Cool stuff with tags

Check the tag "10placesofmycity" at Technorati. People from around the world are tagging URLS, posts and photos showing off where they live. Technorati is automatically assembling them into a mini city pride portal. Cool! [Technorati tag: taxonomy] [Disclosure: I'm on technorati's board of advisors.]

Best D'oh! of the year so far

Matt Biddulf has an animated screen capture of what del.icio.us would look like embedded in the BBC 3's page. It's an eye-popper all right: So elegant it seems obvious. Brilliant. (Thanks to The Obvious for the link.) [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

danah responds to Clay's enthusiasm (which I generally share) for tags.

There’s a problematic feature to crowds - they like to homogenize...

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

These are great questions, and leave it to danah to ask them! We'll address them as they occur...but only if (as danah suggests) we keep raising them. Otherwise, we'd have to design a system ahead of time that we would undoubtedly get wrong.

Tags, labels and piles of leaves

[This is the conclusion of the article on tagging I published a few days ago in my newsletter.]

You label a jar of preserves "Strawberry - Aug. 2005" so you can tell what's in it and whether the green stuff on top is supposed to be there. At Flickr, you tag a digital photo of your jar of preserves "strawberry jam" so other people can find it. The label has a context: the thing that it's attached to. The tag's context is invisible and detached: It's how you think other people are going to search for it. (As Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us, says, tagging is the inverse of searching.)

So, we're creating this context-free realm of free-floating metadata, like word magnets on a refrigerator door, that we will paw through and assemble, and, most important, do things we haven't yet thought of.

The fact that we are inventing this way of classifying is important. It announces that we are skeptical at a whole new level: Not just about the content of knowledge but about how it's divvied up in the first place.

This explicitly pries yet another layer off the real and pulls it into the human, for in a tagged world, it's hard to maintain that topics exist independent of us. Or disciplines. Instead, we cluster our world around our interests. New interest? Shuffle and deal again.

The project of knowledge goes from filling up containers with information to making everything public by tagging it and throwing it into the leaf pile. We're doing that together, without waiting for a plan or permission. Then we're rolling around in the leaves.

This is a knowledge economy of wild excess. It would make no sense if we were still scratching for information under rocks.

We are meaning our world together. We can't do it if we have to do it perfectly or even well. It's better just to do it.

We can sort it out later. [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

BBN rips lid off my seamy relationship with EthanZ

I ignored Ethan's blogging of a comment about my after-dinner speech last week because it was way too embarrassing. Unfortunately, the bastards at Better Bad News have a 15 minute video (also available as a podcast) that begins there, figures out I'm a schmuck, and moves onto the important issues of blogging and credibility. (Hint: It's very funny and they're right.)

Ethan responds with appropriate outrage here.

Yay for democracy

Hooray for the elections in Iraq! The accounts are moving. For example, from the Boston Globe:

Wamidh Imad al-Zubaidi, an engineer, almost decided not to vote after death threats against would-be voters circulated in his mixed Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhood, Zayouna. Then, he said, he remembered his brother, who was executed for opposing Saddam Hussein's regime.

''I feel a power inside myself, and there is a voice telling me, this should not happen to my son or to any Iraqi. I have to prevent this dictatorship from returning to Iraq," he said, adding that he braved the polls with his pregnant wife. ''We put it in God's hands."

But declarations the elections have been are "resounding success" are obviously premature. Did Iraq just vote or did it just establish the fault lines of a civil war?

So, I find myself torn. I am thrilled Saddam is gone and people are voting. But it's still not how I'd choose to spend the money and lives this war we were lied into cost.

Michael Prothero has a nice piece at Salon reporting from the scene.

The street where journalism ends

Bernard Weinraub, former entertainment reporter for The New York Times, writes about what it's like to be a journalist at Hollywood and Vine. The basic lesson seems to be that you can't fully stand apart from the world about which you're reporting. Hollywood, despite its excesses, does not seem to be a special case: Reporters embedded in the financial world, DC or in a foreign capital must face the same situation, albeit with fewer Hummers and tiaras in view. Access is the currency and humans remain human.

Too bad Weinraub wasn't writing a blog during all those years. We would have gotten a sense of the winds buffeting him as he tried to stand tall. Plus, the dishing have been fabulous.

Right brainer

Daniel "Free Agent Nation" Pink (who was also a speechwriter for Gore, by the way), has published a terrific piece in the new Wired on why we need to commit to the right halves of our brains. Best of all, it's from his upcoming book.

Wikipedia has no articles

I have been corrected by the estimable SJ Klein for referring to Wikipedia as "the Wikipedia." I stand corrected and will attempt to avoid mistake next time. I hope I have not caused Wikipedia any the distress.

Shafer's mischaracterization

Jack Shafer's piece in Slate misrepresents what went on at the WebCred conference. The piece says the bloggers in attendance "declared blogs the destroyers of mainstream media." (Notice Jack's use of the term "declared" instead of "said" or, say, "ruminated," btw.) That's a long way from what I thought happened. I thought we had a useful, interesting, and many-sided discussion about how blogs are already changing journalism and how they might in the future. Yes, the bloggers thought the change is going to be more radical, inevitable and unpredictable than the mainstream media folks did. (Note: I'm generalizing.) And, sure, there were moments of conflict. But Jack presents his insight — "the alleged divide between the old media and this new whippersnapper media of blogs has never seemed real to me" — as a corrective to the conference when in fact it was the subject of the very first (and very excellent) presentation at the conference by Jay Rosen, which then served as the premise of the discussion.

Shafer's piece, which contains good thoughts, irks me because he is letting himself play the hard-headed realist at the cost of making others look foolish. Ed Cone in his column today, IMO not only presents the conference more accurately, but also learns from the conversation.

Two notes:

1. Jay Rosen, who was among those singled out by Shafer's article, responds personally here.

2. There's such a thing as premature realism.

Digital hockey season

G4techTV, a cable network that shows people playing video games, has simulated the entire missing National Hockey League season using NHL 2005 from Electronic Arts. According to an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, the network has played all 1,230 games on the NHL schedule using the computer-plays-computer option. (The game has a large set of stats for each player.) The network is releasing the results according to the hockey schedule, so although the computers know who won the Stanley Cup, we don't.

The response has been anemic. The network stopped showing its nightly "highlights" show in November. The network's sr. vp of programming says it's because people don't care about hockey. "''I think it would have been better if the NBA had been locked out instead of the NHL," he said.

I doubt it. But if we knew why we don't care about sport simulations but care absurdly about actual sports, we'd be a long way toward understanding our implicit metaphysics: free will, agency, the contingent, personhood, virtue...the whole shooting match, so to speak.

Favorite phone call so far this morning

[Ring ring]

Me: Hello.

Her: Hello!

Me: Hello!

Her: How are you this morning?

Me: I'm fine. Who is this, please?

Her: It's your mother-in-law.

Me: (Sputtering) Oh. Sorry! I didn't recognize your voice. How are you?

Her: (Laughing) That's ok...

Me: Wait, you're calling on my business line.

Her: Is this John?

Me: Nope. (laughing) Now you feel the fool!

Her: (laughing) I'm sorry!

Me: No problem. And give John my best.

Category guilt and more

In response to AKMA's confession, Dave writes about feeling guilty about not using categories: When he failed to use them a few times, he felt so guilty about it that he stopped using them entirely.

Best of all, now those of us who do use tags can engage in Taggenfreude. (Sign of a meme catching on: Bad bad puns. Why? Because they're as easy as falling off a blog.)

Jay at iCite has some trenchant comments on the article on tagging in the new issue of my newsletter. (I've replied in a comment.)

Dan Bricklin reflects on this and decides that software needs to take guiltlessness as a desideratum.

New issue of my newsletter

I just published a new issue of my (free) newsletter:

January 28, 2005

Pi: Order of magnitude quiz

Hiroyuki Goto holds the record for reciting the value of pi. How many digits did he memorize? To win, you have to come within an order of magnitude. Prize: The satisfaction of know you guessed good.

Drag-select between the X's to see the answer.

X ————In 1995, he recited over 42,000 digits. It took him 9 hours. ———— X

Burningbird on why tagging can't violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Burningbird pulls together a whole bunch of excellent posts about tags, and marshalls them into a discussion dead center on the main point:

I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they're fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.

...no matter how many tricks you play with something like tags, you can only pull out as much 'meaning' as you put into them.

...the semantic web is going to be built 'by the people', but it won’t be built on chaos. In other words, 100 monkeys typing long enough will NOT write Shakespeare; nor will a 100 million people randomly forming associations create the semantic web.

(This snippet doesn't do justice to the piece. It's a must-read.)

Shelley understands this stuff better than I do, but I'm not convinced she's right. My initial concern about the hype is whether we're going to get more apps that get us tagging. If we don't, then tags won't have much effect. If we do, then I simply don't know whether we're going to be able to solve the problems inherent in scaling tags: Tags work because they're so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won't work because they're so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data - especially social data - so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn't seem impossible to me - simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in - but it's not up to me to invent the stuff.

So, I think you can get more out of a tag than someone put in. But I don't know how and I don't know if we will.

Exley on how to fix the Democratic Party

Zack Exley, ex of MoveOn and ex Internet guy for the ex Kerry campaign, kicks off his new blog with a Rosen-length piece — and it's just part 1 of 4 — on what the Democratic Party ought to do to get itself back together.

Zack is not as much of a soft-headed, touchy-feely Web guy as I am. And that's a good thing. We need people like Zack if we're going to win elections, although, IMO, we have to do the touchy-feely stuff if we're going to transform democracy. But let's make damn sure we win some freaking elections already.

Zack's ten-point proposal for "building a permanent field program with the New Grassroots" suggests a way to quickly build up a field organization that does the hard work of traditional politics. He says it combines the benefits of democracy and hierarchy. Conclusion:

Using the online assets that Democrats built in 2004, we should be able to jump light years ahead of the Republican field organization. If we do, it will not be thanks to Internet Magic, but rather thanks to mixing new online tools and resources with good old-fashioned grassroots organizing, focusing on results.

I don't know enough about how politics actually works to be able to evaluate his plan, but I have a lot of respect for Zack. And, yes, his proposal is all about reinventing how the Democrats can do the work of traditional politics — building a clean database of vote information, organizing phone banks, raising money, etc. — and not about building communities and enabling lateral conversation. But, this is not an either/or. And if what Zack proposes can help us change our government's current direction, I'm all in favor of it.

Besides, he has another 3 parts coming.

Congressman Barney Frank blogs from Davos

My Congressperson, Barney Frank, is blogging live from the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. For example, here's a post on the conference blog in which you can feel him trying to process the gap in values and even cognition between him and those he thought he agreed with. Barney's not exactly a hep cat when it comes to technology (and he's not exactly great on tech issues), so it's especially good to see him bloggin' away. [Technorati tag: davos]

Bogus Contest: Truth in Britannicas

From the TimesOnLine, by Alexandra Blair:

A SCHOOLBOY with a fascination for Poland and wildlife has uncovered several significant errors in the latest — the fifteenth — edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Lucian George, 12, a pupil at Highgate Junior School in North London, was delving into the volumes on Poland and wildlife in Central Europe when he noted the mistakes.

The first was the assertion by the internationally acclaimed reference book that the small town of Chochim, in which two battles were fought between the Poles and the Ottoman Empire, now lies in Moldova.

“Wrong,” said Lucian, who attends the former hall of learning of Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. “Chochim is in Ukraine.”...

Bogus contest: Write your own tag line for the Britannica, preferably containing the word "Wikipedia." For instance:

"Encyclopaedia Britannica...It's like Wikipedia, but slower!"

Jay aggregates WebCred

Jay Rosen asked the attendees at the WebCred conference to send him an email describing something the conference change changed their mind about. He has stitched the replies into three posts: 1 2 3.

He also points to Dan Gillmor's excellent Reagan-esque call for newspapers to tear down the walls around their archives. Jay calls it a "must read." I agree. [Technorati tag: webcred]

Gunner Palace

Gunner Palace looks like it might be good. It's a non-political documentary about the life of our soldiers in Baghdad. (Yeah yeah, I know everything is political.) The trailer maybe has a couple too many ironic shots, and the rock 'n' roll soundtrack of the second trailer is too expected, but those seem like trailer artifacts. They're sending me a "screener" - I feel so Hollywood! - so I'll let you know...

P2P fashion

The Annenberg School of Communication is holding a conference called "Ready to Share" (not "ready to wear" ...get it?) to explore the way the fashion industry remixes styles without anyone getting their ultra-glamorous knickers in a twist.

We have something to learn from the fashion industry. If it were like the music industry, someone would have claimed a copyright on wearing your cap backwards.

Postponing Berkman session tonight

It's crappy out and getting crappier. Um, I mean, Boston is being blanketed with innocence made crystalline. So, I'm postponing tonight's Web of Ideas session until Feb. 2.

Damn snow.

Watermark art

Rageboy discovers some found art (finds some discovered art?) on a site that sells stock images cheap.

Web of Ideas: Everything is miscellaneous

Tonight I'm going to lead another session in the semi-regular series at the Berkman Center. This time, I'm going to try out a presentation I'm giving in a couple of weeks at a conference. The topic has something to do with taxonomies and tagging. (Yes, it will repeat some material in the dinner talk I gave last week, and a bunch of stuff from the Library of Congress speech. But it will have new stuff on tagging.)

It's 6-7:30pm at the Baker House (map). It's open to the public and pizza will be served.

Phonoe photos of big-time art

Bill Koslowsky has posted some remarkably good photos taken with his Treo at the Museum of Modern Art.

Wacky Wiki Wemix

Joi has posted a remix of Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales talking at the WebCred conference. Its 41 seconds of audio delight. (Hint: "NPOV" = neutral point of view.)

Technorati tags: webcred joi

Canadian broadband irony

I readily acknowledge that with this screen capture I'm indulging in cheap irony and that the real question is — as Dewayne Hendricks said in forwarding the link — why the US doesn't have an initiative like this Canadian one. Nevertheless, you don't turn down a chance to blog cheap irony, do you, especially when that's our only way of maintaining our sense of national superiority...?

Taxonomy Tales

It's not that we need more proof of the point, but James Carroll, columnist for the Boston Globe, today gives a particularly good example of the politics of categorization. He writes that the first New York Times story about Auschwitz, on May 8, 1945, is surprisingly detailed and blunt about what happened in the death camp where 2 million people were murdered. There's only one major omission: "...in defining the identities of those victims, the story never used the word 'Jew.'" He adds:

The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration camps under the category "Jews" until 1950. It was not until 1975 that the index category "Nazi Policies Toward Jews" appeared.

By the way, the Times story was written by C. L. Sulzberger and appeared on page 12.

Technorati tag: taxonomy

My dinner speech

Benjamen "Theory of Everything" Walker has moved the mp3 of my after-dinner speech to a new home.

Download

Stream

Thanks, Benjamen, for recording it and posting it.

ZDNet's podcasting starts here

David Berlind posts a photo of what could be the start of ZDNet's podcasting empire. You saw it here (uh, there) first!

No, I don't find the snow charming

Three hours later...

Big Bri has posted an eerie Boston snow-at-midnight photo. FreckleGirl shows what it means to dig out a car. And Trevor and his pals are just nuts :) (Thanks to Boston Online for the links.)

Condensed philosophical soup

Squashed Philosophers boils 'em down for you. None of that bothersome reading or thinking required! (Thanks, Staci.)

[bjc] Wrap-ups

Here are some people reflecting on the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference:

Rebecca Mackinnon. Snippet:

...the interests of the people communicating on the web will drive the evolution. But if this "interest" largely represents the interest of middle-class, white, affluent, early adopters, we are in danger of creating a feedback loop that would become less and less inclusive of people who were not in on the conversation at the beginning. Some of us are looking at ways to broaden the global conversation with such projects as Global Voices and the Digital Divide Network.

John Palfrey. Snippet:

We started this event — and an associated little firestorm — by broaching the topic of credibility on the web. It was something, we thought, that both journalists and bloggers ought to have a role in working on. Over the past two days (January 21 and 22, 2005), we made some progress in that direction. But not frankly all that much progress. We're certainly a long way from a shared set of principles, or a code of ethics, or even an understanding of how they could come about. (Personally, I think that there are already norms in the blogosphere that result in credibility, that such norms will continue to come from the bottom up, that those norms will be undergirded by accountability to one another, and that that will work, but I might be wrong. And this notion did not come up at the event.)

Jay Rosen. Snippet:

“The forces of denial are in retreat.” Which is simply my impression–an educated guess, really–about where the mainstream journalism world is, right now, on matters of blogging, journalism, Internet, and trust. For a very long time, the mainstream press has denied that it needs to change any of its ideas about journalism in order to survive and prosper on the new platform. Adapt what you’re doing now? Sure. Journalists knew they had to do that. Transfer it to the new platform? You bet; lots of transferring would be needed. Preserve “traditional” values? Yes, journalists thought it was important to conserve what was valuable about journalism. Re-purpose content online? Of course. But…

Dave Winer. Snippet:

...the real accomplishment may be that now we better understand who we are, having had a chance to take the same side, even though we're so different. For example, I came to admire John Hinderaker, of Power Line, even though our politics are opposite. We have deeper values that bind us. Same with Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia guy. Again, we're opposites in the way we create text but we're both advocates for the same idea, people doing it for themselves.

Zephyr. Snippet:

One model of journalism ... says that the journalists are good reporters because they are not from the community. A stranger makes a better journalist than a friend; the best journalist is detached. When people get excited about citizen journalism (people including myself), we get excited about news – information and framing – coming from a much wider group of storytellers, but also a group that reflects and is the community – the jury of the 1500s.

But I can't fit this into a box — truth seeking mechanisms are not only about truth, they are also...about the act of witnessing itself.

Jon Bonne. This is what the conference looks like filtered through the eyes of a food blogger. Snippet:

No dis to the Harvard Faculty Club, but I was finding it pretty hard to drink their wine last night – a Chilean cab sauv that was pretty much all oak and blackberry, with that vegetal underripe thing lurking in the background and nothing else. Even one of their servers acknowledged, sotto voce, that it was kinda nasty.

(Jon blogs about the substance of the conference here.)

Sources:
Transcripts and audio
Dave's conference blog aggregator
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Technorati tag
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Transcript and audio of my dinner talk

Technorati tag: bjc

Ahnuld's first kill

So, Gov. Schwarzenegger has killed his first real person. To me, that makes the case that if we're going to have actors as leaders, they at least ought to be good actors.

Why? Empathy.

Transparency demonstrated

David Berlind posts the raw material behind his journalism. Cool!

[bjc] My dinner talk

I gave the after dinner speech to the conference. The incredible SJ has posted a rough, unedited transcript. (I haven't read it yet.) I talked about three separate topics: tags, philosophical ethics, and blogging. Now Ben Walker has posted an mp3 of it. (Thanks Ben and SJ.) [Note: The link to the mp3 is the new one. There is also now a RealAudio streaming version.) [Technorati tags: webcred tags]

[bjc] Morning

We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met hostility?)

Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he'd lose tons of contributors.

I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It's neutral when we stop arguing about it. But who is the "we"?

Jimmy responded that he's concerned to make the community that supports Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil rights. E.g., you can't be banned just for disagreeing with someone politicallly.

I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it's definitely white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. "We're in over 50 languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There's a certain kind of diversity that's hard to achieve just because of where pepole live." He points out that USB article in the US version is a "fantastic, clear article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic." He says they're trying to reach out to people. "I'm very interested in reaching out to the Arabic community. We're trying to reach out but it's difficult."

Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.

Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don't know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to professionals.

Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. "How do you batten down the hatches against that?" Jimmy says: We try to think of problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. "The community's already scaled much larger than I ever imagined."

Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will have some original reporting. It's going to have to be high-quality, he says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.

Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," and suggests that that's a good motto for this conference.

Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about a government official posted on an anonymous blog.

Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn't publish it without checking it out. E.g., the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos, and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you follow the same rules.

Jay Rosen says he wouldn't run it.

Dave Winer does run items he hasn't checked out. He asks himself if he thinks it's true, and asks himself what he's basing it on. He also tells his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.

Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn't enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you'd have to get comments.

John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn't go with anything that's anonymous.

Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn't. The change to the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who think they're sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don't think we're journalists at all.

Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue things cause harm.

Ethan says that I'm being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies and it gets indexed. [Yes. It's not identical to water cooler talk, but it's more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn't. But those responsibilities aren't the same as journalists...although we can learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g., disclosure.]

Jay: I'm trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual certainty.

Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they're revenues are based on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution back to you. People say "Gee I wish we had your Google power." We got that power because people are copying our content.

Jim Kennedy: In concept, it's kind of neat. I'm worried about what sort of abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who thought they had a right to it. And it's more of a problem for images and video.

Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses...Your model doesn't depend on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn't apply to you. But it does to newspapers.

Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.

Jim: It's an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.

Jay: In five years you'll change.

Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what he's written?

Jim: I don't disagree with you. We just don't have a mechanism for it.

Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. "I don't know if it hurt sales, but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic."

Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask how people still make money doing it, we can't talk well together. (Dave says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)

Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says journalists don't recognize the damage because they can always get at the content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon journalists to demand this.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now he's thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about alternative business models.

Jay points to an article about The Guardian's reasons for making the archives permanently available.

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages, and they could sell advertising.

Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We're just stuck between models for a while. [Technorati tags: bjc]

GoAwayDaddy

Here is a policy from GoDaddy, a domain registrar:

QUESTION: Why is GoDaddy.com blocking people in certain countries from accessing its site?

ANSWER: GoDaddy.com actively blocks the following countries from using our services due to U.S. government policies:

Cuba
Iran
Iraq
Libya
North Korea
Sudan
Syria

The U.S. Department of State has declared the governments of these states to be sponsors of international terrorism

How screwed up is this? Bush's inaugural address told us we are the purveyors of liberty. That must mean that we want these oppressive governments to fail so that their people can be free. Yet, according to GoDaddy's interpretation, we are to deny those citizens the instruments of their liberty. As Hoder says:

I wonder whether this is what president Bush considers standing with a nation for their freedom. Who else is using these websites other than mostly secular, freedom-loving Iranian youth?

By the way, in a press release on Jan. 12 GoDaddy boasts: "Go Daddy has found its SSL Certificates reaching into virtually every corner of the globe, with new orders coming daily from Europe, Australia, the MidEast, South America and Japan." Well, not every corner.

[The link is from the irc for webcred: webcred at irc.freenode.net. See Hoder's bloggage.]

[bjc] Friday: The things I want to say

On Friday, the pivotal moment for me was when Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia replied to Jill Abramson of the NY Times. Jill was reminding us how expensive it is to maintain overseas reporters, an expense bloggers can't bear. There were a number of replies about how bloggers could reduce that expense, but Jimmy took a different tack. The Encyclopedia Britannica is a $350M operation, he said, but Wikipedia is kicking its butt without having a single employee.

Some of the media folks jumped on this, saying that the Jimmy is underestimating the value of their operations. Jimmy replied that of course the existing media couldn't be replaced except by something that offers more value. Jimmy wasn't crowing and he certainly wasn't threatening. He was pointing to the success of the Wikipedia as a cautionary tale.

I don't blame the media folks who reacted negatively. First, it's a human reaction. But more important, I think it's a sign of the cognitive gap between us; we've made progress in understanding one another, but we're now at the point where the misunderstandings are so deep that they're easier to ignore than to confront.

So, here's the cognitive gap that I see: The media folks (generalizing) still think that the important effect that blogging is having on them — and they do believe it's having an effect — comes from bloggers who are sorta kinda journalists. But that's a tiny percentage of the blogosphere. The truly disruptive effect of bloggers comes from the rest of the blogosphere that doesn't think of itself as journalistic at all. We're not the farm team for Big Media. We're a different ballpark entirely.

In fact, we're not a ballpark at all, of course. The other big gap between us is easy to state but hard to explain: The media is owned. The blogosphere isn't. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It's ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.

Something like that. [Technorati tags: bjc blogs]

[bjc] Friday afternoon session 2

Jeff Jarvis leads a spirited discussion.

[bjc] Friday afternoon - First ten minutes

[Links to the participants] [Conference blog aggregator] [IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net]

Topic: How can institutional journalists adopt what's good about blogging? And what happens to bloggers?

Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online was commissioned to write a paper about transparency. He raises three questions for discussion: 1) What kinds of promises might be made to create the relationships we want between readers and writers. 2) If transparency isn't enough to create trust, what will? 3) What's the coolest tool we could create that would help us get at better representations of reality. [My answer to #3 is simple: Weblogs.]

Karen Schneider says she represents the end of the info transaction. In her professoin (librarian), the code of ethics says that users should do less of the work, despite Dan Gillmor's saying that we're going to have to do more work.

[And then I stopped trying to keep up. Things got good 'n' heated. Sorry. But it's being transcribed at #webcredtrans at irc.freenode.net]

Wikipedia breaks news

Jimmy Wales, at the BJC conference's backchannel, has pointed out that Wikipedia has broken news that has not yet been picked up by the media: Unrest in Belize. Fascinating.

Degrees of belief

One of the differences between the journalists and the rest of us: Journalists have a tiny vocabulary for expressing incredulity: "alleged," "reportedly," "claimed," "suspected." The rest of us have a rich rhetoric of semi-belief, starting with a simple "I think that..." and going all the way to "I find it really hard to believe anything that lying fathead says, but..."

Part of the value of traditional journalists is that they only tell us what they know. But that's a more fragile credibility. And it forces uncertainty out of stories, or, worse, allows it only in what isn't said.

[bjc] Judith Donath

Judith Donath

Look at credibility in terms of signals that occur even among animals where if the signal is costly, it's more likely to be honest. E.g., a moose with big antlers actually is strong. There's also reputation among animals. Sparrows have pecking orders based on having a black mark on their chest that doesn't signal any real property. A scientist painted a black mark on one. It gained in status. When the sparrows figured out that it was painted on [how?], the other sparrows pecked it to death.

What do the webs of links among bloggers mean? How do they build a reputation system and credibility? What are the reprecussions of lying about them? And will readers care enough to put energy into discerning the credibility of what and who they read? There's a cost to that evaluation. People will look for cheaper shortcuts. E.g., they might look to the journalistic elite: Newspapers check the reps of their writers on behalf of their readers. We can't rely on the audience to do that vetting. At what point will bloggers set up collectives and risk their reputation for one another, vouching for their reputations?

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia speculates that it'd be interesting to have a group blog where the contributors group edit their work and the work is published as a group product.

Jane Singer says with regard to credibility the relevant signal is what I do, not what I say about myself.

Jonathan Zittrain: What you say, what you do and perhaps how you live? The journalists at the conference have been less active participants in this discussion. How much of telling truth to others means standing apart from life? [Technorati tags: bjc donath

Halley interviews Dan

Dan Gillmor, who I think we ought to start calling The Dan, is interviewed by Halley at IT Conversations. (I haven't heard it yet because I'm at a conference, but how could it be bad?)

[bjc] Friday morning

[Links to the participants] Conference blog aggregator IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net]

Jan Schaffer, Jimmy Wales, Faye Anderson

jon Bonne, Kathy Im, Alex Jones

Jay Rosen leads off with a brief talk about the paper commissioned for this conference, "Bloggers cs. Journalists Is Over." [I like the idea of conferences commissioning papers. Also maybe next time: music.] He sees the paper as a "peace-making" document that's also "trouble-making." Peace: The war and the cartoon dialogue should be over. It doesn't mean that the discussion is over. The tension is inevitable. But look at how independent citizens were able to contribute to the tsunami story.

Jay says there's a powershift from producers to "consumers." This has led to a loss of sovereignty, a loss of exclusive control. As Rebecca Blood says, blogging and journalism exist in a shared media space. [I actually don't think blogging is a type of medium. [Note: In the comments to this post, Rebecca Blood clarifies and corrects my statement. Thanks and sorry, Rebecca!] The people pushing it forward are in general not the professional journalists but people on the Web. He says the majority of readers of the NY Times read it on line, but the reporters at the NY Times generally feel they're writing for a traditional paper that happens to have an online supplement.

Dave Winer responds. He says what's great about Jay is that he came from the world of ink and really understood what we're doing. It's not about blogging replacing and destroying journalism. It's really hard to find the boundaries. One way to get there would be for the journalists to look at some of the practices of blogging. E.g., full transcripts of every interview.

Bob giles of the Nierman Foundation says he's never thought about it as adversarial. Corporate news organizations ingest ideas very slowly. Ed Cone is doing very interesting work in Greensboro.

Open discussion:

Jon Garfunkel responds to Jay's points, saying (overall) that Jay gives too much credit to bloggers.

Dorothy Zinberg: What is the psychological gap? How would an ink person think differently if she were writing for a blog?

Jay: Every reader is a writer. Every reader is connected horizontally to all the other readers. In Web publishing, the editing occurs after publication.

Jeff Jarvis: Yes, there isn't a war. At some point we won't be able to tell the difference between journalism and citizen journalism, but now they are distinct and there's a tensions.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet project says that it's recognized now that trust and credibility are social processes: The process of deciding what to believe in and act on is a conversational process. In his research, he sees this happening in the health community where the omnipotent doctor is giving way to online support groups of various sorts.

Chris Lydon argues against the reconciliation. As Dave Winer says, bloggers are evangelists. The blogosphere is a better metaphor for God than the NY Times. "I used to think of the NY Times as God's memo on the day." The new metaphor is technorati: You can scan the home page and see a million bloggers...

Ed Clone: I'm a journalist and I didn't understand blogging until I got one. He points to Greensboro101.com and the fact that there's plenty of space for citizen journalists. "I'm a writer and reporter and I feel tremendously empowered by these tools."

Jan Schaffer says the question is: What will news look like in the future?

Rebecca Mackinnon asks if participatory journalism will result in feedback loops where people only hear wht they want ot hear and not what they don't want to hear?

Dan Gillmor, in response to Chris Lydon, says that the NY Times of the rich and powerful and the blogosphere is the trade journal of us and how we live our daily lives. And we need ways to track the conversations better.

Hoder (via IRC): Blogs have more credibility in closed societies.

John Hinderaker: I want to put in a good word for objectivity. I define it as neutrality, fairness, accuracy, and it should remain an important goal for people doing primary news reporting. Objectivity is never perfect; all journalists know that.

Jeff Jarvis: John, who do you think is doing a good job of it?

John: Many reporters do an excellent job. The problem with the NY Times, Washington Post and CBS is they lack diversity: Almost all the editors are liberals.

Dave W: Objectivity leads to you not disclosing your point of view and to a lack of transparency. Newspapers ought to provide a dossier of all previous articles, what school they went to, etc.

Alex Jones: Winer is onto something important. Objectivity is important to traditional journalism. Accountability and transparency may be the greatest things the blogosphere can bring to journalism. I don't think the question of who you are is important to mainstream journalism gaining credibility, but it ought to be responsible for how they made the choices they did. The "who" issue gets in the way: A Democratic can write about a Republican. The "who" would be used mainly to discredit people.

Faye Anderson: Bloggers are more easily transparent because we have links and more context.

Jeff: Objectivity is a sink hole. What we really want to do is be honest and tell the truth.

Me: Objectivity is a methodology and a rhetoric. (And newspapers in their objectivity also tell us what we should find interesting.) The rise of blogs tells us that we're interested in other forms of rhetoric and are taking over the question of what we found interesting.

Me: Three possible dimensions of tension between j and b: Economics, truth and reputation.

Xiang Qiang: We should focus on the collective effect of the blogosphere.

Bill Buzenberg: We've created a big data of people in our audience who are willing to give us info. It's a revolution in sourcing.

Dan: We need to expect more of what used to be alled "the audience." They have more work to do.

David Sifry: I care a lot about objectivity, but what's most important to me when I read the media is trust. Do I trust the person I'm listening to. Knowing that there are fact checkers and an attempt to be objective helps me to trust a newspaper. But I can lso check what the bloggers are saying and watch what they do over time and what other people are saying about them...that gives me a huge amount of info about whether I can trust them. And that's were the common ground is.

Jane Singer: How do we get people to go read people they don't agree with?

Susan Tifft: The younger generation generally doesn't know what blogs are and is confused about what journalism is.

Jeff: More voices are good and we link to lots of voices.

Lee: Our research shows that the most fervent information seekers (about 15-20% of the general population of adult Americans) are aware of many more political arguments than those who do not. They are not only going to sites that reinforce their views.

Chris: The conflict is between the blogosphere and the media powers that be. The crisis is that we're not well-informed. The goal of journalism is popular wisdom [= making the populace wise] and we're in deep trouble.

Jay: Bill Buzenberg's comment represents a big change in American journalism. The old idea is that the audience lacks knowledge and that's why they need the journalists. Bill's idea is really different. WRT objectivity, of course we want people to step outside their own beliefs. That's integrity, not objectivty. We used to be able to believe that the quality of info comes from professionalism, having a strong organization, having good intentions. Now we're realizing that it's deeply related to the quality of your connection to the people you're trying to inform. Without good conection, there won't be good information. Bloggers have that connection.

Jonathan Zittrain: This conference started out with a lot of excitement and buzz. Journalism is ill right now. What's at stake is how we frame our view of the world. We need to find ways to frame the world in less than a 1:1 ratio.

[bjc] First (and last?) photos

I'm at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference, sponsored by Berkman, Shorenstein and the ALA.

Here are the first two photos I've taken, and quite possibly the last just because the conf looks like it will be pretty intense.

Lovely meeting room. The South Vietnamese will be on the left, the North Vietnamese on the right, and Henry Kissinger will be in the middle

Dan Gillmor, chief citizen journalist, and John Hinderaker of Powerline

Berkman Web of Ideas: Everything Is Miscellaneous

This coming Wednesday I'm holding another in a series of open sessions on, well, ideas I'm interested in. This time will be a little different because I want to try out a presentation I'm giving at the TTI Vanguard meeting in SF in a few weeks. The title is "Everything Is Miscellaneous," and I'm really not yet settled on what I'm actually going to say. But here's the blurb:

For 2,500 years, knowledge was shaped like a tree. It had a root, branches and leaves. Now that we're digitizing all the information we can lay our mitts on, it's becoming clear that trees make sense within the constraints of the real world but are far too limited when it comes to organizing information in the digital world: Trees assume a leaf really should be on only one branch, favor neatness over mess, are owned by the people who own the knowledge, and assume the universe can be known ahead of time. We are instead rapidly inventing new principles of organization, from faceted classification to bottom-up folksonomies. If we change the most basic principles of organization, what will happen to knowledge and to the institutions that take their shape from knowledge?

The session is open to anyone. It runs from 6-7:30pm at the Berkman Center's Baker House in Cambridge (map). Best of all: Free pizza.

Blogs as a moral presence

A few days ago, I got an email from a reader outraged that I hadn't commented on Harvard President Lawrence Summers' discouraging remarks. I replied to her that I hadn't had anything interesting to say and I don't feel obligated to comment on every issue of note. From her point of view, because I'm paid (a little bit) by Harvard, my failure to blog was a failure of courage. (I eventually did blog about it, but my affiliation with Harvard is temporary and so far below Summers' radar that it took 0.0 pounds of courage.)

Then Jay Rosen blogged about the silence of PR bloggers about Ketchum's sliminess in the Armstrong Willilams affair. Jay points to an exception: The CEO of Edelman PR, Richard Edelman, blogged twice in no uncertain terms about Ketcham's culpability. In the comments, Jay asks me if I think the existence of Richard's blog altered the way he responded. Although I know Richard a little, I obviously can't speak for him. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in cases like this — if it's a PR scandal and you head a PR agency, or it's a Harvard scandal and you work at Harvard — if you have a blog, not addressing the issue is itself a presumptive moral statement. Of course it's not clear how to take that statement: Maybe you had nothing to say, maybe you're on a plane, maybe you just don't feel like it, maybe you're feeling too confused or too sick at heart. Even so, the blank blog is staring back at you.

Blogs call forth moral presence.

[To disclose yet again: I've started consulting to Edelman PR but had nothing to do with Richard's blogging about Ketchum. I wish that I did.]

Wikipedia topics to love

Heavy Metal Umlauts

A failure of disclosure

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, the largest independent public relations company, has started a weblog. I noted that fact on Nov. 23, and also disclosed that I've done a little work for the company and know Richard a bit. Recently I've become a consultant to the company on how the Internet and PR intersect.

Jay Rosen today posts a good piece that expresses surprise and dismay that the blogosphere — and particularly, the part that blogs about PR — has ignored Richard's posts excoriating Ketchum for betraying the PR code of ethics in the Armstrong Williams propaganda scandal. And before you say, "PR code of ethics? Isn't that an oxymoron? Heh heh," meet Richard.

So, here's the odd thing. I would have linked to his posts but Edelman PR is a new client, and Richard was personally involved in engaging me, so it felt too shill-y and suck-uppity to suddenly start pointing to his posts, even with a disclosure statement. Then there's the fact that I didn't read his posts until long enough afterwards that I felt embarrassed about tacitly acknowledging it; that was a failure as a consultant. (Just to be clear: I had nothing at all to do with the content of Richard's posts.)

On reflection I think it was a mistake not to have blogged them. As Jay says, Richard's posts fulfilled "the public service promise of CEO blogging" and deserve more than close to zero linkage.

[Richard's posts are here and here; the links expressing the permalinks on Richard's page are broken at the moment, so for now use the ones I've provided.]

Wheeeeeeere's Johnny's blog?

Johnny Carson apparently thinks of five new jokes every time he reads the paper and is frustrated that he doesn't have a stage on which to perform them.

Blog, Johnny, blog!

Technorati tags: carson

Symantec WinFax Pro 10.03

I wouldn't bother you with this, but I'd like to get it off my chest:

I spent too much of yesterday trying to install Symantec WinFux WinFax Pro 10.03 which, upon looking to the Web for help, I discovered is the biggest piece of unstable dog crap software ever to reach a double digit rev number.

Thank you. I feel better. Now I only wish I could figure out how to use my scanner to prepare multi-page faxes.

MiscLinks

ThereIsNoCrisis is a social security resource worth noting. It maintains -- guess what? -- that the Bush administration is trumping up the Social Security crisis.

Metaphilm has a bunch of whacky film interpretations. For example, did you know that in The Fight Club, Edward Norton plays grown-up Calvin and Brad Pitt plays grown-up Hobbes?

Rebecca Mackinnon has posted an excellent FAQ about the conference on blogging, journalism and credbiility being put on by Berkman, American Library Association and the Shorenstein Center. Bonus: A photo at the bottom of Berkman Fellows eating a kitten for breakfast. (Very funny comments on the Kitten Breakfast at EthicallyChallenged.)

Technorati tags: social security, metaphilm, berkman

Gates on DRM

Larry Lessig surprised at Bill Gates' clarification — in an excellent Gizmodo interivew — of his "You're all a bunch of freaking communists!" remarks. I'm more frustrated than surprised.

Gates says that we need DRM so that artists and scientists will create and innovate, and to ensure privacy of stuff like medical records. E.g.:

Gates: ...Take medical records: is it your position that rights management for medical records is evil? ... We remind people that, like if there's a medical record that has somebody's AIDS status in it, we have software—which is identical software—that says, 'Hey, if you're trying to forward to someone,' that, 'No, this is restricted. You can't forward this to someone. They don't have the right to see this.' It's the notion of 'should there be confidential information?'

Gizmodo: I think that's a different question.

Gates: It's not different. It's identical technology. It's the same bits!

Gizmodo: No, no, no. I think in calling that evil as opposed to whatever, I think that still basically comes down to, 'Do you feel like things should be able to have passwords on them or not?' And of course the answer is 'yes.' I do think that's reasonable. So I don't think anybody is trying to say 'DRM is evil.' I think what people are trying to say is that DRM, as sanctioned by the big players, may be holding back culture as a whole.

Right on. It doesn't have to be evil to be a bad idea. Gizmodo is right to raise ask about the likely overall outcome of mandating (through legislation or market forces) the ability of "content producers" to lock us out of using products we've purchased in the ways that we want, within the limits of the law.

Gates is using AIDS to nuke the conversation, and it's a trick. "Is it your position that securing your house against burglars is evil?" No, we want our houses secure. "The very same automatic weapons you'd like to ban protects houses. " Yes, but the security of my house is not the only thing affected by allowing the sale of automatic weapons. Of course the analogy isn't exact, especially if you drive it further than where I've left it, but I think the point is right: We should not be expected to pay any price to achieve any particular goal, even if it's something as positive as protecting medical privacy. We need to look at the range of options and make the trade-offs.

Further, Gates is disingenuous when he says:

We're the guys of empowerment. We want these things [creative stuff like personal slide shows with music added] to be out there everywhere. But it wouldn't serve anyone's interests to go out there and say, 'Hey, by the way, there's no way to remind anyone at any time about any rights boundaries.'

Microsoft's DRM is way overkill for "reminding" people about rights boundaries. It does everything it can to prevent it, at the cost of Fair Use.

DRM lets Microsoft go up to the next level in our economy, becoming the platform required by Hollywood to view its products. If that means we have to shut down the way in which culture is absorbed and advanced, Microsoft doesn't care. This bullshit about medical records and AIDS may well be what Gates tells himself as he falls asleep. It fits so nicely in a universe in which software is either good or evil. But the whole point about copyright and Fair Use is that culture is complex and art is the discovery of new shades of gray. That's why we need the right to exercise our judgment and to build new visions based on the old.

Ferries and blogs

A stray trackback brought me and my giant ego to Julie Leung's site, a blog I hadn't visited recently enough. In the course of the current post, she talks about how the ferry ride to Seattle is calming. I felt the same way reading the spread of posts on her page. In her blog we seem to hear the mix of the public and personal curiosity that buoys her while she's ferried to and from the city. After a few days in which the blogosphere has felt more like a colliseum, it was good to join Julie in the space of in-between that's essential for ferries and blogging.

Ex hypothesis

"How do biological differences in the sexes affect abilities, behavior and social position?" is a totally legitimate research question. Let the evidence fall where it may. And if the president of Harvard wants to be "provocative," heck, that's a lot better than the fund-raising drone emitted from most college presidents' orifices. But (according to The Globe):

''Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day," said [Denice D. ] Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.

It's true that "innate differences" were only one of three possibile explanations Summers gave for why there are fewer women than men in science and math. But from the reports it doesn't sound like he was simply laying out three logically-possible hypotheses. For one thing, he cited his daughter's playing with trucks as if they were dolls despite raising her in a gender-neutral environment. Of course, no environment that has people, windows or a TV in it is truly gender-neutral, so the anecdote seems to expose where Summers' heart lies; he could equally well have used the story to show the pervasive influence of gender socialization. But we can't tell because Pres. Summers is refusing to release a tape or transcript of his comments.

What could it hurt?

Here's the Harvard Crimson report on the presentation.

Here's Summer's official statement about the incident.

Oh why cahn't the marketers ... learn ... to ... speak

Over at Worthwhile I've posted a rumination - including a short play! - about why tech marketing-speak goes so wrong.

The mark of Z

The Zephyr affair is, let's say, complex. And it calls for upfront disclosures:

Disclosures

I am a friend of Zephyr. I like and admire her. I also like and admire Joe Trippi. I was an Internet advisor to the Dean campaign; it was an unpaid position. I didn't know about any money changing hands with bloggers and would have advised against it. I have chatted socially with Kos and Jerome a couple of times, and Jerome sent me a brief email yesterday in response to a comment asking for details. For what I think about the need for disclosure statements, see the button perpetually at the top of the left hand column of this blog.

Ok, that's out of the way. So, what happened? Imagine the range of plausible narratives. At the extreme negative end of the narrative range, Trippi and Kos explicitly contracted for Kos to continue writing enthusiastically about Dean and not to pump up the other candidates; it was that non-directed. At the other end the narrative goes like this: Trippi hired two enthusiastically pro-Dean bloggers as tech consultants. One resigned as a blogger in order to take the gig. The other put up a disclosure statement on his blog. The range of narratives is way narrower than two episodes of Leave It to Beaver.

Even the most negative narrative registers about 0.8 on the 100-point sleaziness scale, a peccadillo that any political group except the Quaker Action Committee would laugh away. Taken at its worst, this "scandal" doesn't come close to selling influence to big contributors, discouraging African-American voters from voting, or knowingly lying over and over about your opponent...the stuff of the Republican campaign. Please! I mean,Kos had a statement on his blog saying he was getting money from the Dean campaign and Jerome stopped blogging while he was a paid consultant. This entire "scandal" should be on our list of "Ways we could make a remarkably ethical, people-based campaign even better."

Jerome, Kos and Zephyr all work hard for our shared cause. I'd hate for any of their voices to be stilled. Let's move on to a real issue.

Put aside for the moment what you think of the current incident. I want to tell you what I know about Zephyr.

I'm proud to have her as a friend. I count it a privilege to have worked with her during the Dean campaign. As a volunteer, I "reported" to her when it came to tasks to be done. So, while I certainly don't claim to be her bestest friend and to know everything about her, my perception of her has been tempered by seeing her in a variety of settings, some of them high stress.

Zephyr amazes me. She just assumes that it's the role of each human to make the world better. She stays focused on the practicalities of what needs to be done while working towards a vision. Many of the great ideas tried by the Dean Internet campaign came from her, although in my experience she always deflected credit onto the team. When I disappointed her during the campaign, it was because I was relying too much on her and wasn't taking enough initiative; that's a value she embodies. Zephyr is serious and seriously upright. She is also funny and delightful. Even assuming the worst of her in this incident, the hatred coming through in some comments and blogs is vile. Zephyr has contributed too much to deserve it. PS: Check Z's FAQ on the incident.

De-smoking

My home office shares a wall with a guy who smokes a whole lot of cigs. Particles are getting through even though the rooms are sealed. My room smells faintly of smoke and my throat is scratchy. He's not going to stop, and it's fine during the months when we open our windows. Any suggestions for aggregating, deflecting or dispersing the particles?

Pollard's list

Dave Pollard lists the 10 most important ideas of 2004: Blogs and the Internet. Good list. I'd point out that #10 and #6 are not in perfect harmony, but maybe #10 is the goal and #6 is a present reality we need to fix. (Dave accurately cites me as disagreeing with #6. I think #6 -- forming "echo chambers" -- is a temptation but that we should be careful not to call all conversations except arguments "echo chambers.")

I wish I could compile lists. I'm terrible at it. In fact, I once had to ask my boss to stop calling on me at meetings when he would ask everyone to list things like the three biggest threats facing the company in the next five years. Instead, we agreed I could send him a memo.

Poynting the way

Bill Mitchell and Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute have put together a paper for the upcoming conference on blogging, journalism and credibility. It's called "Earn Your Own Trust, Roll Your Own Ethics: Transparency and Beyond," and I like it. They don't assume that the only way to stay ethical is to live by an established code of ethics.

The idea, in brief, is for bloggers to invite questions from their audience about what questions they have about the blog, what might increase their level of trust, etc. The questions would vary with the blog. The blogger might then build an FAQ responding to such questions and could update the FAQ new questions arise.

Finally, the blogger could be guided by those questions in creating a principles and policies statement addressing issues of trust and credibility. The blogger could describe the principles he or she is committed to, e.g., fairness, independence, accuracy, etc. In addition, bloggers creating such a page could describe the processes they'd use in order to uphold their principles. They might explain how they handle updates and corrections on their blogs, for example, as well as an explanation of how they handle comments. And if the blogger wants to offer some personal background — where they're coming from, as Jay Rosen puts it — so much the better.

Individual bloggers will have to make their own decisions about whatever principles and processes guide their behavior, of course. The most effective standards and codes are not imposed from the outside. The idea that the journalism establishment would have the standing or influence to impose ethical standards on the blogosphere seems especially disconnected from reality.

Excellent idea. Codes of ethics are great for professionals. For the rest of us (even professionals in their off hours), our lack of explicit, codified sets of ethical principles governing our every activity doesn't mean we're unethical. It just means we humans generally do what's right and resort to ethical discussions when we go wrong or get confused.

X marks the mnemonic

Our son Nathan, 14, last night figured out a mnemonic for remembering which way the X axis goes on a graph:

X is a cross. X is across. Works for me.

Jay on removing the Versus between journalists and bloggers

Jay Rosen has a terrific post arguing that the B vs. J debate is over. I don't think it's actually over until we figure out — invent — together the new world that's emerging, but Jay points to five important premises. I'll post the five here, but the piece is worth reading in its entirety:

1.) Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and blogging means anyone can own one. That is the Number One reason why weblogs matter. It is the broadest and deepest of all factors making this conference urgent.

2.) Instead of starting with "do blogs have credibility?" or "should blogging obey journalism ethics?" we should begin in a broader territory, which is trust. Trust as it is generated in different settings, online and off, in both blogging and in journalism — or in life.

3.) Look around: blogging partakes of a re-surgent spirit of amateurism now being seen in many fields earlier colonized by professionals.

4.) If news as lecture could yield to news as conversation, as some have recommended, it might transform the credibility puzzle because it would feed good information to journalists about the trusters and what they do and do not put their trust in.

5.) Among bloggers there is the type "stand alone journalist," and this is why among journalists there is now the type: blogger.

Yup.

A note on Dave's interview of Trippi

Dave Winer interviewed Trippi (transcript) about the Zephyr affair. In the course of it, Dave says:

Let me just say this. The times, the New York Times, interviewed — go back through the archive, it'd be interesting to see — but I believe the New York Times interviewed people who were on the Dean advisory board — like David Weinberger, who was the tech advisor to the Dean campaign without saying that he was basically, you know, not exactly an employee, but although for all I know maybe they were getting money

For the record: No, I wasn't paid in any form. I was not an employee or sort of an employee. I was a volunteer and proud to be one. But I can see why Dave might be confused: Joe gave me the title Senior Internet Advisor to the campaign. When I got interviewed I always tried to make my role clear as a volunteer consultant who deserves no credit for the brilliance of the campaign; for that I'd point primarily to Joe, Zephyr and Mathew. (And while I'm setting "the record" straight, I was a policy advisor, not a tech advisor.)

One more thing. Trippi says: "On the Sleepless Summer tour, we were letting any blogger that wanted to travel with us go." That wasn't my impression. I got a call from Mathew Gross, Dean's chief blogger, a day before the tour was to begin, saying one blogger had been invited for each of the four legs, and would I like to do the first leg. And how! I was, I believe, the only external blogger on the flight, and my posts were cross-posted on to the official campaign blog. I even said something like the following to Joe on the flight: "Hey, I'm the first blogger to be credentialed to go on a presidential candidate's press plane." So, my impression is that the Sleepless Summer Tour was not open to any blogger that wanted to travel with it. On the other hand, I was just an advisor to the campaign and my memory totally sucks.

Disclosure: The campaign paid for my flight to DC, the first stop on the Sleepless Summer Tour. Here is the disclosure statement I made at the time (Aug. 22, 2003):

[Disclosure: I work for the Dean campaign as Senior Internet Advisor. No money changes hands, but the campaign is paying my airfare. I am partisan.]

Hey, you don't keep studying it after you've passed the test!

NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration]
Loses Funding to Gather Long-Term Climate Data

Congress has eliminated funding for a fledgling network of 110 observation stations intended to provide a definitive, long-term climate record for the United States.

If only terrorists were behind global warming!

This comes from Science (subscription required), via Gary Stock.

Blog blogging

I'm enjoying Dave Pell's TheBlogBlog, a blog about the blogosphere.

Clive Thompson at CollisionDetection, picks up on Daniel Luke's idea that we ought to be able to aggregate all the comments we've left on other people's sites. It's a cool idea that's being implemented at frassle where all content is equally grist for the dynamic publication mill. The comments on Clive's article have links to other work as well.

The tagging revolution continues...

Technorati, a site that indexes 4.5 million weblogs, is now enabling us to sort blog posts by tag. This is way way cool. In fact, it marks a next step in the rapid evolution of the tagging economy. [Disclosure: I am on Technorati's Board of Advisors. But I would have been excited about this anyway.]

The tags come from three sources. First, if you've uploaded a photo to Flickr and have tagged it (or if one of your pals has tagged it), it will show up under that tag at technorati. Second, if you've bookmarked a page using del.icio.us, it will show up under that tag at technorati. Third, if your blogging software supports categories, your blog posts will show up under the categories you've assigned; categories are now tags in the eyes of Technorati.

Even if your blogging software doesn't know from categories, you can still tag a post with, say, "weasels" by inserting into it the following line:

It's easy to imagine this becoming a standard part of the footer of blog entries.

Take a look at this page to see how Technorati aggregates all the blogs, flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks tagged as "humor." This page shows the top 100 or so (I didn't count) tags in alphabetical order, with font size representing the number of tagged items.

This is exciting to me not only because it's useful but because it marks a needed advance in how we get value from tags. Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual. As these tags are added willy-nilly, two issues arise: We want to get more value from them and we want to work out the scaling problems — it's one thing when there are 30 things tagged with "weasels" and another when there are 300,000. A site like technorati, which already gets its value as an aggregator, is in a good position to innovate around both issues.

Now for some observations and guesses.

First, categories are not tags. I'm guessing that the average number of categories used by any single blogger is in the 3-15 range. Many of us want to keep our categories broad because they are intended to help a reader see all of our posts, and we want to be inclusive rather than fine-grained. If that's the case, then tags commonly used by categories are not going to be very useful when aggregated by Technorati. Actually, they might be useful to researchers but not very useful to casual readers. That's not a criticism; I'm glad Technorati is treating categories as tags. But I suspect that the hand-tagged tags are going to turn out to be more useful because we'll hand-tag them with their aggregation by Technorati in mind. (Bogus Contest: How many hours before some posts a bookmarklet to ease the hand-tagging of multiple tags?)

Second, it will be fascinating to watch the social effects as people adjust their tag sets in order to get aggregated either into the most popular tags or to be segmented into smaller groupings. That is, if you want to be found when people are searching for blogs about America, you will learn to tag it with (say) "USA" and not "U.S.A.", "US," or "America." And if you want to have your posts be found by people searching for posts written by members of your Dungeons & Dragon's group, your group will make up a tag that no one else would use. How this sort of stuff occurs at Technorati depends to a large degree — but not entirely — on how Technorati chooses to enhance the system. Little changes will have rippling effects.

Third, this represents the externalization of tagging. That is, Technorati is a broker of tags, not a place where you create tags. There are other important functions that could be handled externally, including the creation of thesauruses so that items tagged as "USA" get clustered with ones tagged "America" and "Etats-Unis." The particular apps where you tag stuff can, of course, compile their own thesaursi. And, they're likely to be compiled automatically by noticing the different tags that are applied to the same item. But having a thesaurus compiled from a superset would help smaller-scale apps cluster tagged items well and would provide additional useful information to all clustering apps. Local thesauri are always going to contain the most valuable information, but info from the aggregated thesaurus can also help. But, there will be social effects from having external thesauri. I don't know what those effects will be, but I suspect that they'll be significant since thesauri are about meaning across groups differentiated by meaning.

Fourth, why can't I subscribe at Technorati to an RSS feed for a particular tag? [Note: Dave Sifry tells me that RSS and API support are coming soon; they wanted to get the release out faster rather than completer.]

Fifth, Yay! This is a big day for tagging.

My first technorati tags: Technorati tags taxonomy

Search-ready language

At eBay, if you look for a DVD burner than record on two layers, you'll turn up hits for "dual double layer" burners. No, they don't burn on four layers. They're just trying to be found by people searching on "dual" or "double." I bet there are lots of better examples of this twisting of language to make up for the literal-mindedness of search engines...

Web as world

Last night on the short drive to the session I was leading at the Berkman Center, I decided to change the planned topic — is the Web a medium or a world? — because it struck me as just too boring. Also, I'm not happy with how I've been leading these sessions. So, we talked about tagging instead.

Here's what I'd planned to say. Sort of.

The question of whether the Web is a medium or a world matters if you think it's a medium and nothing more. A medium is something through which a message travels from A to B. The communication succeeds if the message arrives at B unaltered. Obviously, the Net is a medium in that sense, complete with noise and error-correction, etc. But if that's where you stop — and who does? — you don't ever see the Web and can't explain why it matters to us. I don't even think it's enough to talk about how the nature of the medium affects the type of communications and relationships that occur through it, although that's obviously a valuable discussion.

I'd say that discussions of the Web as a medium are too low down on the stack, but that analogy slights the magic that lives between the layers: Just as something beyond human ken occurs between brain and awareness, there's a thin layer of inexplicability between the Net as a medium and the Net we experience.

The communications theory that explains language as a medium has always struck me as demeaning to our experience of language. (Note: I'm about to get all Heideggerian.) Language isn't how isolated individuals get connected. It's how we turn together towards our shared world. Your language reveals the world to me in a particular way. Our conversation does that together.

The world towards which we turn in language has the same properties as language: It's referential in its meaning, those meanings have a history rooted in our cultures, and it is necessarily ambiguous and poorly edged. Both world and language are ultimately founded in the fact that we humans care about ourselves, others, and the world itself; take away caring and you take away the capacity for attention and the ability to let the world show itself in any particular ways.

The Web also has those properties. It's a referential (linked) context. The links express meaning rooted in our historical, cultural, linguistic situation. The meanings of the links are ambiguous. The clusters of links are poorly edged.

The Web isn't the first world the big world has spawned. There's the world of business and the show biz world, for example. But they're domain-specific. The Web is unusual in that it isn't. It is co-extensive with human interest. (Yes, it's confined to those able to connect to it.)

But who cares if the Web is a world? I think it matters, sort-of and kind-of, in a few ways.

First, if you're a reductionist, it's good to pay homage to the unreduced phenomenon we experience. Tip o' the hat. Keeps your reductionism honest.

Second, it can help you avoid the urge to want to fix the ambiguity and messiness of the Web. Within particular domains, that's fine, of course: If no one can find anything on your site, you ought to straighten it up. But ambiguity and messiness are not only inherent in the Web, they are enablers of it and its value.

Third, some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first. Isolation and alienation are withdrawals from the pre-existence of what is shared. I think that helps explain why some sites "work" and others don't. Many of the sites that work for me are ones in which I see that my participation helps create and enrich this shared world; I have that sense at del.icio.us and Flickr, at every place I leave a review or join in a discussion, and every time I blog. I can't explain that by thinking of the Web only as a medium, but I can explain it if it's a shared world that we are building together.

By the way, if you want to see a group that misunderstands the Web and the value of its own products because it thinks of the Net as a medium, look at the RIAA. To the RIAA, the Net is a medium through which bits are sent, some of which are owned by record companies. And that's as far as the RIAA gets in its understanding.

So, I do think it's helpful to think of the Web as a world. And I believe that I have proven in this post that it is, in any case, quite a boring topic.

I'm leading a series of discussions at the Berkman Center and I'm not happy enough with them. Some have been good and even very good, but they could be better, and I haven't felt fully comfortable. I started off by throwing some supposedly provocative question out to instigate a discussion. Haphazard results. I moved towards doing 15-20 minute presentations on what I thought about the question and then opening it up, and I think that worked better. Last night, we instead simply talked about what's going on with tagging and why it matters. Because this is something I've been researching, I talked for maybe 10 minutes to lay out what I think are the basic issues. And then we had a great time.

So, I'm going to make some changes and build on what's worked. First, I will continue to mix up the formats somewhat. For example, I thought the session in which I interviewed David Reed was really interesting because David is so interesting; I want to do more of that. Second, I'm going to try to choose smaller-scoped questions about which reasonable people may not only disagree but about which they might care. E.g., I'm interested in whether the Web is a world, but I don't expect anyone else to be. Third, when I know stuff, I'm going to be less apologetic about presenting it; I know something about tagging and taxonomy because I've been interviewing people about it, so, damn it, I'm just going to tell you what I know. Fourth, more pop quizzes! (Just kidding.)

Dave Rogers has followed up our conversation in the comments section with a thoughtful response on his site.

New health guidelines stress exercise, diet, and laughable disassociation from reality

The government is urging Americans to exercise for an hour every day and to switch to a diet that emphasizes whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. In addition, the government says that we ought to speak Latin at home, only watch PBS, and sprout wings. Advised but not mandatory: Wolverine-like knuckle implants.

Blogging, journalism and credibility: The comment thread

There's a, shall we say, lively discussion going on over at the blog for the Berkman conference on blogs, journalism and credibility. It's an invitation-only conference and that's stirred a lot of questions about whether appropriately representative sets of people have been invited. Are there enough bloggers? Are they the right sort of bloggers? Some are saying that not enough big-readership bloggers are there; others say not enough "struggling" bloggers are there. I suspect there is an age skew, with an under-representation of the people under 30 who collectively are doing something remarkable with blogs to which the question of credibility makes as much sense as the question of punctuality. But a conference is allowed to frame the question it's interested in, and this one is about the interesting intersection of blogging and journalism, not about everything that can and should ever be said out loud about blogging.

If you're in an only a slightly more sober mood, there's a discussion of the intersection of blogging and ethics.

By the way, the event will be webcast.

Reminder: Discussion at the Berkman tonight

Don't forget, you're invited to an open discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center tonight, 6-7:30 pm. I'll talk for 15-20 mins about why it's important to think of the Web as a world and not just as a medium. Then we'll talk and eat pizza.

By the way, if you want to know what Marshall McLuhan meant by "medium," which is not what I mean by it, check Mark Federman's article.

Car Talk Talk

There's an article, by Joseph P. Kahn, with lots of fun facts about Tom and Ray, the Car Talk guys, in today's Boston Globe. Here's a snippet I enjoyed:

Targets of the show's humor sometimes fire back. After Tom made a crack on-air about a tailgate problem the Dodge Caravan was having, suggesting in his usual irreverent manner that Chrysler Corp. had "paid off" investigators to forestall a recall, a highly unamused Chrysler representative demanded a public correction and got one — sort of.

Tom did correct the record during a subsequent show, saying something to the effect that no money had actually changed hands and that Caravan passengers were only being ejected through the back doors of moving vehicles, not the sunroofs and side doors as he might have mistakenly said.

Also:

Ray: "One of the big [automotive repair] chains approached us, but we didn't want to stand in front of their store and tell people to get their cars fixed there. We couldn't. Because they [expletive] everybody.

Car Talk is the most widely-heard show on NPR. And here's a hint: If you tell an NPR producer that you have an idea for a new program, she's highly likely to reply, "Yeah, it's Car Talk for what?", as in Car Talk for computers, Car Talk for health, Car Talk for ventriloquists...

Kenyan pundit, live from Kenya

Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan Pundit, is back in Nairobi, working with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. Her blog entries bounce from what life is like these days in Kenya to why it's like that. Great reading.

To every thing, a blog

SplitCoastStampers is a site for people who create art using rubber stamps. The site's nicely done, with a blog, and a gallery to share ideas. You can upload or download free cards, create your own album, share tips and techniques ("Faux Leather with Masking Tape"), and "Send cards to soldiers in Iraq through Splitcoast's very own Stamp Your Heart Out campaign." In a sign that this is a true community, members turn to one another for off-topic advice: Tips for flying with toddlers, support for Floridian members hit by the hurricanes, a discussion of why our kids their parents are uncool.

Sorry, but I think this site, and a million others like it, are very cool.

Survivor Location Assistance

The Hacker Foundation has created a site to act as a clearinghouse of information about survivors of disasters. From the press release:

"THF is releasing the SLA backend to anyone who requests it & opening our survivor data to the public," said Emerson Tan, Director of Packetstorm Security. "As more of the world gets connected via the Internet, we believe the SLA project has global potential to be used in tracking IDPs, thwarting the child slave-trading of orphans from such disasters, and assisting aid agencies & NGOs responding to humanitarian efforts similar to those in the Darfur region of Sudan."

You have to admire the people who did this. Lord love the Web and webizens like these. But are international aid agencies and governments really going to entrust this data — who's missing, who's been confirmed dead or alive — to The Hacker Foundation? Of course, it doesn't have to be a universal list for it to be useful. And maybe the UN will take advantage of the software and host it. Maybe some local governments will use it in particular disasters. But I have trouble believing that this particular incarnation is going to take off. I hope I'm wrong, because the world could use such a service. Am I missing something? (Thanks to Greg Cavanagh for the link.)

Suing of the innocents

Drunkenblog has a fascinating interview with two of the people Apple is suing for sharing a pre-release version of Tiger. The stories ring true, but you never know: These were guys who naively thought they were letting some pals share the coolness of kicking around a beta version. But Apple is falling on them as if they were selling hot CDs by the truckload.

How Democratic Party chairs are elected

You want to know? You really want to know? Go ask Matt Stoller...

Web of Ideas: Web as world

I'm leading another open discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center this Wednesday. The topic is: Is the Web a medium? The answer - and I will brook no disagreement! - is that, yes, it's a medium, but the Web matters because it's also a world. I'll kick off the session with about 20 minutes on what the hell I mean by that (still working on it!) and why it matters. Then it's an open forum.

It's open to everyone. And we serve pizza. This Wednesdsay, 6-7:30pm, at the Baker House in Cambridge (map).

Tonight's Daily Show this afternoon!

NPR's hourly news just played a snippet of Bush saying something about "an election in Iraq," but he stumbled ever so slightly: "An er-election in Iraq." We can only hope W was on his way to a full spoonerism: "An erection in I-lack."

Sigh. Such are the petty joys to which I have been reduced.

Distributed history

Britt has a terrific piece — with the terrific title "The Commons of the Tragedy" — about blogging and journalism. He says that not only are we — all of us — writing the first draft of history, but we're engaged in what he calls recursive journalism: "the amazing detail and clarity possible when the blogosphere gets on a story and combine our individually flawed viewpoints into a coherent and relevant representation." He quotes Arianna Huffington:

When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and refuse to let go. They're the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to get them off a story is to cut off their heads (and even then you'll need to pry their jaws open). They almost all work alone, but, ironically, it's their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share their work freely, feed off one another's work, argue with each other, and add to the story dialectically.

It'd be easy to dismiss this by pointing to all the ways bloggers get stories wrong and to the genuine strengths of professional, full-time news organizations. Yes, of course. And I demur from the idea that blogs tend toward a single "coherent and relevant representation" — our views remain distributed and diverse. But none of this should mask from us the fundamental truth that Britt and Arianna point to: For better or worse, the who, what, where, when and why of journalism is changing.

(Note: if you use the "echo chamber" word on me, I will sit in a corner with my fingers in my ears chanting "Dean won! Dean won!" until you go away.)

Reframing a small planet

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet — a book that influenced my wife and me waaaay back when — has published an important essay that out-Lakoffs Lakoff. Here's a summary-by-snippets:

Lakoff’s central idea is that conservatives see the world through a “strict father” frame emphasizing discipline, self-reliance, forceful defense, while progressives see the world through a “nurturant parent” frame—supportive, nourishing, emphasizing mutual responsibility.

...Certainly, much of Lakoff’s advice about communicating progressive ideas is powerfully insightful and right on target.

But two big dangers loom.

First: Too narrowly focusing on getting the frame right might delude progressives into believing that’s all they need to win, ...

...Second, the frame Lakoff identifies with progressives – “nurturant parent” – itself needs critical thought.

Nurturant parent – what could be worse for progressives?

They’re already stereotyped as coddlers of the lazy poor; dubbed “bleeding hearts” who refuse to require people to take responsibility for themselves...

... Maybe, in many respects, we’re moving beyond hierarchy, which any parent-centered frame necessarily must be...

...We need to ask: What frames best embrace the growing appreciation that human beings are going beyond one-directional communication, moving from “one-to-many” directives toward “many-to-many” multi-logues? What frame suggests mutuality – mutual responsibility, cooperation, teamwork, dialogue, synergy, inter-connectedness, and the co-creation of meaning?

Any parent frame fails the test; it is inevitably one-directional, and hierarchical. So let’s bury the family metaphor and search for a more robust frame...

...let’s reframe the entire conversation to one that begins with a definition of citizens as responsible grown-ups, not helpless children. In this progressive moral vision we strive to live in strong communities...

There is much, much more good stuff in this article. For example, I've left out the bits about Open Source, reframing the ecological question, and how the crisis of the Catholic church fits in. This is, IMO, a must read. In fact, I feel bad about attempting to summarize it. [Thanks to Jock Gill for the link.]

W and Nixon

"There's an interesting parallel between Bush and Richard Nixon. While Nixon was clearly a superor statesman and in many ways a more intelligent politician, what they share is a kind of boldness in how they emote their insecurities. What we're finding with George Bush — part of what's familiar to people and that adds to his likability for many — is that there's a commonality of deep insecurity and his handling it with a kind of bravado. What they both did is handle things with a similar certainty — certainty being the 'disease of kings.'"

I like this not only for its insight but because it so clearly — and helpfully — reflects the worldview of a professional actor. It's a snippet of an interview in the Boston Globe with Sean Penn, conducted by Ty Burr. (The whole interview is worth reading.)

Good store, bad marketing

NewEgg is my favorite place to buy hardware: Near rock-bottom prices, no-hassle returns, lots of information about what you're buying, customer reviews for every item, no monkey business about shipping costs. I have a good feeling buying from NewEgg.

But I hate their marketing campaign: "Shop there, buy here." We're supposed to go to our local computer store, waste some salesperson's time, get her expectations up that we're going to buying from her, and then buy at NewEgg because Newegg's prices are low ... and those prices are low because NewEgg asks us to steal services from another store.

I don't have a good feeling about buying from a parasite.

Clay and Matt

Clay Shirky responds to Louis Rosenfeld's piece on taxonomies vs. folksonomies. Lou argues that folksonomies aren't as searchable and may not scale, but, he writes, treating both "as major parts of a single metadata ecology might expose a useful symbiosis." Clay responds that economics weighs heavily on the side of folksonomies, since taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are so expensive to build and maintain. And Clay points to what I think is the most important point: We are just at the beginning of inventing folksonomies. Del.icio.us, for example, doesn't yet show us how other people have tagged the page we've just bookmarked, which inhibits consistency in tagging. (On the other hand, that might encourage a tyranny of the majority in the development of folksonomies.) We are way early in the development of folksonomies. Exciting adventures in classification science await us. The game is afoot!

In any case, I haven't done justice to either Lou or Clay's post. Go ahead and give 'em a read...

Matthew Stoller has started a blog supporting Simon Rosenberg for chair of the Democratic National Committee. I don't know enough about Rosenberg to have an opinion, but I have a lot of respect for Matthew's judgment.

Bad 60s films are the worst bad films

I woke up last night and couldn't fall back to sleep, leading me to be able to declare with some authority that "Cult of the Damned" is the worst movie ever made.

But this is an honor it shares we several other films, including "Head," starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson. In fact, there's a cluster of bad films made in the 60s and embodying the 60s ethos. No surprise, for the properties of that epoch — a drug-assisted sense of humor that insisted that any random juxtaposition must be funny, an unshakable belief in one's own profundity, and a belief that talent and craft are forms of despicable elitism — are just what's required to make truly awful movies.

The only other period in living memory so productive of bad movies was the late 70s when fear and patriotism led to a spate of stupid, predictable, jingoistic macho movies. Then, of course, the streams crossed and we got the two worst successful movies in history: "Platoon" and "Dances with Wolves." But I'd rather not discuss them. They're still too painful to contemplate.

Dan blurts out the truth

Dan Gillmor's new blog is kicking ass. In this case, the ass happens to belong to Bill Gates. Go, Dan!

LID - Lightweight identity solution?

NetMesh Inc. has announced its proposed solution for the digital ID problem. Called LID (Lightweight ID), it gives the user complete control over her digital ID by putting the actual info on the user's site. It differs from the Identity Commons idea by using a simple URL as the pointer to the information, rather than a special "URN"; a url has the advantage of being more familiar, and is accessible to anyone who knows how to type in a Web address. LID supports standards, including Jabber's XML version of VCards, FOAF and XPath. In his blog, NetMesh's Johannes Ernst argues that it also supports Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity.

Unfortunately, currently to create a LID, you have to have your own URL, have to be comfortable loading a Perl script, and have to have GPG and the right Perl XPath module installed. I asked Johannes via email why that isn't too high a hurdle. (It's too high for me. At the very least, I'd like a LID-o-Matic that, like FOAF-a-Matic, creates a LID file for me.) He replied that they're aiming initially at the tech community, releasing code that allows would-be LID implementors to understand how it works and what's required to support it, hoping that that will light a fire that will encourage some horizontal apps to take advantage of the standard. Johannes tells me that NetMesh is working with several organizations that are planning their own LID implementations targeted more towards mainstream consumers.

I also asked Johannes what happens if I change urls. He responded with a set of ways that could be handled. For example, they could add a "secured. forward" protocol to LID, a centralized server could let a 404'ed LID URL look for the new one, or, "most intriguingly, one could use one's social network (basically the content of the FOAF file) to 'vouch' for somebody's new LID URL. (That's the way the real world works and it wouldn't be very hard to codify in software...)." But his key point was: "All ideas that I mentioned can be implemented by people other than us — just like new vocabularies (VCard, FOAF, ... whatever-is-hot-next-week) — which makes LID more than just an identity technology but a true platform for identity-related innovation. And at the end of the day, that's what is exciting about LID."

The tortoise and the care

From Reuters (with a photo here):

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday.

The year-old hippo calf christened Owen was rescued last month, suffering from dehydration after being separated from his herd in a river that drains into the Indian Ocean.

"When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos," Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.

She said the hippo's chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.

However, Owen's relationship with the Aldabran tortoise named Mzee, Swahili for old man, may end soon. The sanctuary plans to place Owen with Cleo, a lonely female hippo.

My theory: The tortoise is desperately trying to get away...but no one can tell. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.]

Gaming blogs

PC Gamer's Feb. issue notices four game-related weblogs:

Ron Gilbert — In 1989, Gilbert wrote "Why Adventure Games Suck, and What We Can Do about It," which led to his creating the wonderful Monkey Island adventures. The blog is spunky.

Unknown — The writer claims to be the spouse of an EA game developer. The "blog" is a single entry pointing to an essay on why life as a game developer sucks. The page also promises a " a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry" which will eventually be available at Gamewatch.org

American McGee - He was the producer of Alice, a nicely-imagine first-person shooter. He has since been turned into a brand, although his second game — the "brought to you by" Scrapland — has gotten mediocre reviews. He writes in his blog every couple of weeks about industry news. One entry points to the personal website of Norm Felchle, the artist responsible for much of the look of Alice. Among his galleries you'll find a moderately scary collection of photos from fans modeling Alice outfits.

John Romero - Romero was half of the duo responsible for Doom. He's all of the singularity responsible for what may be the industry's biggest fiasco, Daikatana (free 107MB demo here), a mediocre game totally killed by hype. Among the goodies: A collection of game music. (I have to say I'm a little — and unreasonably — put off by the "planetromero.com" url of the site. I think he's maybe up to Village Romero or possibly Canton Romero, but not a whole planet.)

The article doesn't mention, but should, Terra Nova, a blog devoted to the academic study of virtual worlds. Don't let the "academic" part scare you, though. This is a lively place.

Iran cuts off blogging and social networking

Hoder reports that Iran has cut off access by Iranians to all blogging services and some social software sites, including Orkut. As Dan Brickley writes, "There go 65,000+ Iranian blogs (per blogcensus) and 7%+ of Orkut's user base, in a flip of a switch." Hoder suggests some actions we can take, including having the EU and US demand an end to Net censorship during their negotiations with the government.

Tagalicious

Brian Dear suggests "Taggle" as a future site that would let us type in a keyword and get back all the pages that use that word as a tag. And in the comments people suggest links to a whole bunch of interesting tag work.

I think I'll do a long-overdue issue of my newsletter, Joho, on taxonomies vs. tags. All the cool kids are doing tags, you know. But I'm so wrapped up now in researching the Feb. issue of Esther Dyson's newsletter, that I may not get to it. And what's the topic of that Feb. issue? Taxonomies and tags! That's also (roughly) the topic of the book I'm working on. As the saying goes, when all you have is a <entity type="tool" field="carpentry">hammer</entity>, everything looks like a <entity type="fastener" field="carpentry" driver="hammer">nail</entity>.

Copyrights in the Blogosphere

Terry Heaton raises an important issue: Many of us tend to be, um, lax about copying copyrighted material onto our own servers so that we can make it more broadly available. At some point, we're going to get sued.

Just in case you were looking for something else to worry about...

Live blogging the Gonzales hearing

HumanRightsFirst.org is live-blogging the Gonzales hearing. Cool! (They also have links to the Real Player feed from C-SPAN.)

Fixing a racing heart

Modern medicine has crossed into magic.

My wife Ann went into the Brigham and Women's Hospital today at 6AM to have her tachycardia -- episodes of a racing heartbeat -- fixed. A little before 10AM, they threaded five wires up through her arteries (veins?), from her groin directly into her heart. Ann says the procedure was basically painless.

Once the catheters were in her heart, the doctors stimulated a tachycardia episode and used that to figure out which circuit was going astray. They heated the tip of one of the wires and burned a square millimeter or so of her heart. They then tried to stimulate another episode. They failed, which is a good thing. Ann was wheeled back into the recovery room a little before 11. There she lay on her back to let her blood vessels recover. She was discharged at 3, and was told not to lift any heavy objects for a day or so; otherwise, she can go back to her normal routine of lifting light objects. We've been home for half an hour, and Ann is resting in bed, drinking a cup of tea.

Everyone we dealt with at the hospital treated us with warmth and humor.

Details about Tachycardia: Ann had been having episodes for several years. We were assured that they were not life-threatening to healthy hearts, but because of the episodes' frequency, duration, and intensity -- typically over an hour, 250 beats/minute, about once a month -- her cardiologist thought she was a good candidate for the procedure she went through today. (Beta-blockers were making her tired so staying on medicine forever wasn't an attractive option.) We were told that the fatality rate is well under 1% and the chance of ending up needing a pacemaker because of the procedure was also under 1%. The success rate is 95%. So, we decided to go ahead. Her problem turned out to be with the AV node.

Low blogging day

I have very limited Web access today, so I won't be doing much (= any?) blogging. Try to carry on without me.

I did, however, give blood this morning, the first time in several years. I used to give a few times a year when it was convenient, e.g., when a bloodmobile would drive up to the doors of the building where I worked. Now that I have to get off my fat ass to drive 10 minutes to the blood clinic, I don't do it. If only I could give blood over the Web...

Did the tsunami swerve around Burma?

Ethan has a fascinating post about the growing skepticism about the reports from the Burmese government that the tsunami caused only minor damage. The Myanmar government continues to refuse aid.

Visual thought

This chess game shows you what the computer is contemplating. Very cool. (Via Pito who also has some ruminations on folksonomies today.)

UBL bubble

Tim Bray points to a presentation by Brian Nielsen and Mikkel Hippe Brun on how Denmark is adopting the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL). Tim writes:

Check out slides 4 & 5: they estimate the annual savings achievable from invoicing in UBL at somewhere between €100M and €160M. I may be out of step with the crowd but it seems painfully obvious to me that UBL is going to be huge and I don’t understand why more technology vendors (including my employer) aren’t refocusing their e-business strategy around it.

Future of Newsgle

This Flash documentary by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson on the future of media describes a possible path from here to 2014 for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and the NY Times. I think it eventually goes off the rails, but it's well done and, IMO, worth the 11 minutes.

Capture the Google Flag

From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page. Once you start the Flash app, you'll get instructions in English...

Watching TV while ___-ing

Not only has Internet use cut into this country's sacred TV time, we are not paying strict enough attention to the glowing screens in our living rooms. BIGresearch reports (via Center for Media Research) that a survey of 12,000+ "consumers" shows that we're doing more multitasking while watching TV:

# 66.3% regularly or occasionally read the mail.
# 60.1% regularly or occasionally go online.
# 55.0% regularly or occasionally read the newspaper.
# 51.8% regularly or occasionally read magazines.
# 0.4% mentally undress Larry King

Please, America, let's focus!

PS: I made up one of those statistics.

Lessig on the Radio

Larry Lessig is on The Connection for an hour, live at 11am, EST. Click for local times and stations, or for WBUR where you can pick up the live stream.

Freas frame

Kelly Freas, who I knew as the artist responsible for some of MAD's best early covers, died in his sleep at age 82. Among his accomplishments, according to the AP:

For many years, was the main cover artist for MAD

Designed the official NASA patch for Skylab I

In WWII, he was stationed in the Pacific and in his spare time drew pictures of beautiful women on the noses of bombers. (So he was the guy!)

"Received 11 Hugo awards for his achievements in science fiction, five of them awarded in consecutive years"

And here I thought he was just the guy who made Alfred E. Neuman famously dopey.

Most obnoxious quotes

Right Wing News lists the 40 most obnoxious quotes of the year. Most but not all are from the left. And some are truly obnoxious. If we did a left-centric one, we could fill it up just with Zell Miller-isms...

Museum of Potted Meat

Here's the link. Not much more to say.

Hamlet on Ice

I've reviewed The Lion King musical over at BlogCritics.org.

Taxonomy, folksonomy, tagsonomy

Peterme points to a terrific essay by Adam Mathes titled "Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata" and sparks a discussion of whether "folksonomy" is a good or right term for the sort of thing that del.icio.us does. I happen to think it's a keeper, but I also like Kirk Scott's "tagsonomy." [Note: Jon Lebkowsky tells me that he was actually the one who came up with it. Kevin Marks seems to have come up with independently.]

Italics and saxophones

Steve Johnson writes about a friend who lost a Rhodes Scholarship because of his use of italics. (I may be overstating a little.) It reminds me of my friend who had applied for a faculty position and was waiting to be interviewed at the annual American Philosophical Association meeting. His application was full of his scholarly accomplisments and achievements, the articles he had published, the dissertation he had labored over to support his bold thesis about Nietzsche, and just a few lines about his personal interests. He was waiting in the hallway as the current interviewee departed, and heard a faculty committee ask, "Who's the next one?"

Answer: "The saxophone player."

Modern Drunkard

Modern Drunkard claims to be mainly serious with the goal of returning "drinking to the glorious Rat Pack/Jackie Gleason Era." It celebrates the fun of drinking and rails against what it thinks of as Puritanical forces of repression (including MADD). The latest, and perhaps last, printed issue was published last August. [Thanks to my brother Andy, who is not any sort of drunkard, for the link.]

And with this post, I am now the record holder for the shortest cognitive-emotional distance. Yes! But, heck, it's a blog. We're supposed to have short cognitive-emotional spans.

They played Bach. Bach lost. (Yeah, it's an old joke.)

Susan Crawford did not have a good time at a Bach concert yesterday. I wouldn't mention it except she writes about it so amusingly.

I'm reminded of a conversation my friend Joe Mahoney had with another friend of mine, Tim Anderson. According to Joe, who is an amazing musician, it went like this:

Joe: Can you imagine? Bach had to write a cantata every week!

Tim: Not only that. He had to write a Bach cantata.

(Joe has a great post from November about the joy of growing up with a son and his son Quentin's manic performance in "Cinderella." Unfortunately, I can't find the permalink...)

Dan's new home

Dan Gillmor is off on his journey. His new blog is here. This should be fascinating to watch...

Before and after satellite photos

Banda Aceh before

Banda Aceh after

More at DigitalGlobe.

Forced compassion

From Reuters:

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush, under pressure over the pace and scale of American aid to Asian tsunami victims, abruptly raised the U.S. contribution to $350 million on Friday, 10 times the amount pledged just two days ago.

Good. That's up a lot from the ludicrous $4M we offered five days ago, the boost to a shameful $15M, and the upping of that to the merely disgraceful $35M. It's still not nearly enough from a country that claims to be the world's economic, military and moral leader; before the election, Congress allotted $13.6 billion to rebuild states after the horrendous hurricane season. I understand that no other countries were contributing to the Help Florida fund, and that countries have a first responsibility to their own, but how about a little proportionality here?

And why the hell did it take pressure to get Bush to begin to do the right thing? It took Bush three days to announce the $35M. He is addressing this catastrophe through press releases. What does it take to make George W. Bush's heart hurt?

When Bush was first elected he had been out of the country once or maybe twice, to Mexico and Canada. He was the son of an ambassador and a man of enormous personal wealth, yet he never bothered to leave the continent. (The rumor is that when he was elected, he didn't have a passport.) This is usually taken as an indication of his utter lack of curiosity, definitive of his own special brand of stupidity. But it is also a sign of his lack of caring, his lack of a sense of connection to those unlike him.

This is just further confirmation that whatever a person declares himself in public to be is exactly what he is not. As W likes to say, he's a "compassionate conservative."

I don't claim to know W's soul. I could be dead wrong about him. Maybe he's crying himself to sleep. But his actions suggest not.

I'd like to see him get on a plane for Sri Lanka.