[msc] Tuesday morning

Some excellent presentations on the panel I'm on. But it's tough to be on a panel and blog at the same time, so please pardon my sketchiness...

Pam Meyer gives a fascinating talk on her research into online dating services: What men and women think the other sex is lying about (status, weight), how extremely weak the links are (few people have met their online friends in the real world, trust is low). She says that online social networks have low entry and exit costs; how can loyalty be increased?

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp.org talks about the relationship of online and real world groups. Surprisingly, nline communities were among the first to use MeetUp.

Michael Cornfield takes a hard-nosed look at what the Net is good for in political campaigns. He defines "good for" as contributing towards garnering 50% + 1 of the vote in an election. He downplays the importance of using the Net for community building (the hippie stuff I like). He suggests that the national parties put up wikis so we the people can make a virtual party platform, that the debates ought to accept online questions that we have voted for, and that we set up a mechanism for monitoring what topics are actually being talked about online.

I talk about how the growth of messy, ambiguous, tacit relationships is required for engagement in political campaigns.

Now we head into a series of 20-min presentations.

Mimi Ito gives a great talk on the social networks that spring up around mobile phones in Japan. It's a phenomenology of these networks, supporting the case the social software tools need to be simple so there's room for small factors to trigger great emergence. (In response to a question about getting better input devices for phones, she says in Japan you can get keypad inputs for your PC.)

Rael Dornfeast talks about how new mobile technology allows us to be present to others in a bewildering variety of ways. He plays on Linda Stone's phrase: Continuous (mobile) partial attention. Rael wants things like being notified when he's waiting in public when there's someone nearby who shares many of the same names in their address book. He says that we should consider not just writing for the Web. "You'r saying you're most social when you're sitting in front of your monitor." (Great talk.)

Shelley Farnham of Microsoft Research talks about the social goals of social software: To have meaningful relationships with friends. Research shows that we use technology primarily to interact with our friends, not strangers. Similarity and proximity are strong determinants of friendship. Proximity is a huge predictor of friendship. The number of people we send email to correlates with how involved we feel we are with our community. She talks about intricate ways the real and virtual worlds interact. She refers to a http://research.microsoft.com/scg/#projects>project she's working on.

After lunch, danah boyd leads off. She talks about how she has been trying to make sense of artificial social networks, including how they try to "configure their users." She uses Friendster as her example. Your home page is a representation of self. [I'd say it's a presentation of self.] Gay men and Burning Man participants really picked up on Friendster because they're "urban tribes" with shared interests and co-located. She says that half of Friendster lives in Asia. Each of these sub-populations create their own social norms. We create different facets of our selves for our different environments. Friendster gives you an environment for presenting a self not tied to specific task or context. E.g., a 26-year-old teacher signed up for Friendster as part of her Burning Man group. Nothing in her profile indicated she was a Burning Man person, but her friends had Burning Man-specific info in their profiles. Her students found her group of links and made assumptions about her own behavior.

People are upset about fakesters, she says. But fakesters are political actions. They want to do something that Friendster doesn't let them do, including put up a profile to find fellow alumni or to provide pseudonymity. Publicly articulated social networks are a new architecture that creates new social dynamics, danah concludes. Great stuff. (I've just picked a couple of ideas.)

Backchannels

Liz Lawley has a great blog entry about the importance of backchannel IRC conversations. We're on the back-backchannel here at the Microsoft conference and it's been a very interesting phenomena because of the cultural schisms its surfacing. (Can you surface a schism?)

[msc] Monday afternoon

[Sketchy, semi-random notes from an afternoon of 20-min presentations, with much much much backchannel chat]

Warren Sack gives his twenty minute presentation. Social computing addresses two questions: 1. How can the insights of social science be applied to design better software? 2. How can software be designed to address social problems? He talks about a software prototype that does a "translation map": "The Translation Map is a prototype system designed to facilitate collaborative translations and geographically-based messaging" (from the site).

Now Warren asks if software should be evaluated in terms of social capital? Are there private, public and social capital? Nah, it'd be better to think about this in terms of space. When you introduce a new technology, it redistributes the private, public and social space.

Q: (Clay) Danny O'Brien says that on the Net we have public and secret speech, but not private speech...

Paul Resnick talks about reputation systems: A system that aggregates and distributes info about what people have done in the past so people can make decisions about what to do in the future. He's done a study that has some preliminary results: A sense of uniqueness leads to more ratings, and people respond to challenges to create more ratings.

He talks about eBay. About 1 in 100 transactions gets a negative feedback. But we don't know if that reflects the actual rate of satisfaction. His lab studies show that reputation leads to more trust and trustworthiness, but long-term partners is even better. We know from eBay that having a positive reputation brings in about 8% more money, in his study. Reputations are useful when interacting with strangers, but aren't so important if you already know the person because your experience will trump what others say. Short histories create the best incentives but long term tell you the most about the person. (Paul's research confirms what we suspected.)

Susan Herring talks about "Weblog as Genre." Her group randomly sampled blogs from blo.gs They looked at the producers, purpose and structure of the blogs. They coded 44 features and quantified the results: Adult males produce blogs that are filters, while women and young people do more personal journals. 50% of blogs didn't have links to anyone else. The average blog had 6.5 links out. The blogosphere is densely interconnected: The average degrees of separation of the blogs in the sample was 3.8.

Jonathan Grudin talks on "IM and Blogs in Work Environments." IM he says will be the predominant form of information exchange in business. He says that IM is playing much of the role that email did in 1984. Business is hot on IM, he says, which is different from email 20 yrs ago. In one project, he interviewed 20 people in the Puget Sound. He found they're technically adept but don't now much about blogs. In another study, they looked at 400 early adopters of a new IM client at Microsoft. Managers and older users use it differently. Technophobia and switching costs are dropping. Socially, you can IM down but not up, which is maybe why the managers like it.

Steve Whittaker writes about "Designing for Informal Communication and Social Organization." How do we manage complex social orders? Animals like fixed roles. Apes like dominance orders. The social view says that there are two aspects to being human: Social representation and informal communication. But what is informal communication? His research, within one domain, shows that it takes place between two people, impromptu, and lasts about 2 mins. They looked at ContactMap and tried to build a complex social representation of who communicates with whom by analyzing email. People liked its graphical view of the social net. ContactMap worked better than email for some particular social tasks. But there are issues around scaling.

Wade Cunningham talks about wikis, which he pretty much invented. He says that if wikis and blogs had been invented first, maybe we wouldn't have had email. He says that wikis generally aren't trashed, so maybe people are good. Clay quotes Wattenberg and someone who said that the cost of trashing a wiki is higher than the cost of repairing it, so that's why they generally aren't trashed.

Elizabeth Churchill talks on "Social Computing and Lightweight Collaboration." She shows a video of Sticky Chats, chats that attach to portions of a document. Looks useful. Another project, the Plasma Poster, uses a large screen as a public board by which distributed groups can post shared info, leave msgs, etc.

[msc] Microsoft Social Computing

I'm at a small conference on social networks put on by Microsoft Research.

During the brief intros, I make a fool of myself early on, getting it over early. I say that social networks worry me because they are based on explicit declarations of relationship, and because they're putting valuable relationships behind proprietary walls. Well, it turns out that "social network" means something different to the academics; I meant "artificial social networks" like Friendster. Much of the room must have been puzzled.

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp gave the opening talk. Excellent, but I've blogged it a couple of times before.

Now a panel starts.

Ze Frank, who has an ultra amusing site (see The Alphabet, for example), is being arch and funny about social networks. "Where's the status on line? Where are the velvet ropes?"

Joi denies that social networking tools necessarily diminish social lives and/or spirits. Blogs, he says, is publishing, but IRC is "hanging out." Changes in presence are events, and people should be able to know about those events. Social software like Friendster filter this: Who do you want to know about your presence, and at what level of detail? Cellphones give you presence, location and mobility, none of which we've had in computers, and that makes a big difference.

Tim O'Reilly: We're in the early stages of building an operating system for the Internet as a platform. We need an architecture of participation. He's excited about Microsoft Wallop because it tries to find the existing implict data about relationships. We should be creating loose confederations that allow us to query distributed personal/social info (with the proper privacy and permissioning, of course). "We need to reinvent the user control of social networks using an end-to-end architecture..." [Right on!]

Clay's 10-minute talk is called "The subject of this talk is not explicit." He wants to talk about an early mistake social network software is making. Orkut made it one-click easy to make someone a friend. The number of friends went through the roof but the network no longer reflected reality. So, they added a second click: How much of a friend? I don't need this data; Orkut needs it to create a visible and formal model of the network. But how valuable is a formal model? There's nothing Orkut can extract from a photo of a face that's as interesting as what we get from it in an instant. The most important information is implicit.

So, Clay says, what led Orkut to make these wrong decisions? What is Orkut thinking? 1. It thinks that what people are doing when they think about social situations is a form of computation. This is like AI's mistake. 2. And Orkut also assumes that, when asked, people can express they rules explicitly...but that's false. [Loved the talk. These are topics I've been writing/thinking about, and Clay puts it all so well.]

Steve Johnson says his first two books argued against the idea that the Net consists of little echo chambers. Instead, think of it as a place in which strangers interact and new things emerge. Emergence refers to Jane Jacbob's view of cities. [I've been reading Death and Life...a fantastic book.] He's afraid that the new social networks are "neutering" these adventurous places. And now people — Joi, for example — are talking about the software social networks overlaying real places. He'd like to use Amazon's Search Inside facility to search inside his own library, or the libraries of people one or two degrees away. Then he talks against the echo chamber idea: The Net is an echo chamber compared to what, he asks incredulously? TV? Even if you just follow bloggers in your general universe of interests, you're still following links out to more diverse ideas than ever before. He points out that the criticism used to be that the Net was nothing but flame wars. Now the criticism is that it's echo chambers. But, he worries, we are creating these social network tools in order to decrease our contact with others. [Jeez, is he good!]

Q: So, is FOAF bad, Clay?

A: No, FOAF encodes links. The degree to which you have to express a full, formal relationship will inhibit its adoption.

Politically correct sign languages

The Telegraph in the UK has a story about agitation against some of the British Sign Language gestures. (Thanks to danah for the link)

Hyenas on leashes

Joi just pointed the backchannel at the Microsoft conference I'm at to Boing Boing's photo of hyenas. All around the table, the jaws of those of us connected to IRC are dropping.

Patriotic response

I just learned from David Silver that in 2002 the White House declared Sept. 11 as "Patriot Day." Why do I find this distasteful?

Google Ads and Evil

Businessweek writes about Google's refusing to run ads from an environmental group...

Ghost Town

Talk about eerie. Elena rides her motorcycle through Chernobyl, equipped with a camera and dosemeter. (Thanks to Joi, with whom I got to hang out with last night, for the link)

Allowed Aloud

AKMA has had the best idea of the significant interval: Since Larry Lessig allows anyone to record the audio of his book, Free Culture, for non-commercial purposes, why don't a bunch of us each record a chapter?

Within a couple of days — before Amazon could get me my copy — almost all of it's been done. You can get the list of links on AKMA's site.

Too cool.

New issue of JOHO

I just published the latest - and possibly last? - issue of my newsletter:

The Internet is not a medium

You know how Doc corrects people who talk about "consumers"? "As Jerry Michalski says," Doc objects, "consumers are gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash."

I feel the same way about the word "medium" when applied to the Net.

A medium's job is to deliver a message. It does its job well if that message is delivered intact. But that's not how media actually work because we are not passive containers. Rather, in the process of understanding something, we let it affect us. It shapes us, and we shape it. We absorb it into the context of our lives. The more completely we absorb it, the "wronger" we get it from the point of view of, say, the marketer who wants us to take it exactly as he put it.

This is never so true as with works of art and creativity, which is why it's in the artist's interest to lose creative (but not necessarily economic) control of her work quickly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, the idea that works are content moving through a medium has led us to think that appropriation and reuse is an insult to the artist, and possibly a violation of copyright, when it is in fact a sign that the work is working on us. We honor it by making it our own.

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it.

Google, Libertarians and Faux Principles

It's heartening that Google's motto, "Don't be evil," puts morality at the heart of Google's mission. It's a lot better guideline than "Ruthlessly enrich ourselves" or "Crimp the air supply of our competitors." I personally would like to see "Make the world better" become an explicit part of every company's charter, just as a reminder.

But, "Don't be evil" only poses as a principle. It's not a principle because it can't be applied to a situation. It can't be used to guide action. Does not demoting an anti-semitic site's rank constitute doing evil or not doing evil? Saying "Don't be evil" just doesn't help us decide.

A more dangerous — because more subtle — faux principle is the Libertarian one that says "The goernment that governs least governs best." It looks like it can be brought in to settle a discussion's hash. But it turns out to be totally unhelpful. Everyone agrees that governmental bloat is a bad thing. The real question is: What constitutes bloat and what constitutes "least"? When a Libertarian invokes the "Least Governement" principle to explain why she doesn't want the government to inspect children's toys, the response is: Yes, but is this a case of least-ness? After all, Libertarians aren't anarchists. They believe in some level of government regulation. As we argue about toy inspections or seat belt laws or inheritance taxes, we will have to argue the specifics of each case: Are these regulations necessary and desirable? The "Least Governement" principle doesn't help us at all. It is a faux principle.

At least Google's faux principle tells the company to be alert to the moral dimension, even though the principle can't help with the answers. And it's phrased so succinctly that it won't fool anyone into thinking that it could actually direct action; Google's expression seems to have a little distance, a little irony, a little self-awareness. That's good because, while it reminds us that businesses are moral entities, we shouldn't think that not doing evil is as easy as it sounds.

[See Josh McHugh's Wired article on Good and Evil at Google.]

Jewgle

The Jewish Journal points out that a search for "Jew" at Google puts a site for Jew haters at the number one position.

It sure seems to me that's Google been gamed by anti-Semites. At least, I hope that's the explanation since the alternative is pretty grim.

I admit that this is a tough - and interesting - case, but I'd like to see Google move the site down since Google's aim is to provide us with good information. And, sure, I'd say the same thing if the first hit for "Catholic," "Black," "Arab," or "Mel Gibson" were hate sites. But, the Jewish Journal article reports that David Krane, Google's director of communications, says: 'Google merely reflects what is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless [a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t make any tweaks,' he said."

Google's motto is "Do no evil." That works fine so long as the issues are easy and the group discussing them is homogeneous. So, if hate groups game Google and people are led to a site designed to fuel hatred, does "preserving the sanctity of our algorithms" count as doing evil?

[pcf] Digital ID round table

Andre Durand of PingID says that there are three tiers of ID:

Tier 1: Personal identity: Me. Myself. Possibly I.
Tier 2: Corporate identity: An ID issued to let me into their space
Tier 3: My marketing identity: The buckets companies sort us into for marketing purposes, e.g., a Platinum Frequent Flyer.

We have lots of IDs. "Identity inflation." Most of our identities are T2. Andre himself has over 100 identities. He's given up on keeping track. The trajectory isn't sustainable. Already we generally only have a few passwords. The idea behind federation is that identity in one domain should be transferable across domains. E.g., if I have an account at Company A and click through to Company B, my identity automatically gets transferred, with permission. I could have one place for my address book, I could make it my address authority and it would transfer data to other domains and apps.

There are three protocols: SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), Liberty Alliance, WS Federation (IBM and Microsoft).

Nikolaj Nyholm has a problem with federation. People here are thinking about a perfectly engineered, IT world. Federation is part of the equation but not the way it looks today. The way it stands, if federation were in place, if you put a new SMTP on the Net, it wouldn't be able to send email to anyone.

Dick (Panelist): The web of trust won't extend very far. It'll work if it's United talking to Hertz, but not more widely...

Eric Norlin: Liberty Alliance sits between authentication servers.

Dave Sifry: It's software we run on our sites that says that we trust, say, LinkedIn, etc. From a business perspective, it means that there's some subset of these companies that agree to trust one another's authentication systems and will use the same middleware to accomplish this.

Andre: Why can't I use the protocols to link to my social connections? We should be talking about this.

Nikolaj: I have no sense of "home" in the Liberty Alliance...

Ted: Nikolaj is right. The nerve Microsoft hit with Passport was: Who's going to control my ID?

Andre: Here's one possible outcome of federation. In large enterprises, they have created ways to handle the redundant ID's in multiple directories. They create a virtual directory. Now, if you add up all the account info with all the companies you interact with, that's your useful digital ID today. Suppose I had a dashboard running on my PC, like the enterprise's virtual directory. It's likely a p2p client will exist on my PC or cellphone that gives me control. I don't have to move all the information onto my own computer.

Doc (moderator): Do the protocols for enabling that exist today?

Andrew: Yes, I think they do. I'm describing an application layer on top of the protocols.

Steve Pelletier (Sun): The consumer vision is great, although it's early. But the world is full of ID systems that will never merge. You need something that enables all those identity repositories to be integrated if only for business reasons. And you need protocols to extend this to customers. That's what federation does: cross repositories and cross schemas.

Doc: I hate the word "consumer." I'm a customer.

AOL guy: Before we can do federated ID for social networks, the social networks have to figure out what their business model is.

Isabel Walcott (The Research Board): We've discussed ID federation with F100 companies. The way I see it, this is about access control. Companies haven't figured it out. If social networks could solve this problem, it could go into the corporations. There is no "god" at these big companies saying who can have access to this or that part of the DB. It happens on a peer-to-peer basis: Someone's boss says which field or part of the DB you have access to. How do you manage access control at the object level? It has to be in some sort of p2p fashion.

Someone: There are legacy solutions that won't be displaced. You have to layer on top of them, like PingID.

Jeremy: It's not just the pain of sign-on. It's also the pain of registering for a new service. A few cases: Company B allows customers of Company A to become registered customers, dynamically, moving my profile. The social networks could be a home base for relevant attributes about me. A federation of those in which my attributes could be relied upon by other online services would be appealing to me. I.e., I can dynamically become a cars.com user using my social network ID and profile. You could do that now with the existing standards.

Nikolaj: Today we have an ID where we can reach other: email. But it has no other attributes. You can't authenticate itself. Or, your credit card uniquely identifies you. You can even use it to exchange info through a proxy like PayPal. And that's what we're looking for.

Someone: Do we have a schema for the info that we think is useful? No, we don't. The metadata around my demographics and psychographics. Will people create a common tool across social networks so I have a single user experience?

Andre: Jeremy's comment may have uncovered a business model. If the social networks glommed onto these protocols and built a service for users that allowed them to store the info...

Brian Dear: How about FOAF?

Nikolaj: There's no layer of authentication.

Jeremy: It's an attribute.

Someone: We may not want to connect social networks. E.g., one's for business and the other is personal.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn: I'd only do federation if I had a business case justifying it.

[pcf] Accountable Net

This idea that arose from a meeting at the Aspen Institute is apparently starting to take off. In this "birds of a feather" meeting, Lori Fena (Aspen Institute) says that the Accountable Net addresses problems like security and spam. The solution is to build accountability into the applications. E.g., an identity system and reputation system would let you know who's sending you a msg and what that person's reputation is. With regard to security, if there were identity and reputation attached to a packet, you could decide which packets to trust. [Ack! Scary!] It has to come with transparency and user choice as well. Communities can make their own rules. (The other forum leader, Tara Lemmey (Markle Foundation) talks about a federal security project.)

Government agencies don't trust other government agencies, someone says. The CIA wants to be sure that the data it shares with another agency is treated with the same level of security.

Q: What does an "authenticated user" mean? It seems to imply that a user only has one identity. Digital certificates never took off because you couldn't link them to other attributes of the person such as bank account.

A: (Jon Callas) There are identities, not identity. I have at least four as I sit here: the PGP employee, the home-owner, etc. Authenticated means authenticated to another agency.

A: (Tara) You have soft identifiers like name and social security number. You have hard identifiers like biometrics. You have your wake, which is all the place you've been. And you have your creative output. All of these are part of identity.

Q: How can this be kept ahead of the people who would develope evil tools (evil from a privacy point of view)?

[Lori cites John Walker's Digital Imprimatur]

Q: (Me) Where can I find out more about this proposal that scares the daylights out of me? I don't want to talk about it here because that's not the point of this meeting.

A: There may be regional forums.

Someone in the group says that we're moving to a decentralized system where everyone gets to make his own decision. [But what will happen in a world in which large interests can make demands of us?]

Q: (Keith Teare) We're moving into an assumption of distrust. We shouldn't. I prefer to assume good and deal with evil rather than building big systems to prevent evil.

A: (John Patrick) Maybe working with academia would be a good way to bridge the theoretical and the practical. Maybe we should break it down into bite-sized prototypes.

Lori: Almost a research agenda that breaks it down into the key ideas.

Tara: We are already building an alpha for the national security components.

John Patrick: Authentication would be a real good place to start.

Elliot Noss (Tucows) says we could focus on the large mail server folks and get a win there.

Jon Callas: SPF [Sender Policy Framework] is an accountability system because it says that if mail came from this set of servers, it's from me, and if it didn't it's not.

Someone: Accountable for what? What are you doing to define that? Are you putting together a priority list of what are the behaviors that our society is defining as unacceptable on the Net?

Lori: It's accountable to one another within groups and applications. We don't want to be the central authority. We want to move our principles for rule-making and enforcement; we don't want to say that you should make the following rules.

Someone: In a perfect world, we'd all have perfect authentication, identity, etc. [Not in my perfect world.] Can't be done centrally. It should be driven to the edges.

Bob: The free market won't do this. Databases didn't talk with one another until the federal government said it wouldn't buy your DB unless it supported the spec. [More terrifying. It should be decentralized but accomplished through government intervention?]

Michael Miller: What about in societies where you can't express yourself?

Lori: Maybe we should have checklists for people designing applications. E.g., "Have you thought about how your product can maintain anonymity in societies where there isn't free speech?"

Tara: Many of these systems are being designed for or by the government. They will be influential.

[I remain nervous about this initiative. The intentions are good, of course; two of its leaders are former heads of the EFF, a great credential. Esther is enthusiastic about it. Damn fine reputation system. But I have deep doubts about how well its voluntary nature will be maintained. The large entities that are highly motivated to support it — government, corporations — will require that we participate. We won't be able to say no without walling ourselves off from much of the Net. Social networks, not social fences! On the other hand, this meeting assumed we already know what the Accountable Net is, which I don't. I can't even tell if it's a lobbying effort or an attempt to come up with standards/protocols. So I am, once again, speaking out my ass. I am undoubtedly wrong about it and look forward to understanding it.]

Whitepaper

Firing gays

From the Daily Mislead. I cannot warrantee its accuracy.

BUSH ALLOWS GAYS TO BE FIRED FOR BEING GAY

Despite President Bush's pledge that homosexuals "ought to have the same rights" (1) as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation.

More at Loose Democracy

[pcf] Jack Dangermond, ESRI

ESRI is the leader in GIS systems. Their stuff takes geographic data and manipulates it. First, it creates electronic maps to look at (and zoom in on, put various layers onto, etc.). But, that's just one thing that a GIS system can do with geographic data. I covered ESRI for the issue of Esther's Release 1.0 I wrote a couple of months ago, and I was very impressed not only with their technology but with their public mindedness. I'm also convinced that GIS is going to be big news over the next 2 years.

Geography and GIS provide a framework for language and knowledge, Jack says. GIS is an enterprise system that organizes workflows. Geography is essential to colalboration.

He shows a very cool animation, flying in to Honolulu from space, and then distinguishing it from a virtual reality app by toggling on shading that shows cell phone coverage. Then he flies into Greece and then to Everest. Too cool. [What a way to explore the world! It's the atlas I want!]

GIS is a formal information system, he says. It's a generic platform. Whole bunches of apps are being built using it. GIS is evolving from a digital abstraction to a becoming a "nervous system" for our globe. [I like "The Semantic Earth," the title of my Release 1.0 article. Yes, I'm patting my own back.]

[pcf] OnFolio

I shared a cab ride to PC Forum with Adam Berrey of OnFolio, and then yesterday I got a demo. It looks very useful. It lets you save and organizes ages and snippets of pages.

You know how many bookmarks I have on my bookmarks list? About five. I can't tell you why, but I just don't find it an hospitable environment for saving pages and scraps. OnFolio looks like it might do it. The foldering is easy, it saves bunches of metadata, and it wraps entire pages into .mhs files that contain all the images. It also looks like it'll make it easy to share folders, although I personally don't have much interest in that.

I've tried other such products. The closest any came to meeting my idiosyncratic needs was one from AskSam. Eventually, however, my file got corrupt, or the product upgraded and I didn't, and I lost all my research. I neglected to ask Adam, however, what the story is with export.

[pcf] User-created content

Hank Barry (former CEO of Napster) moderates. He cites a Pew study that says 44% of Net users say they've contributed something to the Net. 140M camera phones in 2004. 115 photo-sharing services. DeviantArt has 4M works of art posted. And there's growing resistance to ISP offerings that restrict uploading.

Shane Robison (HP [Home of computers armed with DRM to lock you out]) says that his customers want to produce their own content.

Rob Glaser (RealNetworks [Talk about your bad defaults! Real is close to deceptive when it walks you through its install program]) points out that not everyone wants to create their own music, although they do want to post their photos. And they want to package up playlists, etc.

Lisa Gansky (Kodak's O-Photo) says 0-Photo has a billion images, a third of which are printed. [Yikes!] The demographic skews to women. George Eastman realized that he had to market to women. When digital cameras first came in, the men bought them and downloaded the image, holding them hostage on their hard disks. O-Photo eases the sharing. The "soccer moms" tend to print more than the younger demographic. Kodak Mobile is a subscription service for cellphone cameras. That gives us a sort of "streaming intimacy."

Q: Why can't I get my IPaq and IPod to work together?

A: (Rob) Because Steve Jobs, for reasons known only to him, won't license the FairPlay DRM manager that IPod uses. Either of two things will happen: Apple will return to its historic single-digit share, or the market will be slowed because they'll say, "What, I bought an IPod and I can only shop in one store?? What is this, the Soviet Union?" (Applause.)

Shane: We're working with Apple on this. It'll get straightened out.

Q: [Steven Levy] Now we have tools that give people quasi-professional ways to create media. Are we going to make media for one another, or is it more of an American Idol sort of thing where people make media in order to filter up?

(Rob): Those aren't mutually exclusive.

Q: This revolution has been around the corner for years. But there's a way to push it forward. There will be an explosion in grassroots video when people can be seen by others on the TVs in living rooms.

Shane: When everyone has access to broadband, the TV can become an interface.

Rob: It has to do with the shortage of narrative-form story-telling skills. There's a dearth of creative talent. [How do we know that?]

Shane: We have to make big content owners comfortable with using our environment. We're making progress. There's a fine line between giving them the kind of protection they need to distribute their property and giving consumers they need. You'll see some announcements soon showing we're making progress with the content companies. [Be afraid.]

[So, here's a complaint about these sessions. They are too top-heavy with industry bigwigs. I know that's the draw of PCForum, and where else will you get the heads of Yahoo, AOL and Google on the same panel? But why wasn't there anyone on this panel who is doing end-user creation? I'm suit saturated! Nevertheless, this was an interesting panel.]

Governor blogs

The Governer of Wisconsin is writing a blog. It looks, feels and smells like a real blog written by an actual person. Very cool. [Thanks to Frank for the link.]

[pcf] Eric Johnson: What do consumers want?

Eric does research on the behavior of shoppers and browsers.

Defaults matter (he says) because people like to be able to make choices, but they don't want to have to make choices. E.g., if the form for new employees that lets them opt into a 401K plan starts out with 3%, lots of people will take that "choice." E.g., XP defaults to having firewalls off. The biggest change they could make would be to pre-check the box on the form where you make the settings.

People are very loyal. The average time people spend on Amazon decreases on repeat visits. That's because we get better at navigating Amazon. This locks us in. And in travel, most people book at the first place they look.

He shows data that if you use clouds as the background of your web site, people are willing to spend 15% more for furniture. [Damn lizard brain!]

Remember, he says, that we're very different from our customers. The customer wants appropriate defaults; "defaults are the most important you can make" to shape behavior. The customer wants to minimize search. And the customer wants to pay in ways that minimize psychological cost — that is, paying $20 for product and shipping together is different than paying $15 for the product and then paying an added $5 for shipping.

Q: How do we go from $0 to $0.01, which you've said is the biggest hurdle?

A: Have them pay for added services.

Q: How about subscription prices?

A: Give 'em a two-part tariff.

[pcf] Technorati

Dave Sifry, everyone's favorite techie, is talking about Technorati. "It's a search engine for conversations," he says. [Disclosure: I'm on their board of advisors.]

[pfc] MetaCarta

I'm in MetaCarta's break-out session. CEO John Frank is presenting. MetaCarta finds all the references to places in large bodies of documents and then enables users to find all the documents that refer to a particular place.

Disclosure: I'm on their board of advisors and worked a bit on this presentation. Because of that, I'm not going to blog it. But, I will say that this is very cool technology with immediate application. Go out and buy several now. Thank you.

[pcf] Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson gives a great talk on the topic of his book, Mind Wide Open. [I wish I could write like Steve. Total author envy.]

First he recounts the result of his own brain scans: When he was floundering, trying to come up with an idea, much of his brain lit up. When he was focused, the amount of brain activity went down. "People say that it's a shame that we only use 10% of our brains. But that's like saying that in many words, Shakespeare only uses 10% of the alphabet...how much better it would be if he used all the letters in every word."

He says that dopamine causes the brain to explore its environment it has been disappointed in an expectation. Fascinating.

He ties this then to why video games are addictive. Video games have a clear reward structure, and frequently the reward is the desire to explore new areas ("I just need to play another 4 hours to unlock the next level of Myst!"). [Hmm, now that I think of it, shouldn't the desire to explore new territory be tied to the failure to get a reward?]

Q: Are you now a determinist?

A: It's important not to have discussions of the brain's physiology get turned into determinism. We're a mix of culture and genetics. The brain evolved to capture the idiosyncracies of an individual life.

Q: [Cory Doctorow] How can we neuro-amateurs distinguish crap from non-crap?

A: The Symphony in the Brain is a good book on the topic.

Q: [Neal Stephenson] Did the scan show any activity in your cerebellum.

A: No.

Q: Has this knowledge made you a better person?

A: Not really. You can recognize some patterns and that can be helpful.

Q: Who's winning, the reductionists or the emergence-ists?

A: I tried to stay away from the question of the origin of consciousness, an incredibly difficult question.

[pcf] Company presenters

Each of the innovative companies presenting this afternoon has 30 seconds to tell us why we should come visit them:

Convoq - the power of web conferencing delivered onto your desktop

Informative - Identify "influentials" to expand your brand.

Intelligent Results - Make meaning out of telephone reports

Language Weaver - Statistical machine translation

MetaCarta - Find all the documents about a place

Mind Fabric - Natural Language Processing to listen to what customers are saying

N8 Systems - Helping IT and businesspeople understand one another

Scalix - "Delivering on the future of email"

Technorati - Searching the part of the Web that changes all the time (= blogs)

[pcf] Accountable Net

Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security) says security is primarily social. The techno solutions don't work if the social environment doesn't support them. Much of the stuff being done in Homeland Security isn't worth the cost; cost isn't considered.

Robert Liscouski from Dept of Homeland Security says that they do consider cost.

Bruce: Wrong economic model. It's not the cost of loss. Take Iraq. It cost us $200B to invade and occupy Iraq. Doing it was good, but was that the best use of the money? Did we get our $200B's worth?

David Johnson of NY Law School, explains the Accountable Net proposal that came out of a meeting at the Aspen Institute. It would let you know that you're dealing with an authenticated person and enable trust networks while staying decentralized. Here's Esther's description from her NY Times column on the topic:

The idea is simple: People on the Internet should be accountable to one another, and they are free to decide whom to interact with. The goal is not a free-for-all, anarchic Net, but one where good behavior is fostered effectively — and locally...

The basic rule is transparency: You need to know whom you are dealing with, or be able to take proper measures to protect yourself. The accountable Net is a complex system of interacting parts, where users answer not just to some central authority, but to the people and organizations whom they affect.

John Palfrey puts it this way:

We think the internet will become more orderly over time, but we do not agree that the internet needs, or will easily yield to, more centralized authority — private or public. To the contrary, we believe a new kind of online social order will emerge as the result of new technologies that enable a more powerful form of decentralized decision-making. These technologies will give private actors greater control over their digital connections. They will enable both end users and access providers to establish connections based on trust, rather than connecting by default to every other network node and trying to filter out harmful messages after the connection has been made. Because of these new developments, participants on the internet will be more accountable to one another than they have been in the past.

...As long as ISPs, enterprises, and individuals use systems that require those who interact with them to authenticate themselves and/or provide acceptable reputational credentials — using a contextually-appropriate mode of authentication — then everyone can decide when to trust someone (some source of bits) and when to filter someone else out of their online world

[Allowing users to do this themselves is far preferable to letting governments or ISPs do it, of course. But in establishing my web of trust, am I simultaneously turning the rest of the Net into a web of distrust? How much will we give up in cuttting ourselves off from that? I don't know the answer to this question, but John's use of the phrase "their online world" instead of "our online world" is worrisome to me. On the other hand, this proposal — which I don't understand well — is coming from people I trust completely and who do understand it. So, I have no trust in my knee-jerk reaction. I definitely want to learn more about this.]

[pcf] Lessons from Columbia

Kenneth Hess talks about the lessons from the Columbia investigation. After showing some startling video — an animation of the failure and video of the pieces streaming to earth — he says that the investigation concluded the problem ultimately was with NASA's culture. NASA got over-confident. Corporate politics had set in. They looked to prove flights were unsafe, not that they were safe. There was overt and subtle time pressure. These factors caused them to ignore the indications that there was a problem with the foam.

[pcf] Google, Yahoo, AOL

[sketchy notes]

Eric Schmidt is being interviewed. He says that Google has lots of ways to get better. He points to two. First, Google doesn't always put the right link in the first slot. Second, there's what others — not Eric — call the "deep Web."

Orkut is part of their strategy to learn how to collect information [from the social networks], as well as building their ours. The privacy issues will only get worse. For example, Google is getting sued by people for making available public documents that show they were convicted of crimes. But when push comes to shove, the company's policy is "Don't be evil." He says people generallly agree about what is evil. [Say wha'? Could the opposite be any clearer? The fact that it doesn't seem that way to Google is an artifact of their homogeneity. Which also means that they just haven't happened to hit an issue that rends that homogeneity. I hope they have a set of back-up policies stored in a "In case of ambiguity break glass" container.]

Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (265M users) says that social networks can help people synthesize information and create an affinity group of people who may have never met but who can share knowledge and make searches more precise.

Jon Miller says that AOL traps about 3B spams a day. Esther suggests that the user should pay the ISP: you get, say, 100 free emails a month. Yahoo says spammers would still find it worthwhile. Eric suggests that we'll have public and unlisted emails.

Q: Thanks for Google News. And will you do Google for the home?

Eric: Google News has had an ever bigger effect outside the US. And we've done some work on Google for the home, but we haven't solved that problem.

Q: [Tim O'Reilly] I tend to think technology advances through hacks. Social networks are currently bad hacks that tell me we really need to add P2P protocols to address books so you can visualize your real social network instead of building a faux social network.

Eric: It'd have to be connected to some sort of server to manage all the different devices you're using. The current social networks are simply trees of information that computers could construct on their own if we simply gave them permission. It's more a permissions issue. The current SN's will probably evolve into being more than simply introduction services.

Esther: The problem is "friend inflation." And, also, these SN's require you to make social relationships explicit. [Right on.]

Eric: Social networks will get better as we figure out what problem they're intended to solve.

[pcf] Politics panel

Tim O'Reilly (one of my heroes) leads a panel on "the reality of Internet and politics."

The panelists are Jonah Seiger who worked with EFF, Bob Epstein of GetActive.com, and Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com. It takes Esther asking a question from the floor to get them to address what I think is the fundamental issue: Ordinary people feeling they can own a campaign.

Eventually, I asked if they each could find even a single sentence about how the Net is making a difference to politics, without using the word "money." Scott did, but the others two couldn't. "The Net lets us do old things in new ways," one concluded.

That may well be the whole truth. But I refuse to be stripped of all hope. Without hope there is no action.

[pcf] PC Forum Bloggers

Here's a list of people blogging the conference:

* Esther Dyson
* Ross Mayfield
* Bret Fausett
* Scott Heiferman
* Cory Doctorow
* Edward Vielmetti - following along from home
* Scott Rosenberg
* David Sifry
* Brian Dear

[pcf] Ride over: PW domain

I shared a ride from the airport and happened to sit with two guys doing really interesting things. Let me tell you about one of them...

Tom Barrett has done a deal with Palau (pop. 16,000) to offer the .pw top-level domain. He's got a 50-year exclusive contract, with revenue sharing for the Palauians. And he's doing something interesting with it.

You can register a domain name at .pw...sort of. Your ISP might offer you "joe@smith.pw," if your name were Joe Smith. But if you were then to go to www.smith.pw, you wouldn't go straight to your home page. You'd go to a directory of smith.pw sites. There you would find a link to your Joe Smith site, but also to the Sarah Smith, University of Smith, and Town of Smith sites, if they too had registered for .pw sites. This moves the naming problem up one level of abstraction: There can be millions of jones.pw sites, but to get a particular one, you have to go through the general jones.pw directory page, maintained by Tom's company.

Tom says that he's reserved the pw.com, pw.edu. pw.gov, etc. for the island nation. Plus, he's reserved the all-digit domains for use with ENUM and other all-digit proposals.

[pcf] Faxes do not count as electronic documents

I just arrived in Scottsdale and walked in late to the first session of PC Forum.

I was late because our America West plane sat on the ground for 3 hours as they diagnosed and fixed a faulty oil pump. Of course, things break and I don 't blame them for that. But the first 1.5 hours were spent on faxing the diagnostic procedures from Phoenix to Boston.

Faxing?????

I used to work at Interleaf. We had this problem solved in 1989.

Then, for the 9 hour flight (6 hours flying, 3 on the ground), we were rewarded with a thimble-size package of roast peanuts, but only if we clapped our hands together like trained seals.

BTW, I hope not to blog this conference obsessively. We'll see...

F2F Criticism

There's something fetching about David Ansen's interview with Kevin Smith. Ansen is Newsweek's film critic and Smith is the creator of sloppy-but-appealing movies. Ansen has liked much of Smith's work but not his latest, Jersey Girl. They have an honest conversation about it. How odd!

How the Web changed my name

All my life, I've been "David," except to my older sister who calls me "Dave" or "Davey."

If you call me "Dave," I won't correct you, although if you ask me my preference, I'll say "David" without hesitation. If you ask me why, I won't be able to give you a meaningful answer other than that my family called me "David."

Now, at age 53, I find I'm becoming a Dave. About half the time.

The explanation is, I think, simple...

Continued at Many2Many...

[em] Regulation of Media Ownership in the Tech Age

The moderator is Jerry Kang from the UCLA LAw School, a visiting prof. at Harvard.

Kang: The FCC wants to maximize competition, diversity and localism. So, what do they do?

Horizontally, they decide how many TV stations a single firm can own in a local market. In 1996, the FCC decided that a single company could own two stations, with some restrictions. In the Sinclair case (2002), you can own more than 2 if it's one of 18 big markets. Similarly for radio. Nationally, in 1996, the cap on how many stations a single company can own was enlarged. Recently, the FCC reset it to 45%, Congress tried to keep it at 35%, but Fox and Viacom benefitted from the current bump up to 39%.

Vertically, there have been complicated rules about whether a single company can own both TV and radio stations, and more rules about owning a newspaper. Now the FCC has a "diversity index," weighting ownership of TV, radio, newspapers, etc. At the end of the day, they said that there are three types of markets: at risk, small to medium, large ones. In large market, there are no cross-market media ownership limits. In small ones, the old bars are in effect: a TV station can't buy a radio station, etc. The medium size ones has mixed rules.

Mark Cooper (Dir of Research, Consumer Federation of America) says that the diversity index is dead in the courts. There has been very significant media consolidation. There's a grassroots rebellion on media ownership because the FCC has taken a very narrow view of the First Amendment, what with its talk of views of "equal value." [Sorry, but he's talking quickly and I'm lacking many of the concepts needed to grasp this fully. Durn lawyers :-)]

Ben Compaine (MIT's Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence) says that there's more competition and options on TV than ever. 30% of America used to watch Marcus Welby on ABC. Now, if you add together all the Disney channels, including ABC, Disney gets only about 12%. Further, the government's tinkering trying to create diversity actually decreased diversity, and when the rules were withdrawn, we got more diversity. Don't focus on what people choose to watch but on how many choices they have. [I.e., if everyone watches the same crap, so long as there's lots of other crap on, the system works.]

Adam Clayton Powell III (USC Annenberg School of Journalism) says that there are more choices than ever: Internet radio, XM and Sirius, towns the size of Albany with two 24-hour news stations... "One person's concentration is another person's favorite program." NPR now has 2 or 3 stations in many towns but no one talks about too much concentration about NPR. The new liberal talk network is paying Black and Hispanic stations to dump their programming, yet no one talks about concentration.

Cheryl Leanza is Deputy Director, Media Access Project, a non-profit law firm promoting the public's right to hear and be heard on electronic media. She says we protect speech rights not so people can speak to themselves but so we can talk in public. The best way to preserve diversity is to separate content from distribution because then the distribution people couldn't stop people from speaking.

David Oxenford (Shaw Pittman) is a lawyer for broadcasters. The real importance is on the rules governing consolidation at the local level. We have to look at this practically, not academically. What's the alternative to five companies owning 80% of the media outlets? When you go to Jackson, Miss., where there's only a $35M pot of money from advertisers, you can't operate a station if you have 1% share. You have to consolidate. The FCC has it backwards: it lets NYC stations consolidate because it's a huge market, but they won't let Jackson consolidate even though it needs it. Radio is a little different because it's cheaper. Besides, by the time we break up the ClearChannels, 85% of cellphones will be wifi enabled and thus able to pick up Internet radio.

Kang: Some questions/oppositions:

1. Broadcasters who want deregulation still want their "property rights" (spectrum) to stay regulated; they want the government to go after "radio pirates."

2. On the practical level, do you more fear the state or private sector's power over speech?

3. What counts as neutrality or intervention? Some who want deregulation of ownership still want regulation in content: obscenity, children's programming, v-chip, adult ratings, etc.

4. Is the argument over consolidation an empirical dispute? Or is it normative?

Overall: Must we deregulate to enable broadcasting to survive? And must we get the government out to allow freedom?

Cooper: Compaine only talked about our ability to watch, not to speak. And he talked about variety, not diversity. And, no, they won't go dark if they're not allowed to merge: No one has given back a broadcast liense. [Powell and Oxenford shake their heads. Kang says some radio stations have gone dark.] He wants to regulate the structure of ownership, not content. We want to avoid content regulation.

Compaine: People are upset that they can't get onto ABC News; they cry they don't have access. [Let 'em eat blogs!] You have to start with empirical numbers. First, if you have multiple news networks, there's a greater chance that more people will be heard. [Yeah, just like adding a second-place winner means more people have a chance to win the Megabucks lottery.] If you have lots of different outlets and proviers, you get more viewpoints. And we can't ignore the potential Dean found in the Net.

Kang: Ben Compaine, where are your normative commitments? What about possibly pathological cases such as the Dixie Chicks, MoveOn not being allowed to advertise, etc.? Do these things bother you?

Compaine: As long as you have choices, let them take the Dixie Chicks off and maybe someone else will pick them up because now they are worth less. The Chernillo [?] thing is good.

Oxenford: Empiricism has nothing to do with it. It has to do with political and economic power. How do you get freedom of speech in broadcast? Do you turn them into common carriers so that everyone gets to speak? But then who'd watch it.?Why should the government parcel it out?

Kang: It's already been parcelled out. How about cognitive radio? Give out spectrum and let people use it...

Oxenford: I think it's great. It means there's less and less need for the structural regulations.

Powell: Most interventions have unintended consequences. E.g., digital tv. The main thing to do is make sure that we all have open access to broadband.

Kang: Why aren't there unintended consquences for supporting the status quo?

Powell: Make no law...

Kang: So you're ok with hard-core porn on broadcast stations?

Powell: Yes.

Leanza: The status quo is not an open market.And when the Dixie Chicks are pulled off of ClearChannel, CC has an enormous share of the country western market, so in reality the local Top 40 station isn't going to pick them up.

Q: The first amendment is about willing speakers finding willing listeners. If people choose to listen to what you don't like, the first amendment is still working.

Compaine: Exactly. People wanted more networks, but they got Fox and they were horrified that it was "Married with Children," not opera.

Kang: You have to look at where preferences are formed. The media forms it, at least in part.

Me: Suppose the open and free market produced a total homogeneity of viewpoint, would you then favor some form of regulation?

Powell: That won't happen.

Compaine: That won't happen.

Leanza: Your unwillingness to address this as a thought experiment speaks volumes. [Thank you!]

Cooper: The founders of the republic would be horrified.

[em] Evolving Media: Emerging Distribution technologies & the legal response

Another day, another conference. Sigh.

Today I'm at a conference, sponsored by the Harvard Journal of Law & Techology, on the response to the digitization of mass media. Because it's sponsored by Harvard Law, it focuses on the legal response. But it also aims at broader effects, which is why somehow I ended up on a panel this afternoon.

[poc] Control vs. Decentralization Keynote Panel

This was supposed to be a debate, with Zack Exley (MoveOn.org) and a guy from RightMarch.com on one side [Sorry, I didn't get his name! Ack!] and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and me on the other. Predictably, we all agreed that campaigns need both, although Kos and I did push the decentralization side harder.

We each gave a 5 minute intro, moderated by the natty Sidney Blumenthal of Salon and general media fame. Zack made an impressive, coherent case for the power of centralized control, while admitting that decentralized community-forming does have a role. But, to win the damn election, we need to be as disciplined as the Republicans, he says. I don't disagree with that, but I also see benefits to campaigns allowing and encouraging decentralized, bottom-up self-organization: It creates enthusiasm that then can lead to action. And, without it, campaigns tend to become top-down machines marketing a product or brand to us "consumers." I guess I ranted a bit about this during my five minutes. I was up to my demographic earlobes with all the talk of "consumers," "marketing campaigns," "branding," and, most of all, "messages." I told them that they were debasing our democracy. A highpoint of the campaign so far was when Kerry uttered five words off-mike because we got to hear his real voice.\ I want more off-mike comments! And, by the way, campaign blogging is off-mike, which is why it works and is important. We need to hear a human voice now and then. The lesson of the Dean campaign and of the Internet is (I said) that control kills scaling, and control kills voice. And that's why we need decentralization. We're about to begin 8 months of relentless, saturation advertising of the most offensive and stupid kind. It will to wear us down to nubbins of indifference. Only by connecting with others, in our own voices, will we find any passion or enthusiasm. Finally, I said, the campaigns ought to be thrilled when we take over their "messages," change the words to ours, apply them to our lives, go off in a thousand directions with them, because that's what it means to make an idea our own. By connecting with one another and by escaping from the controlled messages of the campaigns, we can make those campaigns ours. End o' rant.

The right-wing guy was good. Feisty. And it was a delight to meet Kos in person. Wow. It was, of course, pretty funny to be pitted against Zack, who is one of my heroes. I am a MoveOn automaton: If they tell me to send them twenty bucks because Zack's dog needs aroma therapy, I send 'em $20.

[poc] Joe Trippi

Joe Trippi follows Ken Mehlman as we eat our bad desserts in the packed room. He says [notes, not transcript! As always.]:

I agree with Ken that the party that puts the resources into the new medium usually ends up dominating that medium. It's a little worrisome that we may have just awakened a sleeping giant.

I want to talk about something bigger than any campaign. The Net is a new medium that's different: it empowers the average American. TV doesn't. TV may have been the most powerful appliance in the American home, but the power was for the networks and the advertisers. The Internet is about to change everything. It's finally matured and come of age. It's the most powerful tool ever put in the hands of the American people. It allows them to make their own networks, let their own voices be heard. It's not top down but bottom up. The changes it will bring will be even bigger than the early visionaries suggested.

The naysayers are generally right for 10-15 years — people said no one would want sound in pictures, etc. The Net is maybe where Nixon was with the Checkers speech.

For the past 40 years, we have had broadcast politics. Politics has been about collecting big fat checks and putting ads on TV. The American people got left out. Retail politics becamse making sure you got to that guy who can write the $2,000, not talking with the voters. The Dean campaign set out to change that system, not just changing presidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans contributing less than $100 put together $50M+, more money than any Democratic candidate has ever raised...that was because 100s of thousands of people used the Internet to communicate with each other. That's the main difference between broadcast politics and the new politics of people actually getting involved in their democracy again.

This change is going to come and it's going to be mind-blowing.

When TV came in, the visionaries said what was going to happen, but they couldn't conceive of what the changes would actually be. We needed millions of people to use Amazon, to use eBay. That got people used to the Internet. We needed MoveOn.org and MeetUp. That got people ready for DeanLink that let people find others in their zip code, create their own event. They did this without any command and control from the Dean campaign. It'd be a mistake to underestimate the bottom-up power of the Internet. There are a lot of people in the recording industry today who wished they hadn't underestimated Napster, etc. For Washington to believe it's immune that it's immune to the bottom-up power of the Internet is a huge mistake.

What was really different about our campaign?

We started with 7 people and 432 known supporters nationwide on Jan 31. I found out about MeetUp from a blogger, Jerome Armstrong. By the end of the campaign,l we had 190,000 Americans signed up to meet up on the first Wednesday of every month and then go out and work for Dean.

There's a misunderstanding about blogs. We decided to launch the first presidential campaign blog in history. It changed our campaign radically. [He tells the 50-posters anecdote and the red-bat anecdote.]

The real change in America will come from people using the Internet, using the tools we all build...

He mentions Dean's new org, DemocracyForAmerica.com, and his own, ChangeForAmerica.com

Q: Does this bottomup technology really play well for the Republicans?

A: We're at this weird moment, like the Nixon-Kennedy things. The Internet is just one tool among others now. Over time, it won't be a tool for the campaign. It'll be a tool for the American people. They'll organize themselves whether the politicians like it or not. It could be this year. An organization could come from the grassroots and totally take over one of these campaigns.

The most bizarre one was the Disney fight. Roy Disney has a guy on the phone who has a web site that talks to 1.5M Disney shareholders. You're starting to see these little hiccups that don't make a lot of sense on their own, but collectively it's pretty clear that bottom-up change is coming. Which part raises more money under $100? $1,000? Republicans. The one category the Democratic Party leads in is over $1M. The Internet just changed this. The Internet let people say We want to be involved in our government. The Dean campaign didn't make it, but the genie is out of the bottle. It's gonna happen.

Q: Would you advise Ralph Nader to be more respectful of the new medium? He said he doesn't have time to spend on line.

A: There are studies that say more and more people spend more time online than in front of their television sets. Over time, they'll become the same box. You cannot ignore this or just get in the bunker and pray that you're alive when it's over. The American people now have this tool. The Dean campaign was just the very first babystep of what's coming.

The political press by and large doesn't understand the Internet, and the Internet press doesn't understand politics.

Q: Will the Internet get out the vote in November?

A: Yes. The real debates over the issues is occurring on the Net.

Q: Are you seeing disruptive campaigns in other countries?

A: We tried everything, including SMS. It just didn't work; we had 5,000 people. Korea is an example of a government changed by the Net.

We put up a list of undecideds in Iowa and suggested that supporters write letters. But the Net is transparency, so the Clark and Kerry campaigns sent people to our site and used the list to send their own letters.

[poc] Ken Mehlman

The lunchtime talk begins with Ken Mehlman, Bush-Cheney's campaign manager. He starts graciously by thanking the Dean campaign which taught us a lesson: "The power of the power of the Web and the power of technology means if you have an idea thats interesting, there's a viral way to get that message out." [Excellent! He only sees it as a way of moving messages around!]

He says the party first onto the a technology historically is the campaign that dominates it. The Web is not a substitute for the message. Technology is a way you communicate a candidate's message; it's not a substitute for the message. The Web is at bottom simply a way to accomplish the key aims of the campaign. He's focusing on: 1. Turning out the vote. 2. Using the Web to share the candidate's message.

Why the Web is important. First, we have moved from a world or country where people get mass information from a few sources. The wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The ability to have direct person-to-person contact is the way you cut through the clatter. And it's how you avoid the filter. And communication is increasingly participatory: just look at American Idol. The Web is the ultimate in participatory communication.

Here are the principles of the Bush-Cheney campaign:

First Principle: The Web is crucial to our campaign. Grassroots politics is important because the country is closely divided. And the ability to provide an information mix to people, including person-to-person, is important. We have 6M voters we email. [According to Zack Exley, these are bought lists of low value.] Our site uses MapQuest maps to direct people, online registration forms, etc.

Second Principle: We try to use our Web campaign to share the President's message and get around the filter. We have newsfeeds to 2,200 other sites so when George Bush says something, 2,200 sites say it also. We will direct you to talk radio shows and give you our suggestion for the topic you can talk about. Likewise for letters to the editor. A recent campaign generated 9,000 letters to the editor.

Third Principle: Our site is designed to empower individuals. On April 29, we'll be organizing 2,004 parties supporting George Bush. People can find the names of people in their area and organize parties in their neighborhood, can download the latest talking points...[Omigod is he shameless!]...all to help people share their [!] message with their neighbors.

Here's how the site can inspire people. BlogsForBush was independently created by supporters. Many-to-many. People talk about their support for the President and organize for the President. We didn't create it but I hope our web site is helpful.

Fourth Principle: Personalize. The ability to personally communicate is critically important to mobilize people involvement in grassroots and politics. A good example is Amazon.com. [Judging from his description, he seems not to actually use Amazon.] We encourage Web site visitors to tell us what issues they're interested in so we can proacticely email them information. And everyone who becomes a Bush Team Leader [Hey, that's me!] has their own page where they can track their activities, how many times have they calle talk radio, how many letters to the editor have they written...

Fifth Principle: The goal of a web site is to maintain a customer as much as it is to make a sale. A good Web campaign does not overly-solicit but instead engages individuals the way a good business would engage a customer, multiple contacts on multiple issues. We'll provide you with links, webchats, videos, rewards for encouraging. Customer maintenance is critical. So is customer recruitment. At every Bush event, people walk around signing up people's emails. We've been doing this since 1999.

Sixth Principle: Synergy. A good Web campaign provides a great synergy for whatever else you're doing. E.g., using the Web to launch ads that get print coverage. And they've used print to move people to the Web site.

The Republicans will be launching a Fact Log, or Flog, for fact checking the Dems asses. [He didn't put it quite like that.]

The Web is critically important. It can connect individuals' concerns with your candidate.

The most important reason we have had success is the strong leadership of our President. That's why our web has been successful. It's the cause that matters the most; the Web is just how we get there.

[Oooh. Profound not-getting-it-ness! But probably getting enough of it to win. Argh.]

[poc] Influentials

[I came late to this.] Influentials are more Republican and less Democratic than the general public, but less likely to be undecided.

The top concerns of the influentials are terrorism, foreign relations, but they are less interested in terrorism than the general public and more interested in foreign relations. Terrorism is trending up. The breakdown of the family is trending down. The only domestic issue trending up is health care.

Who are the online influentials? They did a a phone survey of 1,000 poeople and an online survey of 1,400 people. 7% of the phone surveyees counted as online political citizens (OPC) while 35% of those surveyed online were.

62% are male
59% have college degrees
42% have incomes over $75,000
36% are between 18-34
81% are white (compared to 86% in gen pop)
44% have never done any political work or contributed
49% are Democrats
29% are Republicans
46% have made a donation
24% have made a donation online

Compared to the general population, the OPCs are far more likely to have attended a meeting, written a politican, etc. The numbers franged from 2x to 8x.

Q: What's the relative importance of the media?

Guy from Slate: The blog community is real important here, extending stories indefinitely.

Another guy: The influentials watch a little more TV than everyone else. They're the biggest consumers of media. So, yeah, the media are important.

[poc] Media panel

Cam Barrett, ex of Clarke, now consulting to Kerry, starts. At Clarke, he built an infrastructure for online community. Everyone got to have their own voice and point of view.

Gary Kebbel, News Director for AOL, says that only online news is growing. It's not just the medium. It's the audience. [We are not an audience!] That's why at AOL we've created an election site that hits all the audiences. We're most proud of our "SideShow" page, a partnership with Comedy Central, the Onion, Bill Mahr and others. He reads some cynical definitions from The Onion. It's got audio essays.

Vaughn Ververs is the editor of Hotline (a for-pay offering from The National Journal). He says some stuff about how he uses lots from the Internet but doesn't trust everything. E.g., he doesn't trust Drudge.

Stirling Newberry says that the Net is becoming mainstream. It's like TV in 1952: it can break stories but not drive the discussion. And pay attention to the rhythm of the news cycle. Push messages out from your center — your community.

Q: How do you find that influential center?

A: Technorati.com and other such sites.

Morra Aarons, moderator and director of Internet Communications, asks "Is it our message?" but the audience seems to think, yeah, it is our message.

Q: [Me] You're all using the language of broadcasting: consumers, audiences, messages. Is it possible that that vocabulary is getting in the way?

Stirling: Yes. Cam, what do you think?

Cam: Yes. At Clarke, we built a community.

Gary: What sort of terms could we use instead?

Me [snottily, sorry] The marketing vocaabulary comes from the industrial revolution and the military. We don't need a specialized vocabulary because we have ordinary language to talk about who we like talking with.

Stirling: We do have a technical vocabulary: "Flaming," for example.

Q: How do you pitch to an Internet news source?

Cam: Don't pitch. Let them come to you.

Q: How do they find you?

Cam: Google, industry news partners...

Gary: I use the word "community" instead of "blog" because communities are bigger things. Blogs are just another word for home pages.

Q: How do we create news?

Morra: Personally, I still believe in traditional PR.

Cam: One of the most successful ways to get it done is to have the community talking about your news.

Hotline: The traditional methods are still the best. Call the reporters.

Stirling: Create a story and people will cover it. [My advice: Be interesting.]

[poc] Opening Plenary Panel

I'm at the Politics Online Conference, put on by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. It seems to be te place to be. With 400+ paid attendees, it's the biggest conference the IPDI has put on.

The attendees ain't no Internet hippies. The guys dressed informally are the ones whose navy blue suits don't have pin stripes. Well, there is a Net brigade here, including Cameron Barrett, Mathew Gross, Joe Trippi, Dick Bell, Scott Heiferman, Joe Trippi. I've heard Zephyr is coming, too. (Yay!) [NOTE: Much of what follows is in the voice of the speakers.]

Phil Noble (PoliticsOnline) is the moderator: It's a revolution. Are you having fun? Even TV didn't change politics as much as the Internet will. We've come so far so quickly: It was in 2004 that the first home page for a candidate was created, for Diane Feinstein. Two years later, Bob Dole, "the most unwired white man in America," talked about his home page in a debate. Then Jesse Ventura, then John McCain. The digital revolution is here.

Panelists: Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen ratings), Ed Kellerr (RoperASW), Mathew Gross (Dean blogger), Scott Heiferman (MoveOn.org) and Jimmy Orr (Internet News Director, The White House...yes, that White House).

Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen Net Ratings). People use TV because it's what they've done. The Bush and KErry TV campaigns are the ultimate brand campaigns, trying to distill their brands into just afew words. [Which is why they're evil. Oh, wait, that's my conclusion.]

There's definitive evidence that online is going mainstream. Whether you're talking about seniors, or Hispanics, there are groups across the board going online.

Do online media offer unique opportunities to reach new voters? Yes. [He shows some slides of data, but there are props on the sage obscuring my view.] Web users seems to be about 15% more likely to be interested in politics than a typical American. Web users are less likely to say that TV is their main source of news. Web users also vote at much higher rates. Overall, in the US population: 28% are Dem, 32% are Republican, and 40% are independent; the Web population significantly skews Republican. Buchwalter suggests that this is because of the digital divide. The conservative sites are more homogeneously conservative; the liberal sites have more independent visitors.

He ends with a pitch for using Nielsen to figure out which sites to advertise on.

Ed Keller (RoberASW) is a co-author of The Influentials. Who are these influentials? [He uses the rhetoric of "conversation," maybe because the theme of the conference is "The Conversation is Changing" — Markets are conversations and so are elections...at least they should be.] "Decisions are conversations," he says. From 1977 through today, word of mouth has become the dominant factor in conversations. The Internet enables word of mouth. The influencers are 10% of the population. [Ed goes through his standard slides about the demographics of the influentials. I sort of stopped caring, for no particular reason.] The influentials are connected to groups. ["The Influentials" is starting to sound like a bad Harold Robbins novel. "Gig Young and Kim Novak are The Influentials...in Panorama!"]

Scott Heiferman (Meetup). Scott shows photos of recent MeetUps, starting with a Bush MeetUp in Florida. Scott dispells myths about MeetUp: It's not just Dean, it's not just young, it's not just for "decideds," it's not just bottom-up, it's not just about raising money to buy TV ads ("Cut out the middleman"). and the idea that people want to get together is not new. Scott holds up a placard from an event sponsor and says: "This is not good." It's from a company that sells video-enhanced banner ads. "This is not what it's about." [Go, Scott!]

Mathew Gross (Dean blogger). I love Ed's numbers because a year ago it was hard to convince people that the Web sphere matters. Blogs let you do communication and community. Simply having the tool won't change politics; it's how you use it and what you say. The Web is and will continue to be a written medium. Home pages may start to disappear in favor of weblogs. Weblogs won't succeed if it's just press releases posted in reverse chronological order. The challenge is to make the site engaging. We did that in part by engagingi n the conversation alaready going on in the blogosphere. People read blogs looking for a filter. And weblogs and commenting gives everyone the ability to interact with the campaign.

Scott Orr (Internet News Director for the White House) was advised by White House counsel not to show up.

Q: David Halberstam says that the Internet isn't as transformative as TV. It's good for outsiders coming in, but not a big deal otherwise.

Charles: Yes.

scott: The lines are blurry. Suppose a campaign promotes its MeetUp campaign via TV.

Keller: It's too early to tell.

Q: Mr. Keller, what are the age demographics of the influentials?

Keller: They're found in every age group. There are more boomer influentials because there are more boomers.

Q: [Micah Sifry] Charles, what makes someone count as a "net user"?

Charles: It's a wide spectrum.

Q: Ed, are you saying that influencers are the same whether you're talking about SUVs or voting. I've never seen anyone genericize influencers across all categories.

Keller: If you step back from the individual point of view, that's what we look at. [?]

Q: [Henry Copeland from BlogAds] What percentage of influentials are online political citizens?

Keller: 7% of the population are OPCs.

Henry: That means half the influentials are OPCs.

Q: The Dean campaign raised $22M. Why did the campaign spend so little on Internet stuff, and most of it on Iowa and NH TV ads?

Mathew: We invsted far more in the Internet than any other campaign in history. We're not at the point at which the Internet can solve all problems. When you're 4-6 weeks out from Iowa, it's TV. The online communities are tremendous because they help you put the resources on the grouhd or on the air. The Internet is more powerul, at this stage, at the initial stage of the compaign.

Scott: Because most online advertising doesn't work.

[My point of view: Good panel. But not enough about what makes the Net special. Or, maybe I'm just wrong. Noooooo!]

On the road:

I'm at the DC Politics Online Conference, put on by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, where Markos Zuniga of the Daily Kos and I are supposed to be "debating" Zack Exley of MoveOn.org and someone from RightMarch.com on the topic: "One lesson from the Dean campaign is that centralization and control are the keys to using the Internet to win campaigns."

Sure they are. And so are decentralization and the willingness to give up some control.

Michael OO's generational blogging

Michael O'Connor Clarke's father has started telling the family story.

And Michael's son, Charlie, at 6.5 years has started writing stories. Not blogged yet. All I can is that I hope Queen Isabelle gets better. Oh, and, "Scramble!" :-)

Rumsfeld video and noose of words

While we're all enjoying the Rumsfeld stutter video, here's a link to Billmon's list of quotations out of which the Administration wants to weasel.

A Friendster moment

I'm sitting in a chair backed up against the wall in the large room where Jonathan Abrams gave his keynote address to the sxsw conference. He'd left the room about ten minutes earlier, but I was still there, blogging and checking email.

Continued at Many2Many...

[sxsw] Friendster cont'd

The CEO of Friendster finished his talk here by inviting us to take some swag from the podium. You know what it was? Friendster condoms.

Staying on message...

[sxsw] Friendster

The awesome Heath Row has posted his near-transcript of Abrams' talk.

Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster, is giving a keynote. Unfortunately, I missed almost all of it because lunch went long.

Real vision of Friendster: Experience the Internet with your friends. That goes beyond dating. In 2004, we'll see lots of other applications.

Everything is different when you look at the net as social, using your social network as a filter. I look people and tell them I know someone who knows someone who knows you, and people are fascinated. [Seems irrelevant to me.]

He says Friendster is hiring. [If you're looking for an introduction, I have a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who works there...]

Q: Was Six Degrees an inspiration?

A: 90% was addressing problems I and my friends had. But Ryze was an inspiration also. Another guiding idea: To reduce the level of stupidity on the Internet to the level of stupidity you have generally. I can't stop people from being an asshole. But on a computer, with the anonymity and without seeing reactions, people act that much stupider.

He says people want a "break up alert."

Q: You dispelled the rumor that you're a CIA front, but what branch of government do you represent?

A: There are bigger databases with more interesting information in them. What your favorite movie is really doesn't interest the government. [Unless it's The Battle of Algiers, etc.]

Q: What about fakesters (i.e., fake personages)?

A: We've been so busy with scaling that we haven't add functionality. But we'll be doing that now. We'll provide the features that some people use fakesters for (e.g., Burning Man, Stanford Alumni).

Q: Are you going to open up APIs?

A: I'd love to, but we have to deal with privacy and security issues.

Q: Politics?

A: Various politicians are using Friendster. Kerry, for example. Friendster is looking at allowing rock bands, etc., to be available on Friendster so you can link to them as a supporter. [Ah, mission creep!]

Q: Are you really only for the youngsters?

A: Right now our users are first adopters and skew young. But Friendster is for anyone who has at least one friend. If you're over 50 and are looking for a date...[Hmm, the dating purpose seems central to his thinking despite saying that it's about more than that.]

Q: Privacy?

A: We won't sell your info. We will use it for targeting ads. And remember, you can delete your account at any time.

[sxsw] Bruce Sterling

I've never heard him speak before. He's instantly likable, a sort of magic. I'm not going to try to summarize. Just a disjointed set of remarks, without an attempt to capture his thread:

For the Bush administration, getting it spun is job one.

This administration's commitment to bad science will drive scientists away. 19,000 people dead in France from the heat, but there's no climate change. Nooooo.

The concern over offshoring is short sighted. If you really want some part of the human race to remain poor and ignorant, why not do it within your own country? The Indian flag has Gandhi's spinning wheel on it. He spun as a symbolic act to say that India shouldn't rely on foreign economies.

It scares me to see Brazil as the future of politics. Even the Brazilians like to say that Brazil is the country of the future...and always will be.

Outlook is like a flaw with a mailer attached to it.

"Someone in a village in China gets a computer, plugs it in, and out comes this torrent of filth from all over the world." This is how we Americans look to the world.

"it's like a terrifying army, whom we've given carte blanche to go into our homes, and attack people less sophisticated than ourselves. and *this* is the "blooming orchid" of american culture?"

The Bush administration could have done something about these problems. IT would have been hard-core right wing but at least they could have been competent at it.

The Spaniards threw out the government on Sunday because they were angry at the government for lying to them about who planted the bombs.

Sir Martin Rhees thinks there's a 50-50 that we'll kill ourselves. Bruce is cheered up by this: "You mean it's 50-50! That's great damn odds!"

He's watching microbial threats to health like SARS and bird flu. "Real spooky." They mainly kill old people and this is the most top-heavy in heavy.

He's waiting for Somali khat to show up in the US. It's a bundle of straw you chew, "purple foam appears," and you get in your technical and drive through the streets "wasting people."

He ends by saying that "hope is the conviction that what you were doing made sense no matter how things turned out."

[sxsw] Games

Jane Pinckard of gamegirladvance.com moderates.

Sheri Graner Ray is game designer currently working for Sony as a lead designer on unannounced MMORPG. She's written a book about designing games that appeal to both sexes. She says that the market is focused on males 15-25, but that demographic isn't growing as quickly as the game industry itself is. So, the industry has to learn to skew wider.

James Au is the official blogger for the game SecondLife. The player can create her own landscapes. He calls it a Massively Multiplayer Massive Online Creative Agora. He also writes for Wired and Salon. He shows impressive events and scenes created by users, including a Viennese formal ball. Slides are here. [Hmm, I just realized that I carped about something Au wrote about Doom 3 a while ago.]

He shows a character created by a homeless person. Is that true? Even if it's not, says Au, it's an interesting narrative the woman created for herself...blurring the line between avatars and people.

He also shows a slide of Cory's avatar holding an online book forum in the world.

Ray: We're all asking if we're making a sandbox or making a game.

Au: There was a tax revolt in our world. The game used to deduct virtual bucks depending on how much property you own. One person created a protest parade of rats.

Ray: In the social organizations within these worlds, they tend to be led by females and they tend to be the glue that holds the group together. They're also the ones who externalize the game and take it outside the game, running the web sites, doing the fan fiction...

Au: One woman, Jesse, created herself as the premier hostess. She set up a villa in the designated war zone, told the combatants they were being rude. She got a gun. She scared them because she had a lot of "social power." [I don't know what sociala power means in this game, and they're not taking questions yet.]

Q: What about player-killers, griefers, i.e., those who are there to cause mischief.

Ray: They're actually playing against the developers, finding the loopholes. We spend a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to handle them. And we consider them from the gitgo.

The questioner (Mike from Disney) says that there did used to be vigilante players who would police the area, but that got squashed by the developers.

Ray: It wasn't enough. So we had to step in and try to make the experience friendly to new players.

Ray: Players are perverse. "Why are you trying to put the tree in your backpack?" But they'll do it. In one of the games I play, they put in beds. Players immediately stacked them to climb up on things they weren't meant to climb up on.

Au: We had a war zone, but people started building there. Homesteaders were being shot. And that puts you where you started, so they'd be transported back into the war zone and they'd be shot again. So, they took three of the properties and eliminated the war gaming there.

Au: Someone created a game within a game and charges people to play it. And he retains all the IP to the game.

Ray: We like to see where our players are going and then build it in. We'll watch the boards. What are they talking about? That's what we'll fold back into our stories.

Ray: I'd like to see great sandboxes.

Au: Uru [Myst 4, I think] shut down [It promised playuuer-created narratives], so players are recreating it in SecondLife.

Q: Some parts of the world are gorgeous, but some parts look ugly. How do you control that?

Au: Some people agreed to create their dream community and created criteria. They have community meetings.

Q: What will happen as the consoles go online?

Ray: Console titles will go online the way Halo did: The controls lend themselves to twitch games. They won't be willing to pay a monthly fee because they can go online and play for free.

Q: Online games have become like work.

A: We could spend hours on that! Make the treadmill fun. Eliminate the treadmill. If they're using a macro, we should do it for them.

[sxsw] Meta blog

Mike Slone lists blogs from sxsw.

Meta-categories

Last night, at the EFF party at sxsw, I got to talk with Don Turnbull, a professor at the U of Texas. We talked about metadata, a topic he is very learned, thoughtful and interesting about.

This morning, he sent me an email with helpful links to some of the topics we'd talked about (including how the online WorldBook handles tagging entries from the '30s that talked glowingly about that young, dynamic German leader, Adolph Hitler). Excellent. But I'm on the road, so the message came into my laptop's Outlook receptacle, which is a message ghetto in relation to my desktop machine. So, without a trace of irony, I found myself thinking that it's too bad that Outlook doesn't have categories for messages so I could tag Don's message as "Metadata."

[sxsw] Librarians

Dinah Sanders of Metagrrrrl is the moderator.

Liz Lawley: Her mission is to convince people that librarians are relevant to IT.

Cynthia Hill is a librarian for Sun.

Tanya Rabourn is an info architect with MetLife.

Jon Udell is the InfoWorld blogger. He's here because of his "library lookup" project, which is very cool. It's a bookmarklet that will show you if a book you're looking at on the Web is available in your local library. (The URL of the page you're on has to have an ISBN in the url.) It requires no integration effort on the part of the library.

Hill says that librarians know how to authenticate information, which makes them valuable behind the corporate firewall.

Liz: Libraries are brick and mortar reputation management systems. She recommends del.icio.us, a shared bookmark system. She points to the emergence of shared vocabularies for talking 'bout stuff there. Librarians are good at managing controlled vocabularies.

Rabourn: Librarians used to be intermediaries. Now the end users are doing the searching.

Sanders: Libraries are starting to catalog web sites the way they catalog books. Just that something is cataloged gives it a certain weight.

Liz: Tanya said something about "information-seeking behavior." One of the things that's fascinating to me about del.icio.us is that it's an emergent vocabulary. We can see how people are describing information. That's an unusual opportunity.

Jon: You can see this in dmoz also.

Liz: Dmoz is different. Del.icio.us allows an emergence in which you have multiple views of things and then you can refine them.

Liz: Libraries have over-invested in proprietary IT. And our user licenses often prevent us from hacking them, making them less useful.

Jon: And there are other reasons to go to the library. It's an interesting social space.

Liz: Our library took a page from Borders. You can even get food. And now people hang out there to talk.

Hill: People come to libraries also because they're stable and they're neutral.

Dinah: Could libraries become a magazine, aggregating local sites?

Liz: Libraries need to allow annotation. I want to be able to see the notes my colleagues have left. Libraries have been very reluctant to allow users to supply content.

Liz: Libraries are in trouble. In general they've done a very bad job of adopting to new technology.

Jon: I discovered my weblog was censored by one of the net nannies. Initially I thought it didn't matter but it does because libraries are required to use net nannies.

Q: I can get recommendations from Amazon, also. What do librarians that makes them better at it?

A: That we're not doing it to take money out of your pocket. Also, we can localize it.

Dinah recommends www.theshiftedlibrarian.com as a blog about libraries.

AKMA's semi-randomness is as random as a well-aimed arrow

AKMA has a provocative "semi-random" trio of statements about our powerlessness in the face of signifying. 1. Everything we do signifies (projects meaning), he says. 2. Signifying always escapes our ability to control it: Your wearing of an orange jacket on St. Patrick's day will be taken as having a particular significance whether you intended it or not. 3. From this AKMA concludes that there can be no ethic of signifying, just as there's no ethic of gravity. (Pardon my recapitulation. Read the original. It's written with AKMA's usual clear-eyed panache.)

The main point of his conclusion is (and I trust AKMA will correct me if I get this wrong) that because signifying isn't something we do, and isn't something that we even fully understand, there's no "real" signification, intended or otherwise, that we can authoritatively unearth. Our simple model of communication (inner thought expressed in outer signs) misrepresents the actual situation.

My question for AKMA: Within the broad swath of signifying, some of it is on purpose (as AKMA acknowledgeds, of course), so shouldn't we be held responsible for it? Does he general law absolve us of responsibility in particular cases? Somehow I doubt it, but I don't understand the connection.

Bush's anti-woman isolationism

Here's an article from Planetwire, forwarded from a friend who prefaces it by saying: "In case you were on the fence about who to vote for..."

New York City: This week the Bush Administration sought to reverse historic agreements that have significantly contributed to advancing the rights, economic status and health of the world’s women. The United States was the only country to reverse long-standing support of the historic agreements reached in Cairo in 1994 and Beijing in 1995.

“This is a devastating blow to women around the world. The actions of the Bush Administration means more women will continue to die because of inadequate reproductive rights and health programs,” noted June Zeitlin, Executive Director of WEDO, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization...

Dan Gillmor's draft of Chapter 2

Dan Gillmor has posted the draft of the second chapter of the book he's working on and is looking for comments. (I've been running into Dan every hour here at sxsw. That justifies the trip, as far as I'm concerned.)

And speaking of people you count yourself lucky to run into, Howard Rheingold and I interviewed each other for 20 minutes for TechTV. It was streamed and will be posted somewhere sometime. Smart Mobs Loosely Joined.

[sxsw] Ethan Watters: Urban Tribes

Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes is talking about some anxieties he has about the current generation of youngsters. For example, this gen is delaying marriage longer than any in American history. They are, surveys show, more "out for themselves." "They are freer," Ethan says, "than any other generation": Free from the commitments of their parents, freer from parental control, free of long-term commitments to jobs and places, freer in the available social options, free of commitment to national movements, free of a sense that they've been chosen from some higher mission.

We're living in an unprecedented era of personal choice, he says. Where's the fanfare? We're living out the freedom that the Baby Boom broke the ground for but only play-acted.

So, what are we doing with that freedom, he asks. Are we squandering it, the way commentators have said? No, Ethan wrote his book in part spurred by such commentaries. They don't describe his life and friends.

He says that we haven't developed the narratives that allow us to give credit to friendship. We (i.e., Ethan's gen) make households with our friends. We're increasingly erasing the line between workmate and friend; we go into business with our friends. We create rituals like Burning Man. If we had narratives, we would see that we're less apathetic than we seem.

How might these urban tribes create a landscape across a city. Urban tribes maximize "weak ties": acquaintances at the edge of our circle friends. These become important when you try to find housing, a job, a romantic partner, etc. One layer away, says Ethan, are "shadow ties": People who may come into our lives with a piece of information that will change our lives. Urban tribes maximize shadow tribes. "You end up with a network of thousands within which you can maneuver and navigate city life."

These social networks are very hard to see. It's a type of "dark matter": a force that's hard to see but that holds everything together. But they can make a difference: A web of weak acquaintances resulted in the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

So, Ethan says, Robert "Bowling Alone" Putnam is right that Ethan never joined a bowling league, but in any single nighht, he can tap into a network that allows him to do anything from playing frisbee to engaging in political action.

"I could almost make the case that this form of social network is better" because it's continuous, not a set of monthly meetings. "It requires personal and constant involvement." Within these groups, we don't even think about the fact that we're giving of ourselves. It's more like social barter than social capital.

So, what has his gen done with their freedom? "We've had this massive experiment in the meaning of friendship, asking whether friendships can be enough sustain us emotional and bind together large communities."

Q: What do you define as your gen?

A: 20-40 years old.

Q: You missed two important freedoms in your generation: Freedom of health and freedom from fear. The H-bomb was born the same year I was.

A: Yes, but now we're beginning to realize how good that freedom from fear was.

Q: One of the strengths of weak ties is that they bring new stuff into your network. What do you mean by "shadow tie"?

A: I made up the term because I think I misrepresented the original meaning of "weak tie." Shadow ties are people who we don't currently know but who may enter our network.

Q: This is supposed to be an interactive but everyone is attached to their laptops.

A: The extent to which these groups can live exclusively via technology is a question I'm not prepared to answer.

Q: You're mischaracterizing Putnam's weak ties. They enable patterns of service.

A: Putnam simply didn't see ultimate frisbee and Burning Man.

Q: You should characterize what you're talking about as social currency, not social capitalism.

Q: How about dating?

A: Your most likely chance of finding someone to die is through weak ties and shadow ties. When you try to match people up one to one, you lack the trust that comes from working through intermediaries.

Q: What happens when you get married? [He's asking my question off the IRC!]

A: I'm married and we had a baby 5 months ago. [He shows a picture. The baby is in a hat. Can't get much cuter than that :)] I felt I had to step away from role in my tribe to take the risk of relationship. You invest in the relationship. And then you can step back into the group in a new way. It's unclear what that new role is. I won't be the person who plans the trip, but I'll be a participant. For the tribe relationship not to just disappear, people have to recognize it, and give a name to it. [So, how many nights a week is Ethan thinking he'll be away from his family? Just curious.] .

Craig of the eponymous list

I got to meet Craig Newmark of Craigslist here at sxsw. Craigslist is a model of letting the ends connect and getting the center out of the way. Ultracool.

And, Craig reports in his blog that he got to meet Rob Corddry of The Daily Show at the show biz side of sxsw. So, in an Orkutian Friendsterian way, I now am Rob Corddry's friend! Ultracooler!

[sxsw] Wireless commons

I'm a panelist in this session.

I begin by saying: The Titanic couldn't get help because its signals were interefered with. So the government regulated frequency. But it turns out that interference is a myth. In fact, "interference" happens because our devices aren't (weren't) smart enough to discriminate signals well. From the metaphor of interference comes the idea that spectrum is something we consume, that it's scarce and that it's property.

But we should be learning that assigning frequencies — literally assigning colors — is based on metaphoprs from the grwoth of spread spectrum. the information revolution (spectrum is transmitting information that is not a hard-edged good), the Net and the development of software-defined radios.

If we get out of the metaphor, we could end up with a world in which we all have equal access to unlimited bandwidth.

Cory Doctorow of the EFF (you're a member, right?) is up now. He says: More speakers is more speech. The FCC believes, on the other hand, that if you have too many speakers, you have chaos and less speech. But, no, less control is more speech.

Eric Blossom plans on shipping software-defined radios for $65.

Cory says the government is now looking into regulating all digital-to-analog converters and all analog-to-digital converters in order to prevent unauthorized use. The third piece, he says, is the mandate that computers support "trusted computing" that only runs software "signed by a bureaucrat." But we (the EFF) has always said that code is a form of speech.

Jim Snider of the New America Foundation says the politicians won't unlicense spectrum because it is the most value "resource" in the information economy. Only 1% of spectrum under 2gH is unlicensed.

The commons can be done in different ways, Jim says: XG from DARPA allows the "opportunistic use" of spectrum. You can dedicate frequencies for open use. Or you could do unerlays, such as ultrawide band, but the incumbents hate this. (A source he mentions: www.spectrumpolicy.org.)

Q: Should the legislature get involved?

Jim: It's too involved. It's owned by the broadcasters. But there's great enthusiasm at the FCC for granting more unlicensed spectrum.

Cory: Legislators throw hard questions over the wall to administrative agencies like the FCC which are supposed to be rendering only factual opinions.

[Sorry, but i got involved in the conversation and can't simultaneously blog...]

Guantanamo shame

The Guardian has a devastating article by David Rose recounting one British prisoner's ordeal in Guantanamo.

The fifth paragraph addresses the reliability of the account, acknowledging that there's no guarantee that it's truthful, although it apparently accords with other accounts and the reporter's experience visiting Guantanamo. Likewise, the prisoner's account of what he was doing in Afghanistan in the first place is underwhelming. Nevertheless, after 26 months of interrogations, there was no evidence that he was in any way a threat to our security and he was released back to his native Briton.

If this story is even roughly true, we Americans ought to be ashamed. And don't tell me that the fight against terrorism justifies this sort of treatment of prisoners. In fact, as the article points out, the treatment seems custom-made to generate false information.

For shame. I'm sending links to my senators — Kennedy and Kerry — and asking for an investigation. Yeah, sure, that'll happen in an election year.

[sxsw] Trippi

Joe Trippi begins by pointing to a non-Net reality that shaped the campaign: After Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democratic Party's Hunt Commission changed the rules to work against insurgents. Since then, the rules have been tightened further. The only way for an insurgent to win, Joe says, was to win Iowa and New Hampshire.

We are now at the point TV was at 40 years ago, he says. The Dean campaign was the Kennedy-Nixon debates. But TV is a one-way medium. "The Internet is the singlemost powerful tool ever put in the hands of citizens." It allows us to network together, and we're just learning that we can change the country if we take action in common cause with others. Corporations and campaigns won't be able to keep secrets any more.

The Dean campaign was just the tip of the iceberg, he says.

He talks about how the Internet took an obscure governor and made him into the front funner, raising more money than any Democrat in history. How?

Blogs. That's where the debates about WMDs were happening in the blogosphere, not in the mass media which had embedded its reporters. Likewise, the blogosphere really pushed the awareness of the problems with electronic voting machines. He talks about how he first heard about MeetUp on the mydd.com blog.

Also, giving up some centralized control.

"There are 2 million Americans who would borrow $100 to get rid of George Bush, and it's going to happen this year." That, he says, will change American politics forever. "There's only one medium in the world that allows this to happen."

We did have to give up some control. But what's wrong with that? What's wrong with allowing people to work for their candidatee in their communities the way they want? MSNBC after 12 years has 250,00 viewers. In just a few months, the Dean campaign had 600,000 members. That's the power of giving up control.

"A guy like Dean [an insurgent] isn't supposed to get to where he got to. It's a dot com miracle."

"You're not going to tear down a system as corrupt as this one that's been built up over 40 years, it isn't going to be torn down in 13 months." But, he says, it will happen.

It's not just about defeating Bush: "If Howard Dean had gotten elected, there's practically no way his health care would have passed."

In 2008, we'll all look at the Dean campaign and laugh at how primitive it was.

Trippi: We were in trouble well before the Iowa primary. The Gore endorsement motivated the other candidates to decide to "kill" Howard Dean. And the press said, "Oh, man, he's going to be the nominee. We're supposed to scrutinize the nominee and be tough on him." That's the first time the candidates went after someone at the same time that the media went after him. And a 527 backed by Gephart and Kerry were beating the living daylights out of us with a million dollars. "And Iowa is the worst state in the union for a guy like Howard Dean": 65% of caucus attendees are over 65, and Gephart is telling them that Dean is going to take away their Medicare. "It had nothing to do with whether the Internet worked or the 3,500 orange hats."

[Cross-posted at Loose Democracy]

[sxsw] MoveOn.org

Eli Pariser and Zach Exley, names probably familiar from your inbox — Eli has a disconcertingly consistent pattern of vowels and consonants — are talking to a packed crowd of about 400, explaining how MoveOn.org got started and how the Internet is enabling us to rebuild some of the community that's been lost over the decades.

They humbly stress how they stumbled into success, and make the good point that, when something succeeds, inevitably people look for geniuses which is "terribly disempowering" to everyone else.

They stress that we're just at the beginning of the Net-izing of politics. "In a few years, we won't be talking about a 2 million person email list. And we won't be focusing on MoveOn. We'll be talking about 40 million people and hopefully lots of groups."

They say that the report of 6M names on a Republican list is an exaggeration, and if they have that many, it's because they bought 'em and thus the names are less effective. "The Republicans are doing a good job on the Internet, but don't be intimidated by that 6M number. It's more like 400,000."

"And they haven't yet learned the power of having a two-way dialogue."

What will the connective platform in 2008, they're asked. Who knows, they answer.

The unsinkable Molly Ivins introduced them. She loves the Net and the way it's connecting us. I'd take issue with her call to find "some way" to get rid of the bad information on the Net — get used to it, Molly — but what a treat to hear her talk, if only for a few minutes.

[Cross-posted at Loose Democracy]

Opening locked doors

I'm in the Boston Admirals Club lounge, waiting for my flight to Dallas, connecting to Austin, where sxsw is being held. The Admirals Club is American Airline's lounge, about which I have two questions:

1. To enter an Admirals Club, you have to press a buzzer. Someone then presses a switch that unlocks the door for you. So here's my question: What's the difference between a locked door that is unlocked for anyone who presses a buzzer and an unlocked door?

2. Why did an airline name its lounges after admirals?

Off to SXSW

And in case you're wondering, it's pronounced "South by Southwest."

Too many conferences

I'll be out all day tomorrow (Saturday) at a politics-and-tech confab, and then on Sunday morning (6:30AM plane) I'm off to the Wireless Future portion of SXSW. And that's just the beginning of the chain of conferences I'm going to.

I'm tired of traveling already, and I haven't even left yet.

Yahoo and Google Match-Up

This site graphically compares the hits returned by Google and Yahoo for any query you try. Cool and interesting.

Isenberg's WTF

I finally looked at my schedule and realized that I just can't go to David Isenberg's WTF conference April 2-4. Damn! I'm only home 3 days between now and the end of March. Conference conference conference conference conference. Conference. I can't add another one to the list no matter how enticing...and WTF is durn enticing.

It sounds like it'll be a great get-together. I'm sorry to miss it. But I hope not to see you there. Wait, that's not right. I hope you won't see me there. Nope. I hope you go. Some fantastic people are attending. You could be one of them. And Isenberg knows how to throw an A Quality event.

AKMA's passion

AKMA responds in public to a question of mine about Mel's Passion. Thanks, Rev!

My question was prompted by AKMA's learned and diversity-loving and committed comments on the movie here, here, here and then here. (AKMA's son Si blogs about it here.)

Foto Funnies

The Boston Globe is running a periodic caption-the-photo contest. The current photo has Bush touching a cow and pointing at a young woman. You can vote until 2pm today.

Possible entries:

"Sorry, sweetheart, but you're in the Coalition of the Willing. You cain't fight the Eeeny Meeny Miney Mo."

"Sorry, sweetheart, but Bessie's been outsourced."

"Dick, the coast is clear. You can come out of the cow now."

Eh. Do better. Make us laugh.

Salon on the march!

Salon is expanding its coverage of The Slugfest in the States, the Brawl for All America, DubZilla vs. Frankenstein, or whatever you want to call the upcoming election. It's opened a DC bureau under Sidney Blumenthal, it's publsihing "The New Pentagon Papers," it's teaming up with Rolling Stone, Air America (the new liberal talk radio network) and The Guardian.

Salon has 74,000 subscribers. For $29, you could make it 74,001. Salon is one of my favorite daily reads, so I'm just being selfish when I ask you to subscribe.

After all, Scott Rosenberg, has added a notice that now his blog is "New! Improved! Now Fair and Balanced!" Isn't that worth something? (Also, Salon has one of the more innovative ways of enabling readers who don't want to pony up the subscription fee to still get full access to the articles on the site.)

Questions for opponents of same-sex marriage

If I could quiz one of the tens of millions of reasonable, good-hearted Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, here are the questions I'd ask.

Set #1

Do you believe that same-sex couples can fall in love?

Is their love lesser than that of contra-sex couples?

Can same-sex couples form commitments as strong, lasting and valuable as those of contra-sex couples?

Are same-sex couples as likely as contra-sex couples to raise children well?

If yes to all of the above, what is the relevant difference between same-sex and contra-sex couples that justifies treating them differently with regard to marriage? [Note: a relevant difference is one that is relevant to the distinction in treatment. E.g., the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that race was not a relevant difference when it comes to marriage, although weight may be a relevant difference when it comes to choosing jockeys.]

Set #2

Do you believe that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, it will affect contra-sex marriages? If so, how? Is there evidence to support this prediction?

Do you believe that which gender one finds sexually attractive is a matter of choice? Is there an element of choice in it?

If it's a least partially an element of choice, are there reasons — other than the discriminatory culture in which we live — to make one choice over the other? That is, in a culture that didn't discriminate, is heterosexuality a better choice than homosexuality? If so, for what type of reasons? Moral? Psychological?

If so, are the reasons to prefer heterosexuality sufficiently strong, and the overall consequences of same-sex marriage sufficiently negative, to ban same-sex marriage?

Set #3

Let's say your daughter is 28 and has been in a loving relationship for six years with Pat, a person you've come to like and respect. She comes home one night and announces that Pat has popped the question and she's accepted. She's obviously delighted. In case #1, Pat is a man and you share your daughter's joy. In case #2, Pat is a woman. Do you react differently? How? Is the difference in reaction justifiable? Why?

I don't mean to state these questions as if the answers were obvious, although I'm sure my partisanship is evident. I don't have fixed opinions about some of these questions, and I'd like to know where my thinking diverges from those who have come to a different conclusion on this issue.

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

The Worst Game in History: The Sequel

Syberia II is out! At long last! The first game was an arbitrary scavenger hunt that forced you back and forth across an Alpine village that became less charming with each traversal.

I played the demo of the sequel last night. After walking along some crisply rendered mountain paths along tracks without choices, you and your dog come upon a mansion. Inside you pixel hunt until you find a book. It's boring. But you need to know that golden salmon eat green frogs and swim downstream from waterfalls. You go in the only direction you're allowed, through the mansion and onto a dock downstreadm from a waterfall. There's a fishing rod and a tacklebox. Bait the line with the green lure, cast it into the water, and watch the charming animation as your character reels in a fish. Is it a golden salmon? Too small to tell. The animation finishes with you unhooking the fish, putting it on the dock, and then chastising the dog who eats it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you off by a few pixels in where you're casting? Do you need to use lures in some particular order? Is the program wired so that the Big Event — you catch a fish, you hook a tire, you beat the freaking dog senseless with the boring fishing book — occurs on the sixth try? Was there some magic berry you didn't notice when you were running through the mountains nine screens ago? Did you give up caring twenty minutes ago?

Ah, Syberia! Taking the adventure out of adventure games.

Tron 2, on the other hand, is actually pretty good. The game is fun to play, with an occasional exit too hard to find and an occasional enemy too hard to beat. That's why we have cheats and walkthroughs, bless their hearts. But it's imaginative, occasionally funny, and the graphics are consistently astounding: original and sometimes beautiful.

My eBay account has [only apparently] been compromised

When I tried to log in to eBay tonight, my password wouldn't work. So, I had eBay send me my login name. Sure enough, it's not mine. Somehow, another name has been attached to my email address. Not good. My credit card companies don't report any unusual activity, though.

eBay doesn't make it easy to report this problem. Their "Contact us about security page" has a small tree of choices, and this isn't one of them. Their "email us" button nonsensically reports that I haven't filled in all fields, when there were no fields at all to fill in. So, I'm sitting in their live help chat client, waiting an average of 28 minutes, to chat with a support person.

And, no, I didn't fall for one of the eBay scams that has me "update my records."

Later Ok, since last June, eBay has been warning us that it was going to disallow email addresses as logins, a reasonable precaution. They promulgated this warning via emails, but since I get a couple of spoof eBay messages a day, who pays attention to eBay messages. And they use popups. But who has popups turned on these days? So, I never protected myself straight into fearful ignorance.

Am I mistaken or has this blog become nothing but an account of the many ways in which I am a moron?

Do you use the telephone?

Jeneane has announced PhoneCon, the first annual Telephone Users Conference. Sounds fascinating! No buzy signals allowed!

Improv at TED

Mark Hurst's latest GoodExperience newsletter reports on a performance at TED:

Jennifer Lin is a fourteen-year-old pianist from southern California. She began her presentation by playing two very difficult classical pieces; to my untrained ears, she sounded as good as any professional performer two or three times her age.

It was her third piece that brought the house down. She announced that she would like to improvise a song... and asked an audience member to select five notes, at random, from the C scale. She got the sequence C, G, B, A, E.

Fourteen years old, with a live audience of 800 adults awaiting a brand new piece of music, based on a theme of five notes just handed to her. She had ten seconds to prepare.

It was a masterpiece.

Chris Anderson, TED conference host, was nice enough to post the performance online at the TED site. I highly recommend spending a few minutes listening to the whole piece, to get a touch of the experience that Jennifer created.

1. Go to http://www.ted.com

2. Click "Magic moments from TED2004". (If the link disappears suddenly, roll the mouse over the "Home" link and it will reappear.) [Yeah, the UI is problematic - dw]

3. A window called "TED 2004 Summary Slides" will appear and start loading. Slide 1 should play momentarily.

NOTE: Slide 2 of 5 is the beginning of Jennifer Lin's performance, where she gets the five notes (yes, that's Goldie Hawn) and sits down to play. When that slide finishes playing, you're JUST about to get to the good stuff.

If Slide 3 doesn't start playing, click the right arrow-button on the bottom of the window to advance past the end of Slide 2.

Slide 3 plays the audio of Jennifer's incredible improvisation, and shows a slideshow of TED photos on top of that. Enjoy the photos but pay close attention to the music: remember, Jennifer is playing this multi-movement piece "cold", with no prior knowledge of the five-note theme, in front of an audience of several hundred.

You can't see it in the video, but many audience members were crying at the end of the performance.

Mark's more enthusiastic about it than I am. The fact that she's 14 makes it more impressive, which means that the music on its own didn't affect me the way it affected the audience. But, I sure feel grinchy saying it because for a 14 year old it's pretty freaking amazing.

The Turing Test for UI's

Ok, I admit I was a bit testy last night. I have the flu, I have a father-in-law for whom I've bought two computers and three operating systems (XP, Linux, Mac) who still can't pick up his frigging email, and I just wanted to go to sleep.

Instead, I found myself doing Kafka's version of the Turing Test: Can a computer convince you that it's usable if you're connected by telephone to an intelligent human who, when it comes to computers, knows how to move a mouse and find letters on a keyboard but little more?

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions in the comments section of the previous post, including your restraint in offering rude suggestions.

I got a Mac and it sucks

I just spent an hour on the phone with my father-in-law failing to help him find his email client. It used to be there, but it vanished from the tool bar at the bottom. Now we can't get it back. None of the Finder options seem to actually help us find anything.

I know it's there. I know it's "easy." But it sure ain't intuitive. Anyone want to give me the most basic instruction about how to find things on the !@#$% Mac, OS X?

As Dr. Dean would say, "Aaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!"

[Ten minutes later] I can't even walk my father-in-law through the process of using Safari to get to his ISP's home page so he can use the Web client to get his mail. He clicks into the adress bar. It highlights. He presses the Delete key. It clears. He types in "www.rcn.com" and presses the Return key. (Why isn't it called the Enter key? Why is Mac still stuck in the world of typewriters?) A window comes down, obscuring the address bar, telling him that the server can't be found because somehow the address has become http://wwwwww.rcn.comcom (or something like that). We try it three times. I give up.

Are markets social?

Scott Kirsner in The Boston Globe (link will break tomorrow) writes about companies trying to enhance eBay. His lead example is a storefront operation run by AuctionDrop that operates as a consignment shop: You bring in your old goods, they place them on eBay, you split the winnings. It sounds like a cool idea until you get to the final paragraphs of the piece: Their 75 employees and 20,000 square feet of warehouse space brought in $1.3M in revenues last year. Ulp.

Scott cites other companies that have failed, sometimes because eBay sued them into failure. An eBay spokesperson says:

"We are happy to see this universe of different kinds of companies offer services that extend the eBay marketplace in new and innovative ways," says Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. But Durzy says it is in eBay's best interest to ensure that tools offered by third parties work well, and that data from the site is used in a way that protects "the integrity of the marketplace."

That's not why they sued BiddersEdge.com into oblivion. BiddersEdge consolidated auctions across auction sites, so you could find which site was offering the Princess Di Beanie Baby at the lowest price. BiddersEdge helped preserve the "integrity of the marketplace"...unless you define "the marketplace" as "eBay." Yet eBay tolerates (how magnanimous!) AuctionSniper and other such sites that, for a fee, place your bid at the last possible second before a bid closes. Does this protect "the integrity of the marketplace"? Maybe, maybe not, but it does ensure that eBay gets the highest price that robots can provide.

I've lost bids to auction snipers. As a customer, I feel cheated, even though, of course, I could take a sniper's eye-view of the transaction. Even if letting robots game the auction doesn't affect the integrity of the marketplace, they sure take the fun out of it. And that's part of eBay's value as well.

Cross-posted at Many2Many

I'm faster than you are

RCN, my ISP, has recently upped its performance to 5 gigabits. (I sometimes get my units confused so go ahead and have a good laugh at a dumb liberal arts major.) According to DSLreports. I'm running at 4.1 and SpeedCheck says I'm at 4.4. I don't mean to rub your faces in it, but downloading is pretty durn peppy. Why, my pornographic spam is downloading in a fraction of the time that it used to! (Upload times are still under 700kbps.)

So, when will RCN start offering Voice over IP?

Badgering you

I'm sick as a dog today, but that doesn't stop me from bringing you a page that causes our college-freshman daughter to shake her head ruefully and say, "So this is what people do with the Intermenet."

Note, after the bit with the snake, it just repeats. Don't expect anything else to happen. I tell you this as your friend.

World's worst movie?

I'm sick as a dog again — my second cold-y/flu-y thing in two weeks — and was being kept awake by the sound of my own mucus (hey, you asked!), so I turned on the TV at 4:30 this morning. And I'm so glad I did! I may have stumbled on the worst movie ever.

Is there anything worse than a really bad pot-head movie, one that takes drugs to make the jokes funny? Head, starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson was my old favorite bad pot-head movie. But it's been rudely elbowed aside by Pandemonium, a film that confuses the randomly unexpected with the hilarious.

Judge for yourself. Here's a link to a page with a link to the trailer. And keep in mind that the trailer is showing you the highlights.

Vonage arrives

My Vonage phone arrive yesterday afternoon. I followed the simple instructions for plugging it into my cable modem and now I'm making calls to anywhere in the US or Canada - 500 minutes/month for $15.

So far, the sonic quality has been as good as a "real" phone. Yep, them Voice over IP bits can hold their own. And the plain ol' telephone company, the one with the network that's too smart for it's own good, ought to be worried.

X1 gears up

X1 is the best desktop search engine I've found for Windows. It indexes your email, your contacts, and all the files on your desktop. Want to find that email talks about phlogiston? By the time you've finished typing in "phl," X1 will have found it. I use it maybe 5 times a day.

Now X1 is starting to market itself. Good. It's worth the $100 in time savings alone. It's held up well as my email archive has grown to 110,000 messages. And the company has been very responsive to bug reports and enhancement requests. So, go X1! I hope you make a bundle.

Paperless democracy's test

Ed Cone writes about what conclusions to draw from the fact that Maryland's use of electronic voting machines on Tuesday seemed to go well: "'Election officials will think that this validates the system, that now we can all see that it works just fine - but that's not the case,' says Michael Wertheimer, a systems-security consultant..."

My favorite bit:

A sampling of voters at Lutherville, Md., on Super Tuesday showed that the systems worked well on the surface. "The machine was easy to use," says Charlie Mitchell, 49. "The only thing I wondered about was what I had read about these machines - were the votes getting counted or not? I don't know."

Oh, I see. Let me paraphrase: "The system worked perfectly and I was very happy with it, except for the gnawing fear that it disenfranchised me of my most basic right as a citizen."

Electronic voting, without a voter-verifiable paper trail, inevitably introduces doubt into the system that should be the paradigm of lock box security.

(It is inevitable because the digital only has a symbolic relationship to the real, analog world. But that's a different story...the same story about why computers that model thought aren't themselves thinking. But I digress.)

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

Solving the gay marriage mess

Massachusetts' old-style (= corrupt) House Speaker, Thomas Finneran, no longer backs a compromise amendment to the state constitution that would permit civil unions but ban same-sex marriages. Instead, he wants two amendments. The first would say: "It being the public policy of this Commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts." According to the report in the Boston Globe, the second amendment "would include language saying that the Legislature 'shall establish civil unions,' but would call for the Legislature to define at a later date exactly what rights and benefits those unions would include."

Ah, excellent. Let's limit rights first and then maybe get around to supporting some, maybe, oh look, the cat's coughing, what were we talking about?

But those of us who support the right of loving adults to marry can learn from this strategy: We should break our push into two parts. First, we should make it legal for same-sex couples to marry, but only if they're hot lesbians. That's something this great nation has obviously shown it can get behind. And then we can expand the right to include all those whose love dares not speak "I do."

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

Kerry sounds viable

I listened to Kerry's victory speech last night and was impressed. Perhaps because he's an opportunist (yeah, this is going to be a left-handed compliment at best), he has absorbed the best messages from the other candidates. I thought his rhetoric and the set of issues he propounded were right on. (I wish the Internet and innovation were on his radar screen, but that's my own little "special interest.")

I just hope that he hasn't peaked. All three Boston Globe columnists today worry that his shallowness will be exposed over the long term. Why is he running, other than to dethrone King W? I believe Edwards and Dean had issues that kept them going, in addition to their personal ambition of course. Edwards cared about the immorality of there being two Americas. Dean had an inchoate vision of what a great country set free from special interests could do. I honestly can't tell you what gets Kerry going. And I've been paying attention.

I desperately hope Kerry figures it out.

The item on his list that struck me as having the most potential — keeping in mind that I have never ever once been right about this sort of thing — is the idea that Bush the Uniter has been Bush the Divider. Maybe Kerry's announced destiny is to pull America together again, rejecting the wedge politics Bush has been practicing here and abroad. Of course, I'm predisposed to this message as a registered Deaniac and Netiac.

Mini Bogus Contest: What Kerry bumpersticker would be worth driving down the re-sale value of your car?

Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

HP, DRM and the felicitously named

HP yesterday announced further moves to bring it to the forefront of user-hostile digital restrictions management.

Palo Alto, California-based HP said that it had licensed Intel's high-bandwidth digital content protection technology, which is designed to ensure that video cannot be intercepted and recorded as its travels between devices, such as between a personal computer and a TV display screen.

Felice Swapp, who heads up much of HP's digital rights management work, said that the Intel technology is invisible to consumers, and that it made more sense for HP to license that technology from Intel rather than to develop it itself and possibly create a competing standard.

Let's argue about DRM later. For now, let us all join together at the felicity of the name of the person who heads up HP's DRM initiative...

What the world needs now: Another religion

Yoism is a made-up "open source" religion that replaces God with an impersonal Divine Mystery that seems to be loosely defined as "The Stuff that Is and the Scientifical Laws It Follows," so that the proof of Yo's existence consists of saying that the universe exists. Yoism pledges to build Heaven on Earth, and, best of all, without self sacrifice!

I'm confident Yoism is built on the best of intentions. I'm just having trouble getting past the unintentional self-parody. I guess that makes me a small person.

Thanks to Ross Knights for the link.

Audio Barlow

The audio blog of the Berkman center has an interview with John Perry Barlow about the future and present of ideas...a reflection on his "Economy of Ideas" article in Wired ten years ago.

JD's outline

JD has posted the outline of his new book and is looking for feedback.

My feedback: It looks really interesting.

BTW, I'm encouraged by the EFF's proposal for voluntary collective licensing, using the ASCAP/BMI model to help us find a way out of the music sharing quandary.

Jay Rosen on the Master Narrative

Jay finds a positive example, a reporter who sets out to avoid the lures of the Master Narrative. Brilliant, important stuff

Dean's dysfunctional "family"

Fascinating article in the Washington Post by Howard Kurtz about the dysfunctional nature of the Dean campaign organization. Reading it makes you realize that the notion that the campaign's infatuation with the Internet brought it down is a point of view that only someone infatuated with the Internet would propose. Far more destructive were the personal and organizational frictions caused by a small-town campaign suddenly going national.

[Cross-posted at Loose Democracy]

Dean disputes the accuracy of the quotes in the article.

The money behind LOTR

Miramax (owned by Disney) acquired the rights to The Lord of the Rings in 1996 but backed out of the deal in 1998 when Peter Jackson presented his budget. New Line Cinema (owned by Time Warner) stepped in and, under producer Barrie Osborne, stepped up to the plate. The three installments cost a toal of $270M to produce, and that's before marketing costs were added, not to mention the vaseline budget for the cameras filming Liv Tyler.

So, here's a toast to the money guys who said Yes to a director whose pitch must have gone something like this:

I'd like to film one of the most beloved and jealously protected literary properties in history.

I'd like to turn it into a sword-and-dwarves epic that will run somewhere between 9 and 11 hours.

I plan on shooting the largest, most complex battle scenes in history. And you can trust me based on my work in Heavenly Creatures.

We'll have to invent the most convincing CGI effects ever. In fact, the pivotal character will be made entirely of pixels. And you can trust me to bring true humanity to the art of digital acting based on my breakthrough work in Meet the Feebles.

A work of this scale will require marshalling 25,000 people over the course of several years. And I think I proved my ability to do so with Valley of the Stereos.

All hail Peter Jackson! But thanks, for once, to the money people who took the leap with him.

[Cross-posted at BlogCritics.org]