a good job defending id from Au's attempted frag.

So much safer now...

A story from MSNBC, forwarded by Jamie McCarthy to a mailing list I'm on:

Iraqi nuclear site is found looted
Team unable to determine whether materials are missing
By Barton Gellman

NEAR KUT, Iraq, May 3 -- A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

THE DISCOVERY at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control.

In all, seven sites associated with Iraq's nuclear program have been visited by the Pentagon's "special nuclear programs" teams since the war ended last month. None was found to be intact, though it remains unclear what materials -- if any -- had been removed. [...]

Meanwhile, at the nearby Tuwaitha storage site, security remains a concern...

Jamie notes: "Tuwaitha is the 'smoking gun' that Rush Limbaugh calls 'Saddam's Secret Atomic City.'" Says Jamie:

Remind me why we went into Iraq? Wasn't it to prevent materials such as dirty-bomb components from falling into the hands of terrorists?

Update from Jamie:

My MSNBC link was the Washington Post story; there was a story on the same subject, same day, in the New York Times

Slate's "Today's Papers" looks at both and points out a few differences (search down on "Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility").

The NYT adds in an "unconfirmed report" of missing anthrax, which I accord the status of rumor until it gets, well, confirmed. On the subject of the looting and lax security, it has some more details.

Language Determinism Exampled

Continuing the thread on language determinism, Flemming Funch writes:

I've noticed how Chinese or Japanese speakers often will make certain consistent mistakes in English. Like mixing up singular and plural. Some people figure it out eventually, but some people never do. For an English speaker it is obvious that noodles is plural, because there are many noodles on a plate. A Chinese person is just as likely to call it "noodle", not because he can't count, but because he's seeing it differently. I suppose focusing on the substance, not on the individual pieces. A Korean person leading a Yoga class might say "Touch your left feet". I only have one left foot, but in Korean thinking it makes sense that he's talking to the group, and there obviously are a whole bunch of left feet there. The English speaker will be very focused on himself individually, whereas a Korean will think more as a group.

Cool examples!

Jonathan replies patiently to a post by Baldur Bjarnason that argues that culture forms language and not vice versa. Language is "a weapon" used in fights between cultures, Baldur says. It seems he's saying that if you lose your language, you lose your culture, which implies the opposite of what he's arguing. In any case, both sides in the argument over linguistic relativism can (and should) support preserving local languages, IMO.

The Language Thing (Or: Heidegger Made Dense)

I've been a bad bad boy. It's been a busy few weeks and I haven't kept up with the blogiverse as closely as I'd like. So I'm late in coming to the quite wonderful thread on "language determinism" started by Stavros the Wonder Chicken with a brilliant post that uses Korean as an example to shake up our assumptions about whether we speak language or language speaks us.

Among many others who responded was Jonathon Delacour who cites Heidegger saying Language is the house of Being." (The "language speaks us" trope is also Heidegger's.) Jonathon writes:

Heidegger seems to be suggesting a far more active role in the construction of language (and therefore) culture for those who think (philosophers?) and those who create (writers and poets?). Hopefully, a fully-fledged philosopher will clarify Heidegger?s intention.

Clarify Heidegger's intention? Hahahaha, that's a good one! But, since my doctoral dissertation was on Heidegger, I'm going to take a swing at this one anyway. Since it's been 20 years since I read the ol' Nazi, this will be more what-I-think-I-learned-from-Heidegger about language than a scholarly exegesis of his thought.

At bottom, here's why Heidegger mattered to me. I was a freshman in college. I was in the midst of what we used to call an "existential crisis." It seemed obvious to me that the meaning we saw in the world was merely what we project onto it. And we're not talking about Capital M Meanings like "Love thy neighbor" or "Go forth and multiply." No, it was more along the lines of: we only see a difference between a tree's roots and the ground that they're in; the world doesn't really divide up the way we think it does. (Ah, peyote! I miss it still!)

By learning about the history of philosopy, I learned that this line of thought, which seemed so obvious and incontrovertible, in fact had a history: I was thinking that way because 2,500 years of overly-intellectual white guys worked themselves into a corner. (A surprising percentage of the great white philosophers died virgins. 'Nuff sed.)

By learning about phenomenology in general, I learned that the sundering of meaning and reality was in fact a special mood to which we moderns are susceptible, and that that mood does not have special revelatory power. That is, when Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea sees the tree's roots as alien and meaningless, that is not a revelation of the truth of the tree but a projection of 2,500 years of twisted philosophical thought.

Third — and now we're getting closer to Heidegger on language — I learned from Heidegger that things always present themselves to us as something: the apple tree shows itself as an apple tree, the hammer as a hammer. Further, things show themselves within a project: eating an apple, harvesting apples, getting an apple to throw at postal worker, etc. The idea of a thing-in-itself makes as much sense as what yellow looks like when the lights are off.

Fourth, I came to accept that the interesting and important phenomenon to explain is the ordinary experience of our world in which what is shows itself as something. The notion of Reality as that which stands apart from human experience comes about only in two highly suspect ways: In the mood of despair and in the overly-rational, abstract contemplations of philosophers.

Heidegger's Big Point about language, at least as it affected me, is that it is not a medium of communication. It first and foremost the "as"-ness of our experience. When we speak together, we are not shipping meanings from one mind to another. We are instead turning towards the world together, letting the world reveal itself in its as-ness.

Further, language is a "gesture." Heidegger doesn't do a great job laying this out (perhaps because he offers the gesture idea as a gesture), but I find the idea deeply appealing for two reasons.

First, the existing theory of language said that good language is precise. Nah, says the gesture idea. Good language is ambiguous because it's contextual. The "as-ness" of a thing is, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, totally contextual: a hammer can't be a hammer (for driving nails) without a context that includes nails, lumber, trees, humans as builders, humans as needers of shelter, etc. Words are also contextual; language is not a one-to-one relationship of grunt to thing.

Second, the current theory said that language is about A getting an internal idea out of his head and into B's head. The gesture idea says that language is about A revealing the world in a particular way to B. Language is a way we turn towards the world together, not a way we replicate inner states.

So: Language is the house of Being because language fundamentally is the as-ness of the world, and to be is to be as something.

Now, in response to the blogthread. Heidegger has a heroic view of the development of language. He believes that poets are the real philosophers because poets shape language and thus shape being (the way the world presents itself to us). He doesn't want to say that poets make stuff up, so he instead has an idea of Being unfolding itself in history. Shades of Hegel, but perhaps motivated by his need to shore up Nazism as not just a great idea for a political party but as a destiny of the German people. You can't have a destiny unless history is unfolding.

So, let's leave aside the question of how the history of language develops. On a smaller scale, Heidegger certainly thinks that language isn't merely how we experience the world, for he rejects the idea that we start out with two poles: the world and our perception. No, for him the world is what shows itself to us, and it shows itself to us in the as-ness of language. Language is the house of being. It's also the floorplan of being, and the wallpaper and matching sofa of being.

Believe it or not, I am trying to be clear.

ComPeeting with Wifi

In Coolidge Corner in Brookline near where I live, there's a Starbuck's three doors from a Peet's Coffee. Starbuck's charges for it's wifi.

Why the hell doesn't Peet's provide free wifi?

Humanists and Scientists

Arnold Kling writes about the continuing triumph of technologists over humanists:

The Kling thesis is that the project of the humanists is degenerating into an exercise in archaeology. It is a way to study where we have been. But it does not tell us where we are going.

Arnold paraphrases Will Wilkinson to define the terms:

a humanist arrives at understanding subjectively, through introspection and empathy. A scientist arrives at understanding objectively, through the scientific method.

One of his examples:

To a humanist, the recent war in Iraq had the potential to turn into a quagmire. To a technologist, such an outcome was highly unlikely, given the advances that had taken place in computer and communication technology in just the last ten years.

The question of the accuracy of smart bombs is for the scientists. Humanists who pronounced on that topic via introspection and empathy were misapplying their skills. But technologists who pronounced on the wisdom and morality of the war based on their assessment of the accuracy of smart bombs were also off base.

Are humanism and science equals, then? Nah. Humanism is broader and more fundamental. But not if you define it as "introspection and empathy." That'd be like defining science as "measuring stuff." Humanists, as I understand the term, don't sit around looking inwards. Originally, humanism was a break from God-centered philosophies, asserting the magnificence of our capabilities as opposed to our feebleness and frailness in the face of our Creator. The term has come to refer to those who assert something like: 1) There is no external authority that settles all questions for us; 2) Human reason is not all that matters; 3) Human experience does not reduce to the physical.

If that's an acceptable definition, put me down as a humanist.

And I don't want to leave it at a misty-eyed plea for embracing both points of view. I love technology and want every child trained in the scientific method. Objectivity is one very important way of seeing the world. It has precedence in certain projects, and those projects are crucial. But it is just one stance we can take toward the world. Humanism, however, isn't just one stance. It is what explains — and grounds — how and why we humans take different stances towards the world, including science.

Humanism rulz! We're #1! We're #1! Whooooo!

Information wants to go boom

Bruce Simpson set off a flurry at Slashdot by posting his intention to build a cruise missile for under $5,000. He's going to screen who gets to see the intimate details and since no honorable terrorist would stoop to lying, that should be alright.

Among his many noble intentions, he's offering to sell the exclusive rights to his story to a media outlet for a to-be-determined amount.

Bricklin on Paying Artists

Dan Bricklin has posted a nuanced analysis of how artists do, can and should get paid for their work. Dan puts the transaction/commerce side of it within an entire "ecosystem." This leads him to criticize the current talk about Digital Rights Management:

The freeform of a variety and a mixture of funding models, and the benefits of unintended free release, are part of what makes things work with art and society. Responding to opportunities that present themselves requires flexibility. The DRM systems we hear about today are rigid procrustean beds that could kill this ecology. They are wedded to narrow, simplistic business models, dominated by large publishing businesses.

He concludes:

Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer. Those publishing businesses may be based on that one form of payment, but the artists' livelihood need not.

Another Word for Visualization

The Visual Thesaurus sure looks beautiful. But, it packs so much information into a few simple pictures that I - with my graphodeficiency - can't really make sense of it. Assuming that your DNA isn't short a few pairings the way mine is, you'll probably love it.

The Mother of Coincidence

From Mark Dionne

Someone wrote me, and mentioned this quote:

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous

I hadn't heard it before, so I looked it up with Google. It was surprising how many people it was credited to, but the winners seemed to be Albert Einstein and Doris Lessing.I decided to count who was the winner. Albert got something like 33 hits with the quote written exactly as above. Doris got NONE. But if I look for the "coincidences are" variation, Doris gets about 36. Einstein gets NONE.

This is pretty interesting, suggesting that on one (or both?) branches of the history, there was an early misquote that has been perpetuated very accurately. OR, that both came up with the same quote. OR, that one of them stole it from the other. OR, that both were quoting an earlier source.

Of course, it could just be a coincidence.

Jonathon on social software

Jonathan puts well why social software is becoming important.

I liked what Phil Windley had to say also. (I wrote about this topic here. Dave Winer wrote here about why he thinks it's over-hyped.)

Making the World Safe for Boredom

A disappointing editorial in the Boston Globe today urges presidential candidates to be more guarded and boring. Jeez, is that even possible?

The Globe is bothered by Kerry calling for "regime change in the United States" and by Dean who. while "advocating a foreign policy that relies more on diplomacy," said that "we won't always have the strongest military." The Globe thinks Kerry is guilty of "bad taste" and that Dean's explanation, although "not contradictory," leaves him with "the task of detailing his plans for the military."

Aarrgghh. So, Kerry should always be tasteful, and Dean shouldn't raise the obvious and important point that the US has not entirely slipped the bonds of history?

The editorial's reasoning is that because presidents need to choose their words carefully. "it makes sense" that presidential candidates should be held to a similarly high standard.

It doesn't make no stinkin' sense to me.

The Globe's example of why a president needs to be careful is W declaring a "crusade" against Moslem terrorists and the countries that harbor them. But the words of a president when making foreign policy statements can be performative: like saying "I do" at a wedding or "I promise" to your mother, such words are events. But the words of presidential candidates are not performatives. Candidates need to be permitted to speak casually, off the cuff and from the heart — for our sakes.

So, here's the editorial I would have written:

No more mush from the wimps

Congratulations to Kerry and Dean for speaking out. Give us more! If sometimes their words may inflame or seem intemperate, our democracy is still stronger for their overall candor and frankness. So, as a responsible newspaper, we will provide you with the context as opponents quote one another out of context. Indeed, as a society, we need to give one another the permission to speak freely, because otherwise free speech just isn't very interesting.