[f2c] Municipal wifi

(After a morning with no women speakers or questioners, we now have a panel with a woman on it. Yay.)

J.H. Snider moderates. [Sketchy coverage follows...]

Varinia Robinson is in charge of Philadelphia's municipal wifi project. You have to get your muni wifi in by Jan. 1, 2006, or else you have go to your local provider. This was done to protect "competition." The city thinks it'll cost $10.5M to build it and $1.5M annually to maintain it. It will cover 45 square miles and provide a mnimum of 1mb up and down. It's an ubiquitous indoor network. To break even, they have to make it available indoors. They're looking at providing broadband access at dialup prices. (Harold Feld points out that the incumbent got a $600M incentive for moving their hq downtown, yet they yelp about a $10M network.)

Dewayne Hendricks, who has a habit of providing telecommunications infrastructures in unregulated areas — Tonga, Indian reservations, etc.) is now working on providing wireless networks that cover hundreds of square miles. He's hopeful that we're going to keep matching wireless speeds with the speeds we need on our computers. He also talks about "smart dust": Radios that are like grains of sand that mesh automatically. Dust Networks in the Bay area is already doing this.

Ben Scott: In state after state, there are grass roots efforts fighting the incumbents' attempts to put through favorable legislation.

Harold Feld: Municipal wifi could be like taxis: You have the basic service available to anyone, but there's room for higher-end services such as limos. [Technorati tags: f2c philadelphia]

Conference attendance parallelism

As far as I can tell, Andrew McLaughlin is the only person who has to been to all four of the same conferences I've been to this month: The Madrid conference on democracy, security and terrorism; O'Reilly Emerging Tech; Esther Dyson's PC Forum; David Isenberg's Freedom2Connect.

It's been a total pleasure to get to spend some time with Andrew, but all I can say to him is: Andrew, you're going to way too many conferences! [Technorati tags: AndrewMcLaughlin pcf05 etech05 f2c]

Cluetrain remix

Scott Adams at Arkansas Tech has remixed Cluetrain for education, through "creative search and replace." [Technorati tag: cluetrain]

[f2c] The Great Debate

[NOTE: This is live blogging. It is not close to a transcript, nor is it comprehensive. Finally, I'm hindered by having only a sketchy sense of what they're talking about.]

Charlie Firestone of the Aspen Institute moderates a debate. Resolved that the Communication Act's stovepipe, vertical regime ought to be replaced by a horizontal regime.

Rick Whitt (MCI and author of "Taking a Horizontal Leap Forward")
Tim Wu (U of Va law prof)
Randolph May (Progress and Freedom Foundation)
James Gattuso (Heritage Foundation)

Rick Whitt: The basics of the Net are at odds with the Communications Act: Layers, agnosticism of IP, transparency of the layers (= end to end). The CA views it vertically: Title II covers voice, Title II covers audio/video, etc. Vertical regulation stifles innovation. In fact, a packet is a packet and thus upsets the silo-ization: an audio packet is the same as a video packet. The horizontal approach regulates by layer: content layer, application layer, transmission layer, physical layer. [I'm not sure I've gotten this right] and an intermediate one is consistent with the architecture of the Net. It also gives you more granularity.

May: The horizontal approach is based on techno-functional capabilities. But tech changes rapidly, so you don't want to lock in public policy framework based on technology? We're not going to have agreement on the layers. Fundamentally, this is not worth overturning the stovepipes to move3 to this place. We need to be in a better place: A regime that would look at services offered by providers in a market and to see whether those providers have market power, and if so what type of reglation you would apply based on market power.

Wu: The layers model need not be complicated. The one we're proposing is the same as the model in the heads of the best FCC regulators. It's based on the distinction between transport infrastructure and applications. Contol over the physical infrastructure restricts market entry. People are upset about this because the layers approach would remove the incumbents' ability to block market entry. We need to control the physical layer because that's where the bottleneck,

Gattuso: We agree that there's a problem. But the Layers approach is muddled; people disagree about it. The key factors that should drive regulation: Competition and choice. Layers can inform you about what the market might be, but it's not definitive. Competition should be the key consideration. Public policy should look at the actual problems we're facing, not as a secondary consideration.

Whitt: May, the CA is not techno-functional. Yes, tech will change over time, but the layers have survived for four decades. The point isn't to replicate the OSI stack but to give regulators a way to think about this. What we're proposing to Congress is a two-layer approach. The main dispute goes to the broadband layer: MCI belives there's concentration of broadband suppliers. Even Michael Powell thinks there's an issue.

May: When you have a model that leads things unclear, you're inviting litigation. The FCC is trying to look at services to see if they're in the same marketplace. That doesn't involve a technical-functional distinction.

Wu: Any telecommunications legislation will have classification. The point of layers is to minimize them and have them make sense. The vertical model muddles the question. Would a market or anti-trust approach be simpler? No, you have the same problem of market definition with anti-trust. It's even more complex. Leaving it to anti-trust is just a way of saying that we should just leave the incumbents alone. Anti-trust courts rarely do anything.

Gattuso: Regulation ought only to look to whether competition is working. We're actually talking about whether cable companies have market power over consumers. That's what the discussion ought to be about. I worry that with Layers model in 15 years we'll be arguing over the layers instead of over the real question which is whether consumers have choices. And when Rick says "it's hard to imagine" that tech will change, that's exactly the problem we've had with communications acts.

May: Rick may be coming over to our side. In his new handout he says that all entities should be free to compete within and across layers without regulation. I don't think Prof. Wu agrees. If this is nothing but a market power test, that's what James and I are saying.

Firestone: There's agreement that: A. The existing regime is too restrictive. B. Extreme market power is bad and we want some kind of anti-trust. C. We want to get to a place where there's more competition and consumer choice. Whitt says we should get there by changing the scheme so there are basically two layers. Gattuso wants a strict competitive approach, getting more competitors into the market.

Wu: If we all agree on an anti-trust framework and principles, then you realize that the Layered model deals with a repeated anti-trust issue, i.e., the abuse of the physical layer to restrict competition. It's a way of dealing with a repetitive anti-trust problem. People who believe in anti-trust principles ought to be on our side.

Q&A

Frankston: Layers are a great talking point but there's no reality to them. We're starting with the assumption that regulation makes sense. Maybe we should recognize that provisioning bits isn't a good business.

Whitt: The regulators don't think about it as bit pipes. The Layers approach tries to shatter that way of thinking. It's about political feasibility.

Tim Denton: If we put the four of you in a room, you could come up with the right legislation.

May: Yes, but our side wouldn't put in language about layers.

Isenberg: Can Randolph and James put forward some simple principles to make sure we get the best network, given today's reality of big honking companies that have captured the regulatory apparatus.

Gattuso: I'd make sure that one set of big honking companies can compete to provide alternatives; you want them to go after each other. I'd make sure people can get a foothold in the market; that may be in conflict with uniform connectivity and universal standards. I tend to favor approaches where the regulator is more general, e.g., Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC.

Richard Levine: In the European model, you define anti-trust markets and whether a single firm dominates; if so, then you do something about it. E.g., UK has a market called "broadband access" and British Telcom has a dominate position.

Joel Plotkin: The Baby Bells have privatized a public asset and are blocking competition.

Jerry Gleason: You're talking about competition but you're funded by the incumbents. [They disagree.]

Fred Seignor: How long will the layers model survive with Verizon buying MCI.

Wu: At a conceptual level, anti-trust and European model are attractive. The question whether practically they are excuses for doing nothing. The MCI 2-layer model is real legislation to combat abuse of the physical infrastructure.

May: If you believe that generally that competition is better than regulation, and that you have to provide incentives for people invest and innovate. You do that, you don't take over their property. Just by calling them "incumbent," that's not a policy. [Technorati tags: f2c mci]

Burningbird on WordPress' link farm

Shelley has a considered piece on the discovery that WordPress, the open source blogging software, has been hosting a link farm on its site. " I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people making money from their art," she says. But, she adds, "I can also see that there’s been a dimming of the joy of this medium, as more and more people turn to these pages as a way to make a buck." And she concludes:

Bottom line is: do you like Wordpress? Do you like using Wordpress? Can you still get it for free? Is it still GPL? Then perhaps that’s what should be focused on, and however or whatever Matt does with the Wordpress page is between him and Google; because what matters is the code, not the purity of actions peripherial to the code, or its release.

It's a forgiving piece — the final paragraph recounts how the Romans would make sure triumphant generals would remember they are mortals — which is great to read. We're all human. But I don't think the problem is that WordPress made some money. It's the fact that link farms make one of our tools, Google, less useful. And it's the lack of transparency. Of course, you can't long host a link farm if you're transparent about it, which is a reason for a legit site not to host one.

But why does WordPress owe us anything? In a legal and formal sense, it doesn't. But, part of the joy of the Net — and I think Shelley is exactly right to use the word "joy" here — has been the forging of new, personal relationships with the companies that we engage with, whether they're for free or for pay. I feel oddly connected to Firefox, Six Apart, TinyApps.org, and hundreds of others, large and small, free and commercial, because I feel that they're doing something for the community first; they're not in it only for themselves. I trust them to do the right thing for us. When they don't, I feel betrayed. It's not that big a deal, and I don't go all binary on them. But the sense of betrayal demonstrates the depth of the bond.

So, IMO, WordPress made a mistake. The mistake definitely wasn't making money. It was making money in a way that works against the interests of the Web community. As Shelley says, that doesn't make the WordPress code any worse, and I may switch from Movable Type to WordPress at some point. Forgiveness is totally in order. Yet the abrading of joy does matter. [Technorati tags: wordpress burningbird google]

Matt's response to the brouhaha is here.

[f2c] Jeff Jarvis and Bob Corn-Revere

Jeff interviews Bob Corn-Revere, a first amendment lawyer, about the new threats to free speech. Bob says that the Democrats have been even more pro-regulation than the Republicans. The fines have gone way up: 4x the fines this year than in the total of the past ten years. We now have "obscenity light," a vast expansion of scope and vagueness.

Jeff recounts his investigation of the 129 complaints that caused the FCC to issue it's largest fine ever, $1.2M. Jeff found that they were written by 23 people and all but 3 were the same.

Bob says that the number of complaints is going up dramatically, but that they are being generated by particular web sites. The number of shows that receive complaints is declining. But Congress seems not to be interested in protecting free speech. So, Jeff asks, if this doesn't get settled until it gets to the Supreme Court.

Bob: "It's hard to predict."

Jeff: Broadcasting now is multi-way. Bob replies that that's what's really different now. [Sorry for the crappy summary. It was more nuanced and wide-ranging than this.]

[Can we complain to the FCC that there isn't enough profanity on TV? After all, Janet Jackson's nipple slip was the most frequently replayed moment of the Super Bowl among people with TiVos] [Technorati tags: f2c jarvis CornRevere]

[f2c] Lafayette, LA

Terry Huval tells about the battle for Lafayette, LA, where a citizen desire for broadband access (via fiber to the home) was opposed by the incumbents who proposed legislation to maintain their monopoly. A judge finally ruled that the public ought to be able to vote on it. [Technorati tags: f2c lafayette huval]

[f2c] Susan Crawford

Susan objects to the title of the conference because it acknowledges that someone can take the rightto connect away from you. We don't need permission, she aays. "We are here to assert our freedom to connect." We should be optimistic about the state of connection. "Things are flourishing." The content guys, law enforcement and the telcos would like to control the future. We need to uncontrol it.

At what level of the protocol stack should the government intervene? To allow design mandates to be put in place by a sovereign is like thought control. To assert we have the right to connect without asking permission requires us overcoming our "inner demons," e.g., our willingness to accept filters.

She suggests that we need to "route around" the regulation rather than redoing it. By "route around" she means push out devices that are impossible to regulate. [Technorati tags: f2c scrawford]

[f2c] Lee Rainie

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group reports on his group's recent studies. But first he fools us by pointing to the effects of this new technology, except it turns out to be from Elizabeth Eisenstein's study of the effect of the printing press.

136M American adults now use the Internet. That's 67% of Americans. 87% of teen-agers. 50% of home owners have broadband. In a typical day, 82M Americans will be on line. 71M of those use email...9x the number of people who use the postal system. 41M used a search engine. Broadband teenagers are more likely to get their news online. 14M did online banking, 5x the number who visited a bank. 4M googled someone they were about to meet; 1M googled themselves.

79M have participated in online support groups for a medical or personal problem. 7M have made political donations. 5-88M swapped files even as the Supreme Court was hearing the case.

There were 9 gaps. Only the gender gap has vanished.

Most important: Age.
Employment status: Students rule.
Education: More important than income as an indicator of Internet use
Disability: Only 38% of those with a significant disability use the Internet
Language: English is an indicator
Community type: Ruralites are less likely to be online than urbanites
Parental: Parented households are more likely
Income
Race and ethnicity: Less significant than other indicators.

How does connectivity change us?

People who use the Internet "grow their social capital." People (especially women) use email to enhance their social networks. 84% of Internet users belong to online groups — that's 115M people. "ePatients are creating a new healthcare model where the all-knowing, omnipotent, gate-keeping doctor is being replaced by a new model — online advice and support. (Half of the people doing medical research online are looking for info for someone.) And there is an increase in civic engagement.

He does point to a down side: Evidence shows heavy use of the Net can cause stress. Not to mention bad people doing bad things via the Net.

[Great talk.]

[Technorati tags: f2c pew]

[f2c] Freedom to Connect

I'm at a Freedom to Connect, David Isenberg's conference on why network connections are important and how we can get more of them. It's a fantastic list of attendees.

David opens by arguing that freedom to connect is a political issue. The Democrats don't like it because they're in the pockets of Hollywood. The Republicans don't like it because they're in the pockets of the incumbent telcos. We need to get political, he says.

IRC here.

Audio stream here.

(By the way, Isenberg broke the "fuck" barrier eleven minutes into the conference.) [Technorati tag: f2c]

Grokster roundups

Tim Anderson was at the Supreme Court hearing on the Grokster case and writes it up without too too much legalese. So does Donna Wentworth at Copyfight. Wendy "Berkperson" Seltzer has a bit at EFF, as well as a photo of her camping out on the Courthouse steps. Would we expect any less from the EFF?

Here's the friend of the court brief prepared by three of the Berkman's leaders:

The brief urged the Court not to modify the standard it created 20 years ago in its landmark Sony-Betamax decision, which exempted from liability the distributors of technologies - in that case the VCR - that are "capable of substantial noninfringing uses" even if they are also often used for infringing purposes.

I hang on to the legal descriptions by the skin of my teeth, so I don't have an opinion, except that the legal folks seem to think that the uphill battle went slightly better than expect. Woo minor-key hoo! [Technorati tags: grokster berkman]

Denise notes that Aldo Castañeda is writing his legal thesis online. It's on open standards in identity management systems and you're welcome to participate...

GlobalVoices

Rebecca and Ethan are leading the Tuesday lunch session at Berkman. They're explaining Global Voices, an attempt to crack open the little shells we live in so we can hear, well, global voices.There are all sorts of issues to be resolved: Internationalized software, free anonymous hosting, and identifying "bridge-bloggers" who "have feet in two worlds." But, it's getting going now. They even point out that there are instances when they're getting international news via bloggers faster than the MSM; they're developing a network of bloggers on the ground around the world.

The Global Voices wiki is here.

If you want to tag a post as relevant to Global Voices, tag it as "globalvoices" at delicious. [Technorati tag: GlobalVoices]

Mac tags

Why is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops with stickers than do PC notebook owners?

Maybe it's because we PC owners want to be able to re-sell our notebooks while Mac owners assume they're going to own their machines till they wear them down to the rims. [Technorati tag: macintosh]

Owukori interview

Ethan interviews Sokari Ekine, "a Nigerian feminist, human rights activist and scholar who blogs from her organic farm in Almeria, Spain, south of Madrid." (She also writes an African tech blog.) Fascinating. It's a big world. [Technorati tag: nigeria]

Selective sympathy

General Inquirer applied to blogs

Berkman's Henrick Schneider at the Tuesday morning informal get-together talks about some quick research he's done using General Inquirer, "A computer-assisted approach for content analyses of textual data" by Philip Stone. It's a dictionary-based approach with over 10,000 words and 180 categories. (GI has a blog.) E.g., it found a strong correlation between the optimism in the first speech given by presidential candidates and the outcome of the elections. Also, the pessimism in popular songs and newsmagazzins predicted decreased consumer optimism and economic recession.

Henrik did a quick study feeding in blogs about the Eason Jordan case, using just six blogs (or other statements) and only one text from each source, so this is more of a test of whether there's a reason to go ahead with a statistically significant study. The content came from Eason Jordan, Rebecca MacKinnon, LaShawn Barber, Rony Abovitz, Richard Sambrook, Brian Ericksen.

Ethan points out that GI is sometimes used to note rhetorical signatures. Henrik's mini-study shows, for example, that Jordan and Sambrook use the most "negative" terms, Abovitz is distinctively positive, and Ericksen (an Army guy) uses the most political terms.

Applied more broadly — Ethan suggests looking at the top 100 technorati-ranked bloggers — this could be quite interesting. We kicked around other ideas, e.g., looking at the deviation among US MSM, foreign media and bloggers on a particular topic. [Technorati tags: blogs berkman]

West Wing's indoor and outdoor voice

My wife and I have been catching up on TiVo'ed West Wings and the pattern seems obvious: The ones on the campaign trail are good while the ones inside the White House suck. The cause seems just as obvious: Without the natural drama of a campaign, the writers are at a loss.

AdamAaron Sorkin's genius was his ability to create compelling scripts out of two elements that traditionally are drama-free: a group of people who like one another and political issues/ideas. The new writers have fragmented the group and are relying on ridiculous plot twists: CJ's elevation to chief of staff was totally arbitrary, and the national security advisor is now being given a cloak and dagger backstory that shows the producers think we viewers can't appreciate a well-drawn character unless she's killed someone.

I hope West Wing continues with Santos as president and with a whole new cast, except for maybe Josh and Charlie. If within a year they can't figure out how to make the west wing of the White House interesting, then I'm switching to Joey. [Technorati tag: WestWing]

Blog stickies

Further evidence of the penetration of blogs into mainstream culture:

Blog Sticky Notes

Courtesy of my lovely daughter Leah.

Getting rid of those damn bars

For months and months I've been ignoring the ugly horizontal bars that show up in the box at the top of my archive pages. One crosses out "An Entry from the Archives" and the other runs underneath that text. They don't show up in Microsoft IE but they do in Firefox and Safari.

Generous reader Miles of TinyApps, a site I never tire of recommending to y'all, scouted out the html code and found the offending lines. Apparently the Style property "text-decoration: none;" renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari, although I'm sure it will turn out to have been my fault. Anyway, I've removed those lines and am confident that when my archives finish rebuilding — scheduled for Oscar Night 2006 — they will have been shorn of their extraneous blue lines.

Thanks, Miles!

So, of course I got Miles' advice backwards. Here's a snippet from an email from him:

You mentioned that the "Style property "text-decoration: none;" renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari". Actually, that is the code to get RID of the lines when added to the A HREF tag [as Miles had indicated -ed.]. Sorry if that was unclear. [It was clear. I wasn't.- ed.]

It seems the problem was more with Internet Explorer NOT putting the blue lines in, as the original HTML has no provision for removing them. "text-decoration:none" needs to be in the A HREF tag, not in the FONT tags.

And be sure to see Shelley's comments (in the comments) on how to do this purely through CSS instead of kludging together CSS and font tags....

Consumerpedia

Consumerpedia is Wikipedia for products. It's in .00000001 alpha, the site says, but it seems usable, albeit empty. (I put in a review of Thinkpad X40, just to try it out.) The Help page highlights its tools for constructing a hierchical folksonomy: Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link). It explicitly has avoided creating a top-down categorization scheme.Who's up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System (UNSPSC) Deathmatch!

How is it different from ePinions? From the About page:

Consumerpedia came out of a desire to have a user-driven consumer resource that evolved based on how people actually used it - where they were not forced into certain narrow categories and topics as an appendage of someone's ecommerce effort, but rather a completely independent information resource that was an end in itself - one that had no conflict of interest and with the sole goal of simply making it easier to find and share helpful information

I don't yet see how it accommodates multiple points of view, as the About page promises, but I'm sure that'll be clear once someone posts a multiple point of view. [Technorati tags: taxonomy consumerpedia wikipedia]

Consumerpedia has posted a helpful response and explanation on their blog. To clarify: It's for anything reviewable, not just products. And I didn't mean to imply that it's a wiki.

It'll be crucial to see how they implement their karma system. And, I'm still unclear about the basic question of how it handles multiple reviews of a single item.

I hope it's wildly successful.

Folksonomy 2x2

Gene Smith has posted a helpful diagram from his IA Summit Panel presentation:

Click to see full size

You get folksonomies when people are tagging stuff — whether it's their own or other's — in public.

Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term "folksonomy," I think would label the X axis [Mnemonic: X is a-cross] differently. In his post on broad and narrow folksonomies, he defines a broad folksonomy as one that "has many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags" (= del.icio.us). A narrow taxonomy has fewer people tagging and there is only one of each tag applied (= flickr).

The latter clause is the important one. At del.icio.us, 100 people could upload the same bookmark (= URL) and tag it. At flickr, generally only the person who took a photo is going to upload it, and even if two people upload the identical photo, flickr counts them as a separate. So, at del.icio.us, if 50 people have tagged a bookmark as "SF," you may nevertheless decide to become the 51st, because that's how you want to remember that URL. That there are now 51 "SF" tags is important information that could be used to create a folksonomy. At flickr, if you come across a photo of the Golden Gate bridge that is already tagged "SF," and that's how you want to remember it, you won't add a "SF" tag because the photo already has that tag. Thus, flickr doesn't know how many people find the "SF" tag useful for any particular photo. (Flickr can know that overall at flickr there are lots more "SF" tags than "San Francisco" tags; the folksonomy happens one level up.)

So, if I understand Thomas, a broad taxonomy is really one in which an object can have multiple instances of the same tag, whereas in a narrow taxonomy, an object can only have one instance of each tag.

I wrote to Thomas and asked him how he would jigger Gene's diagram, and he replied:

I think the X-axis should be tagging for one's self (right) and tagging for others (left), which would make the pure folksonomy quadrant the upper right. This would move GMail to the lower right with Furl above it and a little left. I think Technorati Tags would move ever so slightly right.

Or we could replace the X axis with Narrow to Broad folksonomy, which would move flickr to the left and del.icio.us to the right. So, now all we need is a n-dimensional matrix to accommodate all these damn quadrants. Plus, I need a brain that understands spatial relationships.

P2P backup

I think I'm missing something obvious, but why can't I find a p2p backup system that lets me and a designated buddy swap storage space? I'll give my pal, say, 5GB of storage on my computer if she'll give me 5GB on hers. My computer is pretty much always on, and so is my buddy's. All we need is some basic sw for letting us designate the directories we want kept up to date and for making the p2p connection. Maybe a little encryption and compression. Neither of us guarantees 24/7/365 access, multiply redundant raid arrays, or whatever, but it would help me sleep better knowing that when my house melts, the drafts of that unfinished awful novel will survive.

Does this software — preferably free and open source — exist and I've just missed it? If it doesn't, have I missed why this is a bad idea?

The fundamental force of the cosmos: Coincidence

Over at Tom Peters' site I posted a bit about Netflix's policy on who gets which DVD's first, citing an anonymous research paper on the topic. Who do I hear from afterwards but my old friend Mike Muegel. Turns out, he's the anonymous writer. He says:

It was a fun little project, as it was so obvious what was going on, especially after I set up the 2nd account. And I enjoy writing custom Web robots and charting. Oh how I love my graphs...

By the way, Mike notes that he's looking for his next job. If you want to contact him, he's now added his name and email address (mike\AT/muegel.org) to his report, as well as a postscript...

GlobalVoices

The GlobalVoices blog is getting really interesting. It's a Berkman-sponsored place for talking about ways in which we can get better at hearing blogs from other parts of the world.

For example, recent articles include: An Iranian presidential candidate starts blogging, two Malaysian bloggers talk about the role of blogs where the MSM are tightly controlled, and sources of information from newly-tumultuous Krygyzstan.

Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?

Companies like Boeing spend years developing controlled vocabularies to drive ambiguity out of their technical documentation. For example, tech writers might be told to use the word "turn" but not "twist" when describing any circular motion involving a tool. And, at Corbis, the home of millions of digital images, the in-house cataloguers might be told to use the word "shore" and not "beach" when describing coastal photos.

But no one is in a position to write a controlled vocabulary for the Internet, And if they were, you can be sure that many of us would be twisting the night away on the beach, just to break the rules.

This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies.

For not very good reasons, the word "controlled" raises a red flag for me. Here's my mental back-and-forth on the issue:

Back: A folksonomy is not centrally controlled, which is good because a vocabulary dictator would not only frequently get it wrong, but would silently enforce her interpretation. Word choice is too important to be left to the tyrants. In fact, the first thing tyrants do is try to control our word choices.

Forth: But a folksonomy is nonetheless controlled by a majority. Do folksonomies replace the central vocabulary dictator with an emergent dictator? The word choices are likely to be more in tune with majority thinking, but the conformism of the hippies was as bad as the conformism of the suits.

Back: This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of "conformism," but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag!

Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares "Thou shalt now replace the word 'idea' with 'meme.'" Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That's a diminishment.

Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It's why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group.

Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a "notebook," not a "laptop." Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a "tidal wave," but switched when everyone else was calling it a "tsunami." That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields.

Back: Big deal. Tsunami = tidal wave. And because CNN switched, now we can find its stories when we search for "tsunami."

Forth: No two words are every exactly the same. And clarity leads to division. Imagine that a site like NYTimes.com allows us to tag their posts in a del.icio.us sort of way. (We can do that already at del.icio.us, of course, but doing it on the Times site would be different.) There will be tag wars over whether to tag articles as "tax relief" or "wealthy welfare." Communities will form around semantics, making George Lakoff happy, but further driving us apart.

Back: So the only thing that lets us live together is the ambiguity of our language? If we ever really understood each other, we'd kill each other?

Forth: Well, ambiguity sure helps. What would we do without those gray zones?

Me: Folksonomies will influence how we use words outside of the tagging environment. It will sometimes replace the subtle, organic ways in which language evolves with the crudity endemic to explicitness. Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive. [Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy tags]

Guest blogging at Tom Peters

I'm doing a little guest blogging at Tom Peters' blog. For example, I just posted something about Netflix's way of deciding who gets which titles when...

As I've said before, I'm a big admirer of Tom, so I'm thrilled to get to blog there for a bit. [Technorati tag: TomPeters]

Steve Johnson on books and blogs

Steve Johnson has a brilliant post on why he doesn't blog his books as he writes them:

The problem for an author is that books are not written the way they are read. They usually take years to write, from original proposal to final proofs; they are rarely composed in sequence; and by the time you submit a final manuscript, you've invariably read every page dozens of times, mostly out context.

So for me at least, the trick of writing a book is somehow shedding all the layered, time-shifted contortions of writing, and somehow recreating what it would feel like to sit down as a newcomer to the book and start reading..

...And private, linear, slow is exactly the opposite of the experience of blogging. .

Read the whole thing if only because it is itself an example of Steve's blend of logic, insight and voice.

I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined entirely online, posting updated drafts every day. That was a mistake. What's the point of reading, much less commenting on, drafts the author is going to throw out tomorow? So, next time, I think I'll aggressively blog ideas as they occur and post drafts of chapters as I finish them. I think. [Technorati tags: SteveJohnson blogs]

Berkman's Signal to Noise conference, and Malaysian irc

From the Signal to Noise conference announcement:

The conference offers an exciting mix of performances, demonstrations and discussions examining how digital technologies are enabling new forms of creativity by a broader group of people. Cultural, business, legal and ethical implications of new genres and new forms of authorship will all be covered along with an artist's interests and rights in downstream uses of original creations. Scheduled conference participants include New York Times bestselling author Matthew Pearl, copyright scholar Terry Fisher, fanfic author Naomi Novik, David Dixon of Beatallica, innovative musician Dan the Automator, Paul Marino of machinima.org, and Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Signal or Noise 2K5 is open to the public but pre-registration is needed: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/register. For more information about the conference's location, schedule and participants, please visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sn/schedule. To view a map of the area: http://map.harvard.edu/level2.cfm?mapname=camb_allston&tile=F6.

I sat in on a planning meeting and it looks like it's going to be more eclectic and less sit-and-listen-y than most conferences.

From the Berkman's Rebecca MacKinnon:

Malaysian bloggers Jeff Ooi and Mack Zulkieli will help me kick off our first LIVE Globalvoices online IRC interview and chat. Join us Friday (tomorrow) at *15:00GMT* (10:00am Friday EST, 23:00 Friday China time, etc.)

*IRC location:* #globalvoices on Freenode. (irc://irc.freenode.net/#globalvoices).

Himmer, MFA

Let me be the second to congratulate Steve Himmer on defending his MFA dissertation. Woohoo! [Note: This corrects a mistake in the previous version.] [Technorati tag: himmer]

Ten by Ten

Ten by Ten lets you browse the top stories via thumbnails. [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags]

What would Gandhi do?

Joi Ito has a fascinating, heart-felt post about the way he — and almost all of us — accommodate our positions to the context in which we're speaking. He was at the Doors of Perception conference in India conference:

Later, an elderly man stood up and said that all knowledge should be available to everyone and that he didn't think we should compromise on the copyright issues. He then said that the people are ready to fight and march in the streets and turn over the monopolies and we didn't need to sit around and wait for government. It turns out he used to live with Mahatma Gandhi's at his Ashram.

I felt a sudden pain. I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet...

It sent a shiver down my spine. And then it stiffened my spine. I heartily recommend the post... [Technorati tag: joi]

Thursday night blogging meeting webcast

From Shimon Rura:

The webcast starts at or just before 7pm on Thursdays, when our meeting starts, and ends when the meeting ends.

To listen to the live stream, you'll need an MP3 player capable of receiving audio streams (using HTTP). Most halfway decent MP3 players can do this, including Winamp, Windows Media player, Audio (Mac), iTunes, XMMS, and others. If you're not sure you can handle this, go to shoutcast.com and try listening to some of the streaming radio stations there. If those work, you can listen to our meeting. If you want to load a URL directly into your MP3 player, use:

http://rura.org:8000/stream

If your email client shows a clickable link, try this one:

http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u

(it should launch an mp3 player on the stream).

Note that the stream will not work except during the meeting. No call letters, not even dead silence, just *no stream*.

You can check the status of the webcast at:

http://rura.org:8000/

If you see an "Icecast Status Page" with a blank box, it means the stream is not currently active. If you see a stream, that's what you want. If you can't connect, then my server may be disabled for some reason and you might want to let me know.

If you want to do more than listen, join the IRC (chat) channel:

irc://irc.freenode.net/berkmanbloggroup

That's #berkmanbloggroup on server irc.freenode.net.

All of this information, as well as our agenda, is always available on our blog:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings

I'll be there, although there's a small chance something may come up... [Technorati tags: blogs harvard]

Tagging Frist

Michael Bassik at Personal Democracy Forum finds it distubring that Sen. Bill Frist was able to diagnosis Terri Schiavo on the basis of a video of her. So, Michael suggests that we upload photos to flickr of our medical conditions — "tennis elbow, acne, runny nose, hemorrhoids, or whatever ails you" — and tag them "Frist" so the good doctor can diagnose us as well.

"Recently used file list" grayed out on Word

If Microsoft Word is no longer displaying recently used files in the Files menu, and if the "Recently used file list" option is grayed out in Tools > Options > General, you should change the value of "Add new documents to Documents on Start Menu" in TweakUI.

If you're not using TweakUI and if you feel comfortable futzing with your Registry, go here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\

Set "NoRecentDocsHistory" to 0.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, then you shouldn't be futzing with the Registry. If you do, then you know to export a copy of your registry and you know not to sue me when your whole system starts to smell of burning grease.

More info here. [Technorati tag: microsoft]

IA Summit folksonomies panel

Thanks to Peter Morville, here are links to info about the panel on folksonomies at the IA Summit:

PDF's of the panelists' slides by Gene Smith Peter Morville, Peter Herholz and Thomas Vander Wal

Seb Paquet's notes on the presentations

An MP3 of Peter Morville on "sorting out social classification" which we're warned crashes Firefox but works on IE.

I'm really sorry I missed attending the Summit. It sounds fascinating: The leading thinkers and what a great time to be talking about these issues. [Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy iasummit]

[pcf05] PC Forum non-coverage

I got up from chez Sifry at 3:30AM, packed, and drove 2.5 hours from Scottsdale to Tuscon to give talk on blogging to Reed Business Information at 8 AM. It was about 30 journalists and editors. I once again over-stated the case, but I think in the discussion we came to a more reasonable outlook on the fate of journalism. If forced to predict (and they did more or less force me to predict), I think we will continue to look to professional journalists for certain types of information — although the line between blogger and journalist will blur even more — but journalism is going to become more strongly voiced,; the voiceless voice of journalism will sound archaic. That which is purely factual will be listed in table form, and will be commoditized. And once truly usable, cheap e-reader hardware is here, publishing will be faced with the same challenges the music publishing industry faces now.

By the way, you haven't had the Arizona Driving Experience until you've driven at day break as the sun snaps to full wattage at eye level over the hill you're climbing. I don't know why the entire east-bound population of the state hasn't already been killed in fiery sun-based accidents.

Then I drove back to Scottsdale — out of eye-shot of the damned sun — and re-joined PC Forum. But not before I faced a dilemma: What do you do when your luggage breaks in the middle of the trip? My suitcase's zipper blew beyond redemption. So, now I'm sending its contents on what will almost certainly be a hugely expensive UPS journey. Plus, tomorrow I have to try to get the airline to accept an empty suitcase with a flapping lid as a legitimate piece of luggage. I anticipate many happy Kafka-esque hours as they work on finding ways to construe it as a terrorist threat.

Then, at 2:30, Esther Dyson and I moderated an open session on tagging. About 100 people showed up and I think it was interesting, but what the hell do I know?

Then I had a chance to catch up with Doc for a bit. He's fine and sends you his best.

Now I will resemble the walking dead as I go to the final cocktail party and dinner.

Soooooo tired...... [Technorati tags: pcforum docsearls]

Must see photo

Doc and his son Allen in a beautiful, truthful photo taken by Dave Sifry...

[pcf05] EVDB

Brian BrianStorms Dear introduces his new company, EVDB (Events & Venues database). Calendars are a poor metaphor for publishing events on the Web, he says. They scroll off the page, they're inconsistent. And there's no structured data. And there's no way of getting notified about an event you would have gone to "had you known."

EVDB is event focused and aims at being a web service, not a portal, he says. The business model: Targeted advertising, commercial use of API, and used by "powered by" apps (web and mobile).

Brian shows a demo. We see a conference schedule. Every session counts as a separate event, under the parent of the overall conference. RSS feeds for events. You can subscribe to events that don't exist. He shows a calendar based on crawling through Meetup.com data.

What does he hope people will do with the API? Desktop projects and mobile projects. Or services like Flickr where people are covering events in some way.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? The blogosphere is big enough to be a good market to start with. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 evdb]

[pcf05] Trumba breakout

Trumba is an online calendar strong at aggregating group calendars. It looks full featured. Subscription based. Integrates with existing calendering tools. In beta.

Jason Calacanis asks why this is different than Yahoo calendar. They say: No ads. It will cost under $50/year. The Seattle Times is using Trumba, e.g., when you use their movie schedule, but the focus is on end-user sales.

In their presentation, they make too many big claims about revolutionizing and democratizing parenting, communities, large organizations, etc. In my view: It'd be enough if it were a really great calendar. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 trumbo]

Micah on Schiavo

As the American government loses whatever tiny shred of genuine decency it had and as the American media loses its last breath of proportionality, Micah Sifry blogs about how the Schiavo affair ever made it out of the waiting room where a devastated family was faced with a tragic choice. [Technorati tag: schiavo]

Summer Founders

The brilliant Paul Graham is offering to seed some summer projects that could turn into start-ups. Take a look... [Technorati tag: PaulGraham]

[pcf05] IRC

Join the IRC: irc.freenote.net #pcforum [Technorati tag: pcforum]

[pcf05] Presenting companies

Companies who get their own positions have 2 mins each to give us an overview. Here are my one sentence summaries of their 2 min summaries:

Trumba: We help people build calendar networks.

EVDB: (Brian Dear, yay!) Did you ever find out about an event after the fact?

Endeca: Guides users through complex sets of choices. (= faceted classification)

Siderean: Guides uesrs through complex sets of choices. (= faceted classification, but also manages ontologies)

Impinj: Chips the size of a grain of sand for RFIDS.

Grouper: Share music and videos to "socialize your media."

Epocrates: Deliver info to doctors' handhelds.

Brightcove (Jeremy Allaire): The Internet for television

Rearden: Agent technology.

Opera: We have the fastest, most secure browser and now it's on a browser.

JotSpot: Integrated application platform (i.e., not just a wiki) [Technorati tag: pcforum]

[pcf05] Security and Identity

What will computing be like in 5 years?

Jayshree Ullal (Cisco): There are no secure perimeters. We need to be much more real-world. It's going to be based on defining trust domains — the school you're from, the location you're from — which will be different than now when everything is separtae, e.g., you anti-virus, your firewall, etc.

Esther: Will we be able to go to an Internet cafe and anonymously log on?

Ullal: You shouldn't be allowed to now. We need authentication and feedback mechanisms, etc. [Ack!]

John Thompson (Symantec): We should keep the Net environment diverse and learn where the bad parts of town are.

Scott Charney (Microsoft): We need both accountability and anonymity, so it should be done on the application layer. I want accountability when on-line banking but anonymity when engaging in political speech.

Thompson: We'll be in trusted communities but not only in trusted communities.

Bob Frankston: How do we make computers secure without limiting outlandish and outrageous innovation?

Steven Levy: How do we do this without losing our civil liberties?

[No time for answers.] Thompson: Phishing has gone up exponentially. The question is whether the info that's gathered is going to be used in the near future.

Ullal: We need better enforcement and more centralization.

Thompson: We can't turn back democracy. [I'm liking him!] [Technorati tag: pcforum05]