Stephen Downes on tags and communities

Terrific speech — provocative, funny, asking great questions — by Stephen Downes (transcript mp3) about what we can do to keep tags from forming power laws that suppress community. How can tags encourage community? He suggests embedding a pointer to FOAF files in RSS feeds, but the presentation is much broader than that. (Here's a post of mine that relates to one point he makes.) [Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy Downes ]

Why tagging matters — Notes

The Berkman Center has a lunchtime speaker every Tuesday, and this week it's my turn. I'm talking about — guess what? — taxonomies and tags. It's an informal venue, and with luck I'll be interrupted after ten minutes, but I need to have a full talk prepared, just in case. I've been having trouble structuring it. Here are the notes I have so far. Comments? Criticisms? Rude suggestions?

Why Tags Matter

I want to talk about three ways tags matter.

If necessary: Brief explanation of tags. Show del.icio.us and Flickr. [Yes, I'm confident Berkpeople know what tags are, but these talks draw a broader audience.]

First, tags may not matter:

We're in an early adopter phase. Historically, people have resisted adding metadata to objects.

Why is there such enthusiasm now? A. We get individual value from tagging.
B. No one is telling us to do it or how to do it.

First reason: Aristotle

For Aristotle, to be is to be a type of thing. Types = categories. He gave us genus-species definitions: X is a type of P and is different from other members of P. I.e., X is what it is because of the category it's in.

Atistotle's implications/assumptions:

Knowledge and world are one

Categories are defined by principles (e.g., "rational animal"): These principles are rational, can be known by experts who have authority, exist independent of our awareness, and are precise. (Every member of a category is an equally good example of that category.)

Aristotle's principles of organization come from how we organize physical things in the real world: Lumping and splitting. So, ideas are assumed to be subject to the same limitations as physical things: X can only be "shelved" in one spot at a time. (Law of Identity — ((A=A) and ~(A = ~A)) — becomes true for ideas as well as for physical objects.)

Challenges to Aristotle:

Postmodernism (brief!): Disputes that categories are independent of us and are rational. Points to relation of knowledge, authority and power.

Eleanor Rosch: Not all members of a category are equally good examples. Her theory of classification by prototype. Prototype classification says our conceptual organization is far fuzzier and messier than Aristotle thought.

Tagging: Categories are driven by convenience not principle, are relative and relevant to the individual, and are non-authoritative

Lack of special status for author's own tags indicates just how non-authoritative tagging is

Why does disputing Aristotle matter? Aristotelianism affects us when we think of the world as something that starts with definitions, that consists of topics that persist through history, that enable domain-specific authority.

Second reason: Nature of topics

Frank Miksa, professor at the University of Texas, Austin: We all tend to believe that "there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions and is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being examined."

Example of the breakdown of that idea: Wikipedia

Topics are whatever someone is interested in, so long as it can be verified

450,000 entries in English so far (60,000 in Encyc. Britannica)

Categories (like tags) are assigned by readers. Hierarchy also. E.g., Tori Amos is a top-level category because someone assigned her sub-categories. This isn't a statement about what's important but about how to make it easy to find the new Tori Amos CD.

Topics are becoming more like interests than self-standing, transgenerational slots. Also, finer-grained.

Third reason: Re-meaning

We have been born into taxonomies. Now we're making our own. It's messy, but, well, so are we.

The fact that the basic principles of taxonomies — lumping and splitting — have reflected physical limitations means that our alienation from categories is an alienation from the physical world??

Most exciting thing: We don't know where this is going. A new infrastructure of human meaning. What will emerge?

[Technorati tags: taxonomy tags berkman ]

Web of Ideas: The Time of the Net

This Wednesday, I'm leading yet another in a series of discussions at the Berkman Center. This time the topic is:

Many of our metaphors about the Internet treat it as a place, which is perfectly appropriate. But many - or perhaps all - Net phenomena have a temporal dimension which is not "merely" metaphorical. For example, weblogs are able to become proxy selves because they have permanent addresses, IM's distinguishing characteristic is that it's interruptive of the now, and discussions are presented as threaded as a way to sort through overlapping chronologies. How else does time manifest itself on the Net? How is it different from real world time and our traditional conception of time as a series of atomic moments?

It's open to anyone. And we serve pizza. Woohoo! Wednesday, 6-7:30pm, at the Baker House (map) [Technorati tag: berkman ]

Authors tags and topics

I find it interesting that I haven't seen a new age tagging app that gives special social weight to the tags the authors of works create. Obviously authors get to sort their resources by the tags they've assigned, but when it comes to make sense of the aggregation of tags, authors' tags have no special weight.

This isn't a criticism. Rather, it's an observation about how reader-centric we're becoming.

It also is another signal that we are shifting from topics to interests. Topics get declared by authorities and have authority. They are assumed to have some independent, trans-generational longevity. Topics can even have ontological status: A topic is what a resource is about. In the tagging world, though, a tag expresses what something means to me, the reader. It can say what something is about, but it can just as easily denote its genre ("humor", "disclosure statements"), significance ("must read," "nitpicking") or its language. And if the tag expresses the resource's topic, it's the topic in its relevance to my interests: I might tag a custard pie recipe as "ballistic object."

Now, along comes folksonomy, the emergence of taxonomy from the bottom up. It can occur if people get some feedback about how others are tagging resources: If I see that 500 people tag photos of San Francisco as "SanFran" and only three tag them "SF," I will go with "SanFran" if I want my photos to be found, thus adding to that tag's momentum.

Does this mean that folksonomies will encourage the re-emergence of topics, bottom up? Are we going to be double-minded, applying one tag for the folksonomy so the resource can be found and others that reflect our own interests? ? (If we also start tagging for local folksonomies — our social networks — we may become multi-minded in our tagging.) Are topics dead or are we rebuilding them in our images? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy ]

Shufflecasting

Rael has coined a term: Shufflecasting:

Rather than downloading fully-formed podcast "shows" consisting of talk, music, and assorted sound-effects, I've been autofilling my Shuffle with an eclectic mix...

Rather than a "produced" full-blown radio show (the direction in which some podcasting seems headed), shufflecasting is more geek NPR meets Prairie Home Companion meets The Screensavers...

[Technorati tags: shufflecast rael ]

Geniacs at work

A 1955 Geniacs computer kit for kids 1955 is currently selling at eBay for $232.50, and there are four days left in the auction.

Geniacs kit

I had one of these when I was a lad. You programmed it by placing metal strips on wheels.

I also had a plastic computer that consisted of layers like a lasagna that had tubes you slid over prongs to make them longer (where long=on), and then you shuffled the layers. Yes, the memory is a bit fuzzy, but the computer's logic was not.

I did not care for either toy. I didn't like computers until I was typing my wife's dissertation for her and discovered word processing. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.] [Technorati tags: geniacs ebay ]

Marc Abrahams points to a Geniac ad from 1957. The first paragraph:

GENIAC the first electrical brain construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. Specific problems in a variety of fields--actuarial, policy claim settlement, physics, etc., can be set up and solved with the components. Connections are solderless and are completely explained with templates in the manual. This covers 33 circuits and shows how new ones can be designed.

It cost $19.95.

Release 1.0 - Taxonomies and Trees

I wrote the current issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter, a looong piece on taxonomies and tagging. Esther has given me permission to post the introduction to the article. It attempts to give an overview of taxonomies, trees, faceted classification, tags and folksonomies. Here's how it begins:

The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree’s branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example ...

Click here to read the rest of the introductory section... [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy ]

Google loses S

Gary Googlewhack Stock points out that Google no longer provides automatic links to the definition of search terms that end in S:

Nothing is delicious (11M pages). No one is anxious (6M). This may be because no one has a penis (24M). In apparent response to GOP fiscal irresponsiblity, nothing remains gratis (131M). Some fail to see the obvious (28M), that Genesis (16M) is not in conflict with physics (56M). Alas! (5M)

You know how when you search for, say, anxietyon Google, the light blue bar at the top reports that it's showing Results 1-100 of about 16,900,00 for anxiety (0.55), and since "anxiety" is a recognized word, there's a ink to a dictionary definition? If you search for any word that ends with an "s," as in "anxious," there's no link.

Gary speculates, among other possibilites that "At Google's heart, the regex !^(?i)[a-z]+\s*$ has lost a slash, banning all pluralization!"

Unnamed fame

There have been two problems, both involving veterans. After receiving the big money, Mark Blount has been about 60 percent of the Mark Blount of a year ago. And then there was the resident star, who has played much of the season in a pout...

— Bob Ryan, "Ainge may not be able to wiggle out of this," Boston Globe, Feb. 25, 2005

The resident star is apparently so famous that he does not need to be named. His absence of namingness signals his fame, so to speak. It's takes one-namers such as Madonna and Cher one step further, all the way to being a non-namer. Now that's fame!

I, of course, don't have any idea who the article is referring to. Presumably, a computer trying to parse this article, even just to index it, is going to have less of an idea.

Here's where you get to jump in and explain that latent semantic indexing would associate cues such as "star" with other articles where the star is named, and thus computers are smarter than I am and I ought to take my hair-sprouting protoplasm back to the swamp that spawned it and not only that but chrome takes a polish better than my sagging flesh ever did. To which I reply that if computers are so smart, how come they haven't sent an Arnold-like cyborg from the future and have it assume the reins of government. Yeah, how come? Answer me that, bit-brain-boy!

Prototype blogs

At the Thursday night blogging confab at the Berkman Center, the question of how to define blogs briefly surfaced in a meta way. It reminded me of a page I've wanted for a long time, but apparently haven't wanted enough to build.

The idea is that most living terms are impossible to define cleanly. We do much better by pointing to some examples that everyone agrees "If these aren't ___s, then nothing is!" (This is part of the rejection of Aristotelianism built on Eleanor Rosch's work in prototype classification, but that's an example of a different color.) So, if you wanted to explain to someone what a blog is, what would be a reasonable set of examples to which you could point? These aren't necessarily the award-winning, big time blogs. In fact, they probably shouldn't be because, by definition, the award winners aren't typical. You'd want the list to include a good range of types and styles.

What would you put on a list of prototype blogs that would give a newbie — or a journalist — a good sense of the nature and range of blogs?

BTW, here's now not to define a blog:

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web."

This would be slightly amusing if it didn't come from Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

Amazing visualization

You may not care about the frequency of baby names sorted by year, but you will go gaga over this way of visualizing that information you may not care about.

As viral as a splinter

Online Media Daily reports that MSN Search has started a "viral campaign" created by an agency called 42 Entertainment. But I don't get what's viral about it.

The main page, MSNFound, aggregates six phony blogs supposedly written by a demographically-appealing set of people. The individual blogs are one-entry and not very interesting. In fact, they are interest-averse, as so much marketing is. For example, the one by the so-called conspiracy theorist has a small banner about the "Enron/Afghanistan connection," but it's not linked to anything.

The aim seems to be to get you to click on links that are in fact queries so you can see the magnificence of MSN Search. But it in fact is confusing. The surfer dude's "blog" suggests you do a search on "Tad _____" (where the blank is autofilled each time by the software with something different such as "Huntington Pier" or "Apprentice") to see some "surprises." The only surprise is that MSN Search puts a photo of the dude and a paragraph from his blog above all the legitimate entries and doesn't explain how it got there. It's just confusing. (In normal searches, the paid-for links are visually set off and the phrase "sponsored links" shows up in a too-faint gray.)

So, what's supposed to be viral about this other than that by calling it viral, you get people like me to write about it?

(Disclosure: I was a member of the group of people MSN Search targeted for schmoozing shortly before the launch.) [Technorati tags: marketing MSNSearch ]

I'm going to guess that this is the marketing project Scoble rips a new one for.

In response to Scoble, Pamela Parker Caird of The River wonders if a campaign can go viral these days without bloggers.

Sean Carver of MSN responds.

Sean, it's not that I'm taking the site too seriously. I admit that I'm probably out of your demographic, but why would I want to come back to this site? And if I don't come back, how am I supposed to figure out that it's actually a a "search engine 'opera'"? I understand that it's supposed to be entertaining but to me it just wasn't. That's sort of the opposite of viral.

But, then, I also think the MSN Search tv ads are a waste of electrons. After 28 seconds of random images dancing around a search box, we learn that MSN Search exists. Is there some reason we should go to MSN Search or is its mere existence supposed to be enough of an enticement? But, I assume this ad tested well, so I'm just showing my naivete.

Orphaned works - a plea from Lessig

A big snippet from email Larry Lessig, star of The West Wing, is sending around, lightly edited:

Thanks to some prodding by a couple of great US Senators, the copyright office is currently considering whether to recommend changes to copyright law that will make it easier and cheaper for you to use "orphaned works" — works that remain under copyright but whose "owner" can't be found...

To convince them, we need your help. If you have a relevant story, or a perspective that might help the Copyright Office evaluate this issue, I would be grateful if you took just a few minutes to write an email telling them your story. The most valuable submissions will make clear the practical burden the existing system creates. (One of my favorite stories is about a copy-shop's refusal to enlarge a 60 year old photo from an elementary school year book for a eulogy because the copyright owner couldn't be found.) Describe instances where you wanted to use a work, but couldn't find the owner to ask permission. Explain how that impacted your ability to create...

The Copyright Office is already overworked and understaffed, so I'm not asking that you stuff their inbox with demands for action, or anything like that. [Emphasis added] They are not Congress. They are not even the FCC. Their role here is as fact-finder, so "just the facts, ma'am." (Oops, do I need permission to use that?)

Everything you need to do this is online at http://eldred.cc. ..

Larry also points at LuminousVoid's reporting on the American Library Association's oral argument against the FCC's right to put in blace the Broadcast Flag regulation that will require manufacturers of digital equipment to ensure that their recorders can't be used to make copies of copyrighted works. The article also points to Declan McCullagh's coverage. [Technorati tags: fcc BroadcastFlag lessig ]

Halley's Bard moment

Halley does a might fine pastiche in response to Rebecca's request for bloggy sonnets. Here's the first quatrain:

Let me not to the syndication of true blogs
Admit impediments. Blog is not blog
Which alters when it aggregation finds,
Or bends with the question of Atom or Dave:

Freedom to Connect

There's one week left to register for David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect conference at the reduced price of $250. It looks like it'll be an informal confabulation of interesting people, with a special emphasis on how telecommunications might change and change the world. See you there? [Technorati tag: DavidIsenberg f2c]

While we're talking about freedom to connect:

SaveMuniWireless wants to stop a Texas House bill that would ban municipal wireless networks.

And the EFF is having more luck putting together MythTVs than Greg and I are... [Technorati tag: mythtv ]

Thomas Hoeren

Thomas Hoeren from Muenster is talking at the Berkman Tuesday lunch. He's been described as the Larry Lessig of Europe.

He says there are five ways of regulating information:

1. By statute. But how do you manage statutes across national boundaries? Plus, technology out-races statues.

2. Regulation by courts. Lessig likes this because you have the client there advocating for herself. Hoeren likes it also, but there are problems: Courts don't have rules. You can't predict what they're going to do.

3. Non-regulation. E.g., until 1989, the US avoided having copyright protection for foreign works. In Europe, consumer protection has not been regulated. But, there are areas where constitutions require regulation.

4. Self-regulation. Good, but there are problems. E.g., eBay is self-regulating but is now being sued under European anti-trust laws.

5. Code as Code, technical regulation. This is Lessig's innovation. Use technology to reinvent the rules. But the DMCA has lawyers helping companies avoid hacking.

In which situation do we use which tool? That is the main issue of information regulation. We need to find a Kantian "regulative idea," which Hoeren calls "informational justice."

There are four ways of defining it:

1. Use a constitution. (BTW, he says in Germany they avoid using the word "property" when talking about "intellectual property." Yay.)

2. International public law. E.g., Kyoto for air quality. But when it comes to information law, there are too many players. He maintains that Article 9 of the Geneva rules is now being used in a way that twists its original intention.

3. Law and economics. Let the efficiency of rules determine how we think in informational law. But there are fundamental values that are not economic: E.g., the moral right of authors.

4. Can we use ideas of procedural justice to determine the meta-rules for information? Presented by Habermas who said we'll never find a solution for determining common values. But we can find procedural rules of justice. A result is ok if it's the result of a fair procedure. Hoeren likes this.

Right now there are many procedural injustices, he says. E.g., most of the internal drafts copyright directives in Europe are first sent to the headquarters to the content producers, not the consumer organizations.

Q: (Me) At Harvard there's a controversy. We try to have fair hiring processes but it has led to an imbalance in gender and race. Inevitably we judge whether a process is just in part by looking at the outcome. But with information, we don't have agreement about what is just. So, how do we know that the process is just?

A: We don't have an idea about what informational justice is, so it's best to try to make sure that the processes are fair and open.

Q: (Urs) Who defines the procedural rules — that's the meta-meta problem.

A: In Sweden there are many procedural rules for lobbying. The drafts of acts are published and any meetings with lobbyists are posted on the Net. (John Clippinger asks about the effect of social norms, a point Hoeren very much liked, but I missed it. Sorry.)

Q: (Urs) What about blended approaches?

A: I'm not trying to invent a theory that changes the whole world. I see procedural justice as a type of negative justice: I can determine what is unjust but not what is just.

Q: (me) Let's say we go through the process and we lose. E.g., Lessig lost the Eldred case. Should he then say, Ok, justice has been served because the process was fair? But he won't. He has a non-procedural idea of justice.

A: Yes, but I don't understand that. As a researcher, Lessig ought to be satisfied. The rest of it is religion. Larry is a preacher.

He ends by admitting that there is an old argument between Hegel and Kant about the limits of formalism. And, he says, he's not a huge fan of procedural justice; he just can't find anything better.

Jason needs your micro-cash

Jason Kottke is going full time as a blogger and would like some help.

Bacon rulz (not)

An international team has put together a new blog on the virtues of bacon. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the baconists, sees this as yet another way to build bridges between bloggers, in this case the vegetarians and the carnivores.

As a vegetarian, I can only applaud this noble yet repulsive effort.

Ethan has Flickred photos from his India trip. And this post is worth a second link to.

Community bloggers at the gates

Lisa Williams has started a community journalism site for Watertown, MA: H20town.info. (As of this morning, the name hasn't made it entirely hrough the DNS system, so you may have to click here for now.) It looks great.

Lisa says she was inspired in large part by Adam Gaffin's Boston-online.com and Debbie Galant's Baristanet.com.

When it comes to blogging's long-term effect on journalism, this stuff matters more than the ability of bloggers to bring down media authority figures. The latter counts, no doubt, but it's giving us a Barbarians-at-the-gates image. In fact, I think it'd be fairer to view us overall as community gardeners.

Hunter S. Thompson

He was a ferociously talented writer and a truth teller. I'm sad to hear he's gone.

Smaller than a googol

Enter a mathematical expression into Google and it will return the results. E.g., if you enter "1+2" (no quotes), it will tell you the answer is 3. Enter "half a cup in teaspoons" and it tells you that that's 24 US teaspoons.

So, the lunatic journal, WordWays (I'm a long-time subscriber and love it) writes briefly about Eric Iverson's attempt to see "which alphabetic phrase without any repreating letters generated the largest and smallest number." Why? For that we'd need a psychiatrist and a pick axe. But who cares? Eric has found that the smallest is

and the largest is

I am so not tempted to outdo Eric.

WordWays — "The Journal of Recreational Linguistics" — continues to get harder to read thanks to computers. A typical article treats words as collections of letters and tries to find ones that meet some odd constraint. Typical articles used to be about word pyramids and hyphenated words whose letters immediately before and after the hyphen cover every possible pairing. But now that word lists are computerized, the best of the WordWaysians have to come up with challenges that would not only stump a human but come close to stumping computers. I often can't figure out what the hell the challenge is. For example, Simon Norton has an article wondering if all words can be expressed as sumagrams. Here's the second paragraph:

This is what is called a free abelian group, where the second word derives from the name opf the Norwegian mathematician Abel. The elements of this group are sequences of (upper case) letters and antiletters...

Some I can follow, though. Eric Iverson, for example, publishes a list of words made only with letters with diagonals in them, from akavit to zanza. He finishes with a list of the longest words without any diagonal letters, starting with bioelectricities. And Darryl Francis lists all 300 tube stations in London and tries to find something interesting about their names. For example, did you know that Bond Street transadds to deobstruent and sober-tinted? I didn't!

In the current issue, there's also an article by Will Nediger speculating that Douglas Adams took his fascination with the number 42 from Lewis Carroll. And my son and I particularly enjoyed Fender Tucker's list of 11 heterograms placed in perfectly ambiguous sentences, such as:

After breaking into the Sherriff of Nottingham's armory, the flamboyant actor/thief Robin Hood took a bow.

Unfortunately, WordWays has a minimal Web presence — some samples and an opportunity to subscribe. It's just about tailor-made for living on line. [Technorati tag: wordways ]

Lawrence Summers: Worse than I expected

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, talked semi-informally to a conference held at the university, offering three hypotheses about why women are under-represented in science and engineering: 1. They are less willing than men to work the long hours because they value family more than men do; 2. Women are inherently worse at science; 3. There are "different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search."

The discrepancy between the transcript and the public statement

Before Summers released the transcript, I blogged that, from what he said and what others reported, I thought he wasn't really just putting forward three hypotheses worth looking at. I thought he betrayed a subtle preference for one of them. Now that the transcript has been released, we know it wasn't subtle. He was arguing explicitly for the first two hypotheses: Women choose not to succeed and most women cannot succeed in the sciences. Either way, it's their fault. He said:

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth—I would far prefer to believe something else, ... is that the combination of the high- powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

And:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

But in Summers' initial public statement on the controversy he says that in his remarks he was "offering some informal observations on possibly fruitful avenues for further research." Now that we see the entire transcript, we know that's not the whole truth. He wasn't simply offering three hypotheses. He was arguing for two of them.

His initial public statement tries to put a gloss on matters. For example:

Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science. As the careers of a great many distinguished women scientists make plain, the human potential to excel in science is not somehow the province of one gender or another.

If you read the public statement, you come away thinking that he sees no inherent differences in men and women when it comes to scientific aptitude. But, after reading the transcript, you realize his public statement fudges the issue by leaving out a modifier: The fact that some women become distinguished scientists doesn't mean that women in general aren't innately inferior in the sciences. From the transcript, we learn that Summers in fact does believe that women's under-representation is caused by inherent inabilities, although, to be fair, he repeatedly admits he could be wrong.

So after the controversy broke, Summers put a better gloss on what he'd said. That's a human thing to do. But it detracts from the claim of his supporters — especially the right wingers shouting that this is a case of PC-ness gone wild — that Summers was only engaging in the sort of open inquiry we should applaud. Yes, taking bold stands is a value we should cherish; being disingenous about them afterwards is not.

Summers' view of discrimination

In the transcript Summers makes the odd argument (attributed to Gary Becker) that if discrimination were pervasive, an institution that wasn't discriminatory should be able to gather up a whole bunch of worthy hires quite cheaply. So, we should see a few institutions with science and engineering faculties overloaded with incredibly talented women. But we don't. Therefore, he concludes, there isn't pervasive discrimination. and the first two hypotheses explain the situation.

Transpose this to major league baseball's discrimination against African-Americans before the color barrier was broken. By Summers' reasoning, the fact that teams were all white proved that there wasn't pervasive discrimination, a peculiar argument to say the least. So, you have to add in the particularities of women's situation. If you add in the real situation — schools are actively recruiting women — the argument doesn't apply either. It only applies if one believes that discrimination means having a no "No Girls Allowed" sign on the recruitment office door, except at a handful of institutions that have realized they can scoop up brilliant faculty members at bargain prices if they end their discriminatory policies.

That's not how discrimination works these days. It's not something that occurs just at the moment of hiring. It happens in the socializing of men and women and in the structure of institutions that lead men and women in different directions. That encouragement need not be as explicit as being put on the Science Team in junior high. It can also result from the culture of science being hostile to women or how the scientific community is structured — It is telling that Summers doesn't introduce the structure of institutions as a fourth hypothesis. That's because, while he's a brilliant intellectual, he has a ham-fisted view of discrimination. He sees it as a set of false beliefs through which a sufficiently enlightened person — or an enlightened recruitment committee — could see, rather than as a complex set of assumptions, behaviors and body language pervasive throughout a culture.

I believe that Larry Summers sincerely would like to make Harvard's faculty more diverse. But I also think that his remarks are themselves evidence of the environment in which women struggle, one that assumes that reasons and policies can get over discrimination. Discrimination can come about not only through judgment but, more dangerously, through the environment that conditions judgment.

Larry: Stay or go?

Personally, open inquiry is under attack from so many quarters that I would vote against firing Summers. People need to be allowed to be bone- headed, self-interested, defensive, and imperfectly non-discriminatory. We need to be able to introduce hypotheses and examine them, even if our examinations are flawed. In this case, I think those needs outweigh the degree of insensitivity apparent in Summer's statements and behavior...yes, even if he had made similar remarks about Jews or African- Americans. But it's a hard judgment to make and, as Summers would say, I'm not confident I'm right.

[Disclosure: I'm a Fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center. I've never met Summers. I am not a member of the faculty and have no voice in such issues.] [Technorati tags: harvard LawrenceSummers ]

Bloggers meetup

Chapel Hill bloggers have started using MeetUp to get together in the real world. Given the success of the Berkman weekly blogging meeting, it seems like a great idea. Good luck to them.

A search at MeetUp on "blog" turns up interesting results: 450 meetup groups for LiveJournal, 34 for Persian Blogging, 54 fgor MovableType, 3 for Video Blogging. It'd be interesting to see how many meetups spawn group blogs... [Technorati tag: meetup ]

Shiny points

Jon Stewart on blogs, thanks to onegoodmove.

A photo diary of a day in the life of Tom Peters.

[Technorati tags:DailyShow TomPeters]

Thursday night blog meeting video

Steve Garfield recorded the Thursday night meeting at Berkman that was taped by Nightline. He's posted a 5-min (approx) version of it. So now the discussion about what's on and off the record is totally on the record. Thanks, Steve!

And Mike Walsh has posted an MP3. Thanks, Mike! [Technorati tags: berkman media]

Worst watch instructions...ever

I used my Chanukah money from my in-laws (thanks Grandma and Grandpa!) to buy a watch on eBay that I've been admiring for a couple of years. It's a Citizen Eco-Drive — the Eco means it runs on light, thus saving .0000000000000000005 kilowatts per year for the children of Mother Earth — and I like it, except for the instructions. Often watch instructions fail because they're too brief. These fail because, although they are full, they are incomprehensible. Here's an example, under the subhead "O-Position Correction of Function Hand and Date Wheel":

The whole thing is like that. Page after page.

We need a Watch Setting Wiki where our civilization can pitch in and, using our combined brainpower, create understandable instructions for setting our watches. [Technorati tags: watches eco-drive]

Shiny lights

Robert Scoble made the blogosphere a little shinier by congratulating Firefox on its success.

RageBoy's new High-Beam blog was a pick of the day at The Guardian making The Guardian a little shinier and sanding down a carbunkle on RB's craggy butt which is as close as RB gets to being shiny. (Here's RB on Scoble.)

Reading AKMA's talk - sermon? invocation? - at the marriage of his friends Juliet and John will make you and your life companion feel shiny. For me, AKMA is a BridgeBlogger except instead of giving insight into another country, we learn what's remarkable about another religion.

I got a shiny copy of a new magazine in the mail a few days ago: Make. It's packed with cool stuff and would appeal to the tinkerer in me if I had one of them in me. It's off to a great start. (Dan Bricklin loves it.)

EthanZ is doing some powerful blogging from India, shining his light on a place that is unfamiliar to most of us on this side of the world.

Liz Lawley will be spending her time adding to the wattage of Microsoft Research's Social Computing Group. It's an impressive and congenial group. Congrats, Liz.

Bob "Ethernet" Metcalfe has won a shiny National Medal of Technology for technological innovation. Congrats!

I'm puzzled, though, about why this medal, announced three days ago, is for 2003. Not quite keeping up in Internet time, are we, Department of Commerce?

(Why the surge of miscellany? Because I just turned in a looong article on taxonomies and tags that will be the next issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, so now I have time to poke around the Web some more.)

IBM puts money into linux on the desktop

IBM plans on spending $100M over the next three years on getting linux onto desktops. According to eChannelLine the money will be used to:

...expand Linux support and technology across its Workplace software portfolio, which is used in a server-managed client model.

The investment will be focused on ISV support programs, channel and partner enablement and promotion, research and development, sales and marketing, and various technology and integration centers.

I'm actually surprised they're not spending more. How much would it be worth to IBM to dethrone Windows? ,

Blogs and journalism, again

At the end of last night's weird Berkman blogging meeting, recorded by ABC News for some upcoming episode of Nightline, the producer expressed surprise that anyone would blog about the presence of the cameras in the meeting. There were some very smart replies by bloggers there — Go Lisa, who concluded "Yes, my life is interesting to me" — but the producer's comment indicated to me that we failed to make the point that blogging isn't a sub-species of journalism. Of course we're blogging the event because it's something in our lives that we find interesting: We're not in front of the cameras every day and it's pretty damn fascinating to see how the mere presence of a camera creates a distortion field. But is "Cameras record meeting" news? Of course not; it's a condition for there being news. (Hmm. I think I'm saying what Brendan Greeley of PRX said last night.)

By the way, to read a surprisingly sympathetic view of the effect of blogging on journalism, see Peggy "Reagan's Speechwriter" Noonan's take on it. Wow. [Thanks, Dave, for the link.]

[Technorati tag: media]

Larry Summers on the record

Pres. L. Summers has at last posted a transcript of his comments from a couple of weeks ago. So, now maybe (maybe) we can get a sense of the sense of his remarks. (Ironically, we learned about this at the Berkman Thursday blogging meeting which was discussing what's on and off the record.)

Live blogging a media event

The weekly blogging meeting, 7-8:30, at the Berkman Center this week is being recorded by a team from ABC News for Nightline. Our topic is what's on the record and what's off the record, and, of course, this time the discussion is entirely on the record.

It's a bizarre experience. The bit Sony camera gets swung around to point at the person speaking, changing everything. It's attention made physical.

I'm worried because the conversation keeps talking about the question in terms of the tiny handful of bloggers who view themselves as doing some type of journalism. That's how the mainstream media already tends to view us. I hate to see us reinforce that.

That aside, it's a good conversation. So far... (I particularly enjoyed Lisa Williams comments about not publishing information she doesn't own, e.g., conversations with co-workers, and about the state of grown-uppedness of our culture in terms of the media.) [posted at 7:30pm]

Jim Moore points out that we're not going to resolve anything tonight, nor do we expect to. We're engaged in a continuing conversation. That's the way we humans work.

Lisa: Conversations about blogs tend to devolve into conversations about fear. She's amazed at how kind people are in the blogosphere. [I agree. Underneath the links are people who are interested in the same things and, more important, interested in - care about - one another.]

Erica Geroge of the Berkman says, in response to a comment, that the media don't cover average people -- their (our) cares, interests, etc. But bloggers do. [Badabing. Exactly.] [posted at 7:55]

At 8, we turn to topics more typical of the Thursday night group. E.g., Michael Feldman of The Dow Brigade talks briefly about interesting ways to do a Blogging 101 tutorial, using some free tools to do it multimedially.

Where will the tag sets come from?

Marco Montemagno has an idea to help people aggregate blogs that express opinions: Tag your post with "opinionradar" and the topic. He explains it here.

He asked me via email what I think, and I responded. He's generously posted my response on his site. Here's what I said:

I think the general idea is good and that something like it will succeed, but I think it's more likely to come from some huge player, especially Google.

I'm very interested in seeing how tagging becomes a differentiated space instead of the flat space it is now. Already people are suggesting using prefixes as de facto category tags. E.g., Global Visions, a Berkman Center project, suggests that you tag blogs that give insight into their countries with a "gv:" tag, as in "gv:ghana." As these prefixes proliferate, we're going to have the same problem as with the DNS: What happens when Gelber Vistavision (or some other company) starts tagging its stuff "gv:"?

So, I think it's a huge issue, and I suspect it will be addressed definitively by sites that have the clout to convince taggers to adopt their tag sets. Alternatively, it's possible that the grassroots will adopt a general purpose tag set before sites like Google do, but if we do, I suspect we'll adopt not a single tag here and there (gv or opinionradar) but a few of them all at once, in relation to one another, e.g., "dc-author:" and "dc-language:". (I say "dc" because the Dublin Core would love for us all to adopt its categories.)

That's what I think at the moment, fwiw.

[Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy]

fac.etio.us

While del.icio.us is delicious, fac.etio.us isn't facetious. It's a thought experiment embodied in software from Siderean, a company that creates faceted classification systems for big-ass enterprises. (Note the "facet" in "fac.etio.us"? Damn clever!)

Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it's classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.

So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days' worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:

Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.

At the fac.etio.us home page you'll see all five facets exposed: tag, creator of the tag, site tagged, the feed it was found in (del.icio.us, del.icio.us/popular, and Brad's feed), and the date the tag was created. You can click on any, but let's say we click on one of the entries in the list of Tags: Music. We are taken to a page that lists all the bookmarks tagged "music," but are also shown a list of all the other tags given to all pages tagged with "music," all the people who have tagged a page "music," all the feeds that contain bookmarks tagged "music," and every day in which someone has used the "music" tag. Each of these is itself clickable.

Oh, to hell with describing it. Give it a try!

[Technorati tags: taxonomy tags siderean fac.etio.us]

My life as a Berkperson

Before I applied for a Berkman fellowship, I had to ask John Palfrey and Ethan Zuckerman, neither of whom I knew, a whole bunch of damn fool questions. I had no living sense of what it meant to be a Berkman fellow. Do you drink sherry at 4? Just how witty is the banter? Would I get a discount on ascots?

I've been a fellow since July. Here's what it's like.

[Note: I'm uncomfortable posting this because it's so positive. The truth is that I'm very happy at the Center. And in terms of sucking up, my fellowship has already been renewed for a year and sucking up still won't get me a parking space, so what'd be the point?]

Context

The Berkman Center for the Internet and Society is a Center within Harvard Law. The professors affiliated with it are all (?) with the Law School, and so are many of the students who take part in the various activities, but I find the overall interests have more to do with policy than law; I spend little of my time listening to lawyers discussing cases in an argot I don't understand.

When you apply for a fellowship, you have to state what project you want supported, and that determines what your activities will be. The site lists five project areas, each prepended with the word "open": Law, governance, education, commerce and content. Some of the actual projects underway are:

Documenting Internet "filtering" (=censorship) by various governments

Trying to increase international awareness in the blogosphere by facilitating "bridge bloggers"

Encouraging and facilitating the growth of blogs in rights-challenged countries

Aggregating information about all the groups aiming at establishing international governance of the Internet

Building software to encourage classroom cross-discipline and cross-border conversation

The Digital Media Project, looking at the legal, social and economic effects of five possible "scenarios" describing the development of digital media tech and law

The Center combines research and advocacy, which is always a tough balance. While the Center doesn't enunciate official stands on issues, it comes down consistently in favor of keeping the Internet an open space for ideas and innovation.

What it's like

The Berkman Center has its own house, a three-story Victorian on Mass Ave a few blocks (but on a cold day, a very long few blocks) from Harvard Square. It's a funky place, furnished with a dog pound of furniture, just the way your college apartment was. There's not a lot of space, so only a few people have offices there. The rest of us come in as appropriate and hang around the small-ish downstairs meeting room or perhaps grab a spare computer in a hallway or cranny. (You've gotta like a house with crannies.) I have a home office, so I don't come into the Center to write. I come to hang out with people.

Last year, the Center started a new semi-policy: Tuesdays are fellows days. That's the day to show up. In the morning, fellows hang out in the downstairs meeting room around a table. There are bagels, fruit and coffee, and no topic. It's usually only a handful of us. I think I most see Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Zephyr Teachout, Mary Rundle, Derek Bambauer and Wendy Koslow there. There's never a problem getting a conversation going. Jezoos Carruthers, I learn a lot.

Most Tuesdays there's a lunchtime speaker. It's in the same small room, often with an overflow crowd of twenty or so. The speakers range pretty much all over the lot, from a Microsoft lawyer talking about copyright to a report on connectivity in Uzbekistan. Typically the speaker doesn't get through her presentation entirely. The Center provides sandwiches.

Tuesdays are the most structured, but any day of the week you will find interesting people from whom you will learn gobs. Plus, there are speakers, meetings and get-togethers at random times.

What you have to do

Each fellow is expected to present her research at a Tuesday lunch or equivalent and to write something for the Center's journal. The rest of your duties are determined by the project the Center is supporting.

My case is a bit unusual because my project — working on a book about the effect the digital organization of stuff is having on the nature of knowledge (I really have to find a more interesting way of describing it) — is a bit off-topic for the Center. So, I'm supposed to work on the book and also lead a series of Wednesday night discussions.

Fellowships are usually for one year.

What you get

A stipend that ranges from $0 to $42,000. (I'm way at the low end of the scale, and certainly need to keep my day job.)

A Harvard ID that lets you use just about any of its resources

A Harvard business card that impresses the hell out of people

The opportunity to participate in the life of the Center

No parking privileges

The Culture

I've been in a variety of academic environments, and the Berkman is the most collegial of them. Much of that is due to the personalities of the law professors in charge. The Center's first instinct, in my limited experience, is to support you in your project or line of thought. There is an air of sweetness about the Center, which I did not expect. I mean, these are Harvard law professors. Didn't they see The Paper Chase, fer pete's sake?

The Center is multi-partisan in theory. In practice, the Center's heart is clearly pro-grassroots. It's unlikely to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the RIAA. (If you're from the RIAA and give a lunchtime talk, you'll be treated with respect, but you'll also be asked tough questions by Harvard lawyers.)

I personally love the mix of scholarship and activism. These are folks passionate about the Internet both intellectually and practically. And it's a "learning community": I have yet to be laughed at (to my face, anyway) for asking dumb questions. The ethos is one of generosity: People will spend forever helping me to understand things.

I see more women there than men.

Negatives

The gender balance feels about right in practice among the fellows (yes, I'm aware of the irony of using the word "fellows" in this sentence), although it's way off at the professorial level. And the atmosphere is definitely not one of macho competition and oneupmanship. There's a fair bit of international presence, and most discussions occur within a global perspective. The racial balance sucks.

It is an academic environment, which often informs the discourse. If that's not your cup of tea, then the Berkman Center is probably not for you. It is, however, also an activist center. I like the balance. You may not.

The range of political and policy opinions among the fellows is fairly narrow. More diversity would help.

I'm having trouble coming up with other negatives. (Oy, that sentence sits there like bait!)

In Conclusion

If you can't tell, I'm enjoying my time as a Berkperson. I'm meeting people I care about and, unsurprisingly, you can't hardly walk through the doors without falling into a conversation that changes the way you think. What more could I ask for? Besides a parking space.

[Technorati tag: berkman]

The New IE, i.e., Firefox scares Microsoft

RageBoy points to the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog where someone named Dave — "the guy responsible for IE" — tells us Microsoft will release IE 7.0 before Longhorn and that it will kick butt somehow. There are 544 comments.

I assume that IE 7.0 will mercilessly rip-off Firefox, which is exactly what should happen. But Firefox escapes the leapfrog paradigm because its friendly development environment — and the commitment of so many talented developers — means that features get added whenever anyone has a good idea. In fact, here's a suggested mouse gesture for use within Firefox:

It'd open an instance of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

[Technorati tags: firefox ie microsoft]

Topical citizen journalism

Campus J is trying to "cover" Jewish campus news by having students blogging from various universities — topic-based citizen newspapers makes total sense.

Steven Weiss, the editor and publisher, writes in an email that after launching two weeks ago, it's already having an effect: A piece on the Orthodox Union cancelling its Congressional internship program has spurred the organization's former president to lead a successful push to cancel the cancellation. [Technorati tags: journalism media]

Dave blogs about his day in Greensboro where a fascinating experiment in location-based citizen journalism is underway.

Transparency and forgiveness

I find the story of Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN disturbing, but not for the reasons Scott Rosenberg suggests:

I'm not shedding tears for the CNN executive. I'm always amazed at the stupid things CEOs, politicians, news honchos and other people who hold public responsibility will say in public (and do in private), thinking that the inherent power of their position grants them carte blanche and wraps them in Teflon. If they need to be beaten up over and over again until they really, really understand that — as the saying goes in blog-land — "off the record is dead," fine.

It's certainly true that remarks that formerly would have been private now are made not just public but super-public. But I don't think we can survive the new transparency if we keep up the same old standards of criticism. I've said plenty of stupid things in my life. (Heck, I may be saying one right now.) Most have been in private. Some have been in public. And some things I said in public would look downright dastardly if viewed as isolated sentences. If we're going to make more of the private public, we also have to give the benefit of the doubt, forgive, and laugh off the occasional offensive and stupid remarks. Otherwise, no one will survive the glare of the public.

Yes, I think that's true of Jordan, Larry Summers and even Dick "Go f_ck yourself" Cheney. Transparency requires forgiveness. [Technorati tags: transparency jordan media]

If you want to see what the opposite of forgiveness looks like, take a gander at the organized piling-on in reaction to Mitch's recent bloggery.