[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]

Trek-based science

Diana Schaub is against cloning in part because of what she's learned watching Star Trek, which is, basically, that death is a part of the great circle of life:

The show has "left me receptive to the view that mortality is, if not precisely a good thing, then at least the necessary foundation of other very good things," she wrote in an article last year. "There is something misguided about the attempt to overcome mortality."

..."Both Lincoln and the Enterprise argue that there ought to be certain moral limits to the scientific project, and they help us articulate what those limits are."

...Cloning is an evil," she wrote in an article published in 2003. "It is slavery, plus abortion."

This would be mildly loony and uninteresting except that she's on the President's Council on Bioethics, which advises President Bush.

[Thanks to Andrew McLaughlin for the link.]

[pcf05] Mulcahy, Schwartz, Ward

Steve Ward of IBM talks about its Chinese business. He says it's an international team with more women than men. [He also says he keeps a list of attendees at meetings and checks people off as they talk, which, although it's undoubtedly a good management technique, I find slightly creepy.]

Anne Mulcahy (Xerox) talks about the partnership with Fuji.

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) talks about doing business in China.

[I found little unexpected in their responses, so I zoned out. Sorry.]

Esther asks what you do about corruption? Ward says that you make clear that your company has certain beliefs, and if you're a mega-corp, they'll be honored.

Schwartz says that Sun left a country because it was too corrupt. He also reminds us that Enron et al. have destroyed far more value in this country than any other country's corrupt practices have.

Mulcahy says that they no longer have a business in South Africa — they are mere distributors there — because of "reputational risk."

Q: What's going to happen to our Thinkpads?

Esther: How many of you have Thinkpads? [About a third of us...very different from a tech conference/]

Ward: We're going to innovate even more! "Thinkpads will be forever." We're trying to decide if the branding will be "Thinkpad" or "Lenovo Thinkpad"

Doc: Will Lenovo market a linux desktop?

Ward: Lenovo ships several million linux clients today, mainly cell phones and pdas. But there's a lot to do to get linux accepted by the mass market.

Schwartz: And we're committed to working with Lenovo to provide a mass market, desktop linux....

Q: When will you have a woman as CEO of Fuji-Xerox in Japan?

Mulcahy: Fuji-Xerox does a good job hiring women managers, but it will be a long time before there's a woman CEO. But Japanese companies that hire women have a competitive advantage over companies that don't take advantage of half of the work force.

[First use of the word "synergy": 8:15am] [Technorati tag: pcforum]

Google is hiring

Google is hiring someone to work on a UI for blogging... (Thanks to Steve Garfield.) [Technorati tags: google blogs]

My Night Bunking with The Sifry's

The Sifry boys, Dave and Micah, are out like lights — they are so cute when they're asleep! — so I'm writing this from under a "tent" I made with my blanket and my knees. I told them I wouldn't be blogging this, but, what the heck, I don't think they'll mind. We're sharing a room at PCForum, and I know their many fans would love a peek into what they're like when they're not out indexing blogs or fighting for our rights.

I was in bed reading when I heard them fumbling at the door, so I quick as a wink switched off my light, closed my eyes, and began lightly "snoring." As soon as they opened the door and saw that I was "asleep," they dropped into whispers, but I could still hear every word.

Sifraniacs — and aren't we all! — will be excited to know that what you've heard is true. Dave — the outgoing Sifry — calls his brother "Mikey" and Micah — the thoughtful one — calls his brother "Dave-a-Rooty-Tooty"! It's true! And I learned exactly why: Dave sat down on the end of his bed, took off his shoes, and rubbed his toes, saying "Rooty-tooty" for each one. It was all I could do to keep from running up to him and giving him a big hug! But I stayed quiet as a mouse so I could gather more 411 for all my fellow Sifrifans!

You wouldn't believe what happened next! After Micah went into the bathroom to change into his pajamas — blue with little firemen (or what Micah would call "firefighters") all over them — Dave was waiting for him with a big fluffy pillow. Then, boom, that pillow came down on Micah's head and Micah quick as a wink grabbed Dave's NetLink Portable Wireless Router by its electrical cord and began whirling it over his head. Dave still managed to get in a couple of good ones on Micah's tush, but then the router clonked him on his head — what a big sound it made because Dave is so extra smart! — and Micah said how sorry he was and went with him into the bathroom. I heard running water and then, to my relief, a laugh which I think was Dave but maybe was Micah, and the two bros came out fast friends again. Boys will be boys!

Then Dave went into the bathroom and I could hear him counting his toothbrush strokes — 100 even! — and he emerged in shorts pajamas and a snoopy nightcap. Is there a word for so cute that you pull a tendon holding yourself back, because that's just half as cute as Dave looked!

Then the two boys sat on their beds and told ghost stories. My favorite was the one Dave told about the time Google didn't say it wasn't going to index blogs in real time — scary! — but I also liked Micah's story about Jeb running for president in 2008. He made it sound almost real! I had trouble going to sleep last night, I'll tell you that for sure!

Then the two boys got all quiet and serious, and Dave said, "Well, my brother and best pal, it's time we said our thanks." So the two boys got down on their knees by their bed, and Dave, the younger one, led them in a prayer to Jesus, Santa and Tim Berners-Lee.

I thought they'd go to sleep, but, no they had just a little more fun stored up in them waiting to get out. "Tag!" Dave said, "Tag, you're it!" "No, you!" said Micah, tagging him back. Well, you can guess what happened after that. Sure enough, in a few minutes Dave was pummeling Micah with his pillow and Micah had wrapped the Netlink wrapped around Dave's neck, and then it was back into the bathroom for cold compresses and some butterfly clamps.

Then the two boys came over to me and — you won't believe it! — each gave me a kiss on the cheek and whispered goodnight. It was all I could to continue pretending to snore so they wouldn't know I'd seen them both as they REALLY ARE!!!!!!

I slept all night, thanking my lucky stars that somehow I had won the "Win a Night Bunking with The Sifrys" contest. You can bet I'm going to enter again next year! [Technorati tags: sifry technorati humor]

OurMedia launches

JD Lasica's and Marc Canter's OurMedia.org has launched, "a grassroots media organization, site and registry." Here's the one-line explanation from the home page: "Share your videos, audio files, photos, text or software - for free - with a global community of creative individuals."

Looks good, especially for an alpha release. [Technorati tag: media]

[pcf05] Andy Stern, Jerry Yang, Howard Gardner

After a hair-raising ride from the airport — I was driving, 'nuff said — I'm here at Esther Dyson's PCForum. Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union is the second speaker. (I got too late to see Howard "multiple intelligences" Gardner.) It's unusual for PCForum to have a union represented. It's part of the theme, "The World Wide World." It's not just about tech. I don't know how I'm going to manage...

(Gender Note:: Of the 31 featured speakers, 10 are women.)

Stern talks about the importance of unions to the American dream. [My father was a pro-union lawyer for NY State.] The largest employer 30 years ago was GM. Now it's Wal-Mart, and it takes multiple Wal=Mart jobs to earn a living wage. Our children are on the way to being the first generation to do worse economically. He says unions havew made big mistakes, such as focusing on work rules when employers need flexibly. We've gone from 1 in 3 to 1 in 12 union members in the private sector.

We should try something else, he says. We should follow Diana Farrell of the McKinsey Group Institute. She suggests that we use some of the savings gained from off-shoring to supporting our unemployed workers.

Esther inteviews Jerry Yang of Yahoo!

Yahoo has hit its tenth anniversary. Jerry says that, as is typical in tech, we think that in the next ten years we'll get to do what we thought we would have been doing in the past ten years.

Esther pushes him on whether he finds any ethical problems dealing with China. Jerry refuses to say Yes absolutely. He says that when Chinese officials explain their position, it make sense to him: China doesn't have a tradition of free press, so when people have access to sites, they worry about the "lack of veracity." They're trying to do an "orderly transition" to an open Internet. "That transition is going to be managed by the government."

Esther: "My sense is that they're terrified of disorder." Jerry points to the scale of the changes they're managing, in order to say (I think) that they, and we, don't want the disorder that would come from not "managing" the change.

Esther: Which way are you heading? Personalization and community? Or are you going to turn Hollywood on us?

"We are good example of a company trying to figure out how to marry content to this new medium." Yahoo is only concerned with "the best stuff," wherever it comes from. "To be able to build your personal networks, that's really hard to do. No one's done it right." We have to be good at both: Watch the latest content and be a "place where users congregate and discuss things." It's an integration process.

How much by acquisition and how much by in-house development? Both. Acquisitions are primarily for the people. Well, also for the product. [Yahoo bought Flickr today, as everyone already knows.] He refers to Flickr as a community site, which is [imo] better than talking about it as a photo site.

Esther brings up Andy, Howard and Jerry and asks them about courage. They all talk about the courage of others and deflect the idea that they have any particular courage themselves. Howard says that he's surprised at the distance between what his colleagues are saying about Larry Summers in private and in public. He says that courage is a muscle that needs to be developed, and points to Ralph Nader and Margaret Thatcher. But, he says, both over-reached.

Howard says we're too big a country to have one best educational system. The Jesse Test: Is there a school that would be right for Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson and Jess Ventura.

Jerry wants regulation to increase trust, although he thinks that's not going to be enough without community norms. [Ack]

Scott Heiferman (meetup.com) asks how unions work as organizations become napsterized. Andy responds that they're trying to figure it out.

Mitch Kapor comments that the folks in this room who run companies should wonder if the standard 80-hour work week gets in the way of education. "This stuff isn't abstract. The way we run our companies has a direct impact..." [applause] Bob Frankston says that the best educators teach students how to learn. He does this in response to Andy's repeated references to Catholic schools as models. Andy responds that we need to measure if we're going to have an impact.

Howard says he's working on a book about the five minds we need to cultivate: Disciplined, creating, synthesizing, respectful and ethical minds.

Mitch Ratcliffe asks Andy unions perpetuate the idea that employees can be treated as a fixed aset. We should recognize that all the industrial age models are broken. would the SEIU be willing to be treated as a group of contractors... Andy says the premise is right, and that we should think of unions as a community and ask what we can do with such an entity.

No wrap puzzle

Anybody know what this page has decided to stop wrapping? My other comment pages seem to be fine...

Fun with anagrams

TEAM = Tame meta-meat

[etech] My birds of a feather on taxonomy and tags

One last report on etech. I led a "birds of a feather" discussion on Tuesday night, a circle-the-chairs sort of thing for thirty people. The topic was "From Trees to Tags," and I began with about 12 minutes on the topic. This is from the speaking notes I took into the session, so what follows is highly approximate. It's also highly redundant with other blog posts of mine:

I'm writing a book called "Everything Is Miscellaneous," so I convened this BoF selflishly, in order to use you and what you know.

One way of getting at what the book is about is to ask: Why is knowledge organized the way the real world is? It's not at all obvious that we should organize our ideas the way we organize our socks.

We've organized knowledge into trees, from Aristotle to Linnaeus to Dewey. You get a tree by doing the basic thing of lumping and splitting, and then splitting the lumps until you get to a lump that is too unitary or miscellaneous to bear any more splitting. But lumping and splitting has been constrained by physical limitations. For example:

1. A thing has to go in one pile or another. For Aristotle, this was expressed as the Law of Identity (A is A and A is not not-A), a pretty basic rule.

2. The way we lump and split is the same for everyone: If you own a clothing store and separate it into men's and women's departments, it's separated that way for everyone who enters.

3. The lumping and splitting is done by experts.

4. The person who owns the stuff also owns the organization of the stuff. You can't come into the clothing store and rearrange it the way that suits you.

5. Lumping and splitting results in a neat and clean order. It's clean-edged.

But now we're digitizing information, resulting in a third order of order in which we break the rules of real-world order:

1. Things can go in more than one pile - You put your e-store's hiking boots under shoes, men's and women's apparel, outdoor wear, popular items, items on sale, etc.

2. The arrangement can be different for each person.

3. You or your social group are the experts.

4. Users get to control the organization of the stuff.

5. Messiness is a virtue on the Web.

You can see much of this in the rise of tagging: Users create the metadata and anyone can figure out how to sort through it and organize it. It's out of the hands of the owners of the stuff being classified.

So, what I'm saying is that we're moving from thinking that the right way to arrange — and understand — things is to figure out the taxonomic tree ahead of time. Instead, make a big pile of leaves, each with lots of metadata, and allow users to add more metadata and to sort and categorize it as they need.

But there are problems with this, especially with regard to tags:

- One word can have many meanings, and one meaning can have many words. As tagging gets more popular, that'll be a bigger issue.

- If we form social groups based around how we use words, we run the risk of fragmenting ourselves further, this time around semantics.

- Folksonomies can reinforce homogeneity.

But, I'm hopeful. Ask why tagging is happening now. After all, we've been able to tag Word documents forever, but we don't. Why now? I think in part it's because we are tagging not just for ourselves. We're doing it socially, aware that we're making the Web better for others. Together we're building a new infrastructure of meaning, created by and for one another. We will figure out amazing things to do with this new social semantic construct. (Unfortunately, I didn't take notes during the discussion. Drat!) [Technorati tags: tags etech taxonomy]

Amazon's odd words

RageBoy has discovered that Amazon seems to be rolling out a feature that shows you for any particular book which phrases in it are "statistically improbable." For example, Chris' own Gonzo Marketing uses the phrase "public journalism" and "market advocacy." Obviously those are not phrases unique to Chris' book, so Amazon is doing some sort of statistical analysis to find phrases that have some prominence within a book and across books. Fascinating.

Unfortunately, apparently you need to be using the Safari browser to see this on Amazon. Or perhaps you need to be taking the same drugs as RB. Either way, get a Mac...before it gets you.

Random aphorism

There's no "I" in "team" but there are two "me"s in meme.

Fine-grained mistakes

RageBoy, everyone's Chief Blogging Officer, has a good example (involving something I wrote) of how errors creep into the media: The humor was missed, the main point was ignored in favor of the inflammatory one, and the nesting of the quote was flattened.

The point isn't that the media sometimes make mistakes. We all know that. For me, the point is that it was too small an error for the medium to acknowledge. I suppose I could have written a letter and they would have run it in their corrections box. But that would have been so long after the event that, with a mistake this size, who would have remembered the context or cared?

But, had it been a blog that got it wrong, the blogger would have fixed it immediately, probably with a little embarrassed aside.

So, while bloggers may get more facts wrong, our corrections are finer-grained. And, of course funnier.

[etech] Programme Information Pages

Another BBC talk. Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph, and Tom Coates. How can you make media objects — i.e., all the programs 'n' stuff the BBC has — addressable? And then what could you do with them?

To make a program addressable, they say, you give it an identifier. (Their first ever identifier was kr7rm.) All BBC and radio programming will be addressable. 40,000 hours of national tv broadcast across 8 tv stations every year. 76,000 hours of national radio across ten networks.

They say: "This is what we might be doing after we get bored of broadcast."

The content they deal with is complex. What's a program? There are versions and edits, different broadcasts of the same program. There are series. There are specials. Documentaries. Films. There are "time slots." Bulletins.

The data is scattered throughout the organization. There are maybe 15 systems in the BBC to track this data.

How about the logistical problems? Schedule changes, breaking news, legal issues, the sheer scale of the BBC.

The core of the representation is the episode. e.g., episode 2 of Absolutely Fabulous in Series 1. They create a web page for every episode of every program the BBC creates. They want to make the episodes as rich with information as possible, but the Web page has to be simple. Every individual episode will be uniquely identifiable and addressable forever via a URL. They also have persistent schedules so you can see any program that aired on any day.

They move everything into a big database using a complex data format, Standard Media Exchange Framework (SMEF) that includes more firleds than they care about, including awards. Anyone in BBC can connect to it via an API.

Things you could build on top of this: Statistics. Audio/visual on demand. RSS feed to tell you when an episode is. Social software: What's the most watched program in your circle, buddy lists, etc. [Technorati tags: etech bbc]

[etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags

Clay talks about how taxonomies always have values built in. Even the periodic table's "noble gases" division reflects an assumption about the "essential" state of elements. He points to the Dewey Decimal System's skewed religion category. [Yikes! I've been doing that, too! I probably heard it from Clay first. I will attribute it from now on. Ack!] Even the Library of Congress puts the Balkan Peninsula and African on equal footing because it's measuring the number of books on the shelves. The categorization reflects not the ideas but the physical storage.

He points out, that even though Yahoo has cross links, it has a concept of which is the real categorization; it only shows you the number of links in a category if you are seeing the category in its "real" environment.

Hierarchical systems, he says, inevitably adds hyperlinks to cut across the taxonomy. (Yahoo only allows three, he says, because they didn't want to be spammed.) If you have enough links, you don't need the hierarchy. "There is no shelf."

When does ontological organization work? When you don't have a lot of stuff, it's stable, things have clear edges, an authoritative source and trained users. I.e., the opposite of the Web.

People have assumed that tags that mean the same thing are actually the same, but (Clay says) "movie" people don't want to hang out with "cinema" people, and "queer" people certainly don't want to hang out with "homosexual" people. There is information in the differences that thesauruses and categorization schemes miss.

He shows graphs that provide evidence that tagging forms power laws — who tags, and the tags that individuals use.

Organic categorization uses market logic, merged from URLs not categories. The categories overlap, not synch. The mergers are probabilistic, not binary. User and time are core attributes; you can do grouping, inclusion/exclusion, and decay. The semantics are in the users, not in the system; this is not a way to get computers to understand one another.

[Great talk. As always.] [I spoke with Clay afterwards and he talked about Dewey two years ago during an etech talk I must have been at. I apologized. He was, of course, gracious. I will be adding the phrase, "As Clay says" to yet more of what I say. Happily.] [Technorati tags: etech shirky taxonomy]

[etech] Day 2 - Tom Igoe - Net Objects

Tom describes student projects. [I missed many of these]

- A purse displays when wifi is present

- A protest button initiates a DOS attack on a nearby malevolent corporation

- "Needies" — stuffed animals with mp3 players. If two get together, they talk shit about others behind their backs.

- CareNet displays grandma's life signs around the edge of an electronic photo of her

- Junkie's Little Helper: If levels of meds in a med cabinet drops low, it goes on line and alerts IRC chats that the person is high

- Ku: It communicates sadness over the Net. You sit in a chair waiting for the ceiling to cry on you because someone is sad. (A water pump is involved.)

- White stone: A stone gets warm when someone sends you a hug. [Technorati tags: etech igoe]

[etech] Day 2 Clay Shirky - Phone as platform

Clay begins a segment on tech and education.

He says he thinks of his group at NYU as "The Department of the Recently Possible." A few years ago they noticed that students were increasingly integrating phones into their apps. So they started looking into it. One experiment: PacManhattan that mates the urban grid and the game grid. The runners are controlled by people in a control room via mobile phones.

DodgeBall was an experiment in mobile social networking. "Mobile phones are the first things since keys that everyone carries," Clay says, citing Marko Ahtisaari. DodgeBall alerted him that there was someone one degree removed from his social circle in a bar he was in. The system initially suffered from "the ex-girlfriend bug": She would still be in your circle friends of friends so it would keep suggesting you meet up with her, so you need a way to "denominate" links. [Apparently this was a problem with ex-boyfriends as well.]

Phones are not becoming PCs because: Only the minimum platform is widespread. There's no "ocean of practice." Manufacturers don't understand the benefits of allowing hacking. The US carriers work against ubiquity. So, phones will continue to augment PCs. E.g., upload from phone and view on PC (e.g., flickr).

Mesh is coming, but not soon, Clay says. [Technorati tags: etech shirky]

[etech] Microsoft Tesla

Last night I got a demo of a Microsoft lab project that will be available this summer. Tesla is a layer on top of XP that provides an alternative way of structuring and accessing the files on your desktop. You can sort your files by a whole bunch of the usual file attributes (date, size, etc.) but also by tags. Tags replace folders. (It's a faceted classification system.)

Tesla virtualizes the file system to the point that it doesn't care which actual machine a file lives on. So, if you have home and office computers, it syncs them up automatically. From your point of view, you're working on a file without worrying about where the bits actually are stored.

It'll ship first as a lab experiment. Definitely cool and possibly useful. Cairo lives!

[Technorati tags: etech tesla microsoft]

[etech] Day 2 - Folksonomies panel

Clay Shirky moderates a panel on folksonomies. Participants: Jimbo Wales (wikipedia), Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) and Stewart Butterfield (flickr).

Clay: Why did you decide to let users in to categorization?

Jimbo: We launched our categorization system last June. For the first few weeks, it was a complete madhouse in the English wikipedia. In the German one, they held off for a couple of weeks. It took a little while for things to be rationalized. We decided to let the masses categorize it because that's just the Wiki way.

Stewart: We added it because Joshua told us to. I don't think of it as categorization primarily. Tags are to help users. They aren't a replacement of categorization.

Joshua: I'd been collected links in a text file. I started adding a hash mark and then some text so I could grep them out. Then he decided to make it massively multiplayer. Tags were originally for people to categorize their own bookmarks, but it's gone social and used for purposes other than categorization.

Clay: When tensions arise between the individual and the group, and how is that resolved?

Jimbo: The tension is really more between the individual and the quality of the encyclopedia. We don't allow people to categorize things in individual ways because they're categorizing the encyclopedia itself.

Joshua: Maybe there's a need for some mechanism for consensus because tag sets overlap...At Wikipedia, people fight over the same space whereas at delicious, everyone has his own page. The top tags for Wikipedia are free and reference, which are not words that appear on Wikipedia's home page, so people are thinking about you differently than you are.

Jimbo: Very interesting.

Clay: There's a large collection of "circle in square" photos on Flickr. That's a place where some sort of social group. At delicious, people use the comments field to have a conversation, with the link serving as an anchor.

Joshua: Why do you have a distinction between groups and tags, Stewart?

Marc Cantor: Can we connect tags between systems

Jimbo: I talked with Technorati. We should all get together and share database dumps of tags just to see what people are doing in different systems. E.g., photos in flickr might be useful for the encyclopedia.

Stewart: Technorati is already doing that. We have 200,000 distinct tags and 12M total tags.

Joshua: We have different axes of why you're tagging, what you're tagging, and how it happens. E.g., at Flickr you're mostly tagging your own stuff for your purposes, at delicious it's mostly other people's stuff mostly for your own purposes, technorati you're tagging your stuff for others. Calling them all "tags" over-simplifies. We need better understanding before we start plugging things in.

Q: How are you giving users feedback to get their tagging better?

Jimbo: It's a tight knit community of 600-1000 people who do the vast majority of the work.

Stewart: There are no bad tags, at least within the context of Flickr. The point isn't for you to find all and only the photos of elephants. It's to give them tools for organizing their own stuff. The rest is a happy accident. And when you have millions of photos, you don't have to find all of them.

Joshua: I've tried to close the loop. With the experimental bookmarklet you can see all of your tags, the top tags for the thing you're bookmarking, and the intersection of your tags with everyone's. I don't want people to be dominated by groupthink. Your instinct is the most reliable and reproducible — it's the way you'll remember.

Clay: Traditionally, we don't allow users and time because we want timeless categories.

Q: The semantic web community is creating taxonomies in particular areas. But there are problems scaling it. What about a folksonomic approach to creating large scale taxonomies.

Stewart: I think the wikipedia model works.

Jimbo: To create a large scale category system, a small group of experts can't even begin to compete with a large, open group of people.

Stewart: The idea that there is a proper way to cleave nature at the joints is difficult.

Joshua: Dividing the world into a complex, fine-grained tree doesn't pay attention to what people are trying to do. They're trying to find things. There's a natural sort of scale. You tend not to tag too high ("computers") and not to tag too finely. There's a natural middle ground. [Cf. Eleanor Rosch: Why do we sit in a chair instead of in furniture? It turns out to do with the bodily nature of epistemology. But what about on the bodiless web?]

Q: What happens when we have thousands of services tagging? How do we bring all that knowledge together?

Joshua: First we have to know what we're doing. People use tags for different purposes.

Q: What about using RDF to manage this infrastructure?

Joshua: I emit RDF because it's convenient. They can work together.

Me: How much metadata about tags will we have to capture? E.g., it might be useful to know the author of a tag, whether it's a place or a topic, when it was created, which app created it, etc.

Joshua: that would make tags too complex.

Stewart: You have to do it after the fact. You can't make people express it explicitly.

Jimbo: If we saw two tags for Ohio, "Ohio" and "OH," someone would catch it and fix it. And since our categories are hierarchical, we don't have to disambiguate "cardinal" as a bird or a baseball team.

Joshua: I'm now letting users create "bundles," i.e., second level tags. BTW, hierarchies sort nicely alphabetically. (E.g., computers.languages.perl sorts next to computers.languages.python.) [Technorati tags: etech taxonomy folksonomy tags]

[etech] Day 2 - Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia

Jimbo [I find it hard to call him that] gives an update on Wikipedia. The English version will pass 500,000 articles today. 350,000 hierarchical categories. The site has passd USAToday.com and the NYT.com. It's so popular, he says, because it addresses the original deam of the Internet: People sharing information freely.

WikiCities.com is Jimbo's new for-profit company, expanding the Wikipedia's social model, "the social computing successor of free home pages." 170 communities have formed in 3 months. (Communities are built around topics, it seems.)

He views Wikipedia as a social innovation that will spread to other areas besides encyclopedias. "Social collaboration is the future of the Net." [Technorati tags: etech wikipedia]

[etech] Day 2 - Justin Chapweske

Justin, of Onion Networks, talks about "the swarming Web."

Standard http, he says, doesn't work well for transferring large files: You have a 64% chance of failure if you transfer a gigabyte. (Here's his "large file hall of shame".)

"Swarming" is like RAID for Web content. Even as bandwidth increases, we need more reliable servers. And better make 'em fault tolerant. And he doesn't like setting up mirrors because it's a bad experience for users. Instead Onion Networks uses swarming — the technique BitTorrent uses — as a native Web format. "It's ad hoc, Self-provisioning, it scales on demand." It adds a few simple elements to http headers.

There's a free public version... [Technorati tag: etech]

[etech] Day 2 - Cory Doctorow - All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites

[Cory's talk will be posted on his site.]

You could stop spam by simplifying email, he says. You could charge a penny or two for sending emails. You could put in place strong ID. You could solve spam...by breaking email.

Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.

Global efforts are underway to require anyone who makes a device that touches video first to get permission. You already need permission from a controlling body if you want to create a DVD player. That's why there's no innovation there.

He argues against "trusted computing," the attempt to simplify the ecosystem to protect it from "parasites."

Razing the ecosystem has a cost, he says. Anti-spam limitations hasn't stopped spam. The limitations imposed by DRM haven't stopped infringement. "These are 100% failure systems." "And not a penny more put into artist's pockets." [Technorati tags: etech CoryDoctorow]

[etech] Day 2 Morning - Neil Gershenfeld

Neil heads MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. He teaches a course called "How to make (almost) anything."

As an example, he shows Kelly Dobson's class project, a scream body. You scream into it in public spaces. It muffles the scream entirely, and then you can release it at a more appropriate space. Very funny. Another made an alarm clock you have to wrestle with to prove that you are awake. He says the liberal arts originally were about learning to control the means of expression; the Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric and logic. The "illiberal" arts had to do with making things. Now his students are hijacking the tools of making for personal expression.

They're putting into the field experimental fab studios, all around the world. For about $20K, you get a fab that can make (almost) anything. This helps to get over the "fab divide." He shows a video of street kids in Ghana who woulodn't leave their local fab lab. In rural norway they're making mesh networks for monitoring animals... [Technorati tag: etech]

Meta-tags, or, the Dublin Meta Core

As we sort through tags, it'd often be useful to know who created a particular tag. And when. And in which application. And probably other stuff also. While some apps remember who created which tag (e.g., Flickr), as we begin to aggregate tags, we could use a standard way to express this tagging metadata...a Dublin Core not for objects but for tags attached to objects.

If this were to happen, it's very likely to come from the apps that benefit from having standardized tag metadata. The most obvious suspects are the search engines. (Hmm. I may be re-having Mary Hodder's idea.) [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

[etech] Reinventing radio

Four guys from the BBC are talking about radio.

They say it's a popular medium. It's growing. In fact, in terms of the hours per week people spend listening to it, radio is at an all time high. It is, they say, a re-emerging tech.

The BBC Radio Player lets you listen to any radio program over the past week. They're broadcasting 4M hours of radio over the Net every week and 6M of on-demand music [or possibly vice versa].

So, they ask, how can we make radio more social and interactive? Last April they tried an on-air experiment to see if they could combine aggregation and lottery. It was called the 10 hour takeover: Listeners could text in their requests. They posted the text messages live on the BBC web site, lightly edited for profanity.

Now they want to go further. They want the individual to get value from their contribution, the contributions should provide value to others, and so should the BBC. The BBC should, they say, be more like a participant than "an overarching Sauron's eye." They talk about a demo that allows you to use your phone to bookmark songs that you like. "We're not immune to fashion" so they let users tag the songs. Then they get a folksonomy going. And you should be able to do "group listening": See what your friends are listening to, listen along with them, interact in ways that support the shared experience, and schedule future interactions.

They end by asking what the social implications of networked TiVo would be.

(The BBC guys are: Matt Biddulph, Tom Coates, Paul Hammond and Matt Webb.)

[Technorati tags: etech oreilly bbc]

[etech] Wendey Seltzer: Endangered gizmos

Wendy of the EFF talks about technology threatened by copyright-protection laws. (Here's the list.)

MythTV is open source TiVo. The HD cards sold after the Broadcast Flag law goes into effect will only output low res images, so build your mythTV's now. (Wendy is one of the lawyers contesting the Broadcast Flag. Go Wendy!) [I've been trying to build a mythTV for months now. Hint: Be sure to get exactly the specified parts.]

Her unintroduced co-presenter talks about the game City of Heroes. Marvel Comics is suing because some users make characters who look like Marvel's copyrighted heroes. Marvel wants the game destroyed.

The RIAA is trying to ban our ability to save digital radio broadcasts.

Kaleidescape makes a video jukebox. They got sued by a music studio organization because the library-ing of DVDs was outside the scope of the CSS decryption license.

This is a conflict that has existed for a long time, the presenters say, including with sheet music providers fighting player piano rolls. But we've always made way for the new technologies. Now, they say, we are killing the technology. "Entire avenues of innovation will be cut off."

Some technologies already extinct:

DVD-X
Replay TV 4000
Streambox VCR
Adobe Advanced Ebook Reader
Napster 1.0

Endangered:

Morpheus (MGM vs. Grokster)
pcHDTV HD 3000
iPOD (via the Induce Act)
City of Heroes
Total Recorder - Record anything your cable can play
Analog-Digital converters - Would only play watermarked content, thus shutting the "analog hole"

Some of the technologies that survived:

VCRs
Skylink garage door remotes
Refurbished Lexmark toner cartridges

Q: If you're a content creator, should you forego ITunes because it uses DRM?

A: People should have the choice to use DRM, but the devices shouldn't be locked down to support one particular option.

Q: You defend these by looking for substantial non-infringing uses. How about asking the law makers to justify their regulations on Constitutional grounds?

A: Technologists have been under-represented in the legislative debates. So, we try to tell Congress that it affects them as well.

Q: Why doesn't the consumer electronic industry oppose this?

A: The industry is schizophrenic. They need content to sell their devices, but they need consumers to buy them. They are open to being convinced.

Q: If you're successful, people won't make enough money.

A: In the history of copyright, it's always gone the other way.

Q: Relative urgency of Induce vs. Watermark mandates?

A: Induce is the most immediate threat. The Watermark mandates are currently in discussion in trade associations. [Technorati tags: etech oreilly eff]

[etech] George Dyson on von Neumann

George Dyson talks about "Von Neumann's Universe."

Von Neumann came from Hungary and was appointed to Princeton during the Depression. In the office above him was Kurt Goedel who was stuck in a Catch 22 trying to emigrate. The Germans finally allowed Goedel to leave Austria once they realized he wasn't a Jew, but he got classified as an enemy alien by the US because Germany had conquered Austria. In 1943 he finally got his US citizenship and was immediately drafted. Goedel was, however, paranoid. He would only eat food off his sister's plate because he was worried about being poisoned. He was influential on von Neumann who came back from Los Alamos thinking that computing was going to be more important than bombs. Immediately after the war, von Neumann joined IBM where he designed the architecture of computers...building on Goedel's idea that you could take logical processes, encode them in numbers, and get results.

He describes the culture in the group von Neumann built at Princeton, reminiscent of geek culture, right down to a memo complaining that they're using too much sugar in their tea. They built a compuer with 3,400 tubes, more powerful than the Eniac that had many times that number. No proprietary rights were kept.

Dyson says von Neumann's problem is how you build a reliable computer out of sloppy parts — tubes are not digital — which is the same problem this audience has building something reliable out of the Internet. Dyson was given permission by Princeton to open up seven boxes of archived material and has fantastic scans of logs and letters.

Von Neumann, a biologist, also saw that the digital world could give rise to digital evolution. Dyson shows printouts of generations of transforms that look like the cellular automata that Wolfram is doing. In fact, von Neumann was working on a book on creating self-reproducing automata.

He died of bone cancer at 54, probably from inhaling radioactive material at Los Alamos.

[Fantastic talk.]

[Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] From the Labs

Fifteen minute presentations on what's going on in labs...

Rick Rashid, Microsoft Labs. "SenseCam" is a wearable recorder, presumably part of MyLifeBits, the Gordon Bell project. He takes us under the hood. E.g., they wait for stability to take a photo in order to avoid blurriness. "The ultimate blogging tool," he says [if you've confused blogging with living]. He says there are 12 operational units so far. They're building a new generation: Smaller, GPS, continuous audio.

He also talks about "surface computing" that lets you manipuate images on a surface. [It's very similar to a concept video Bruce Tognazzini did for Sun at least ten years ago. But this is an actual implementation.]

Gary Flake, Yahoo. He talks about Y!Q that does contextual searching. He also talks about aggregating opinions into markets. He announces a joint project between Yahoo Labs and O'Really. It's an artificial market on questions related to emerging tech trends. It's a contest. E.g., you purchase shares in OS X Panther vs. OS X Tiger — when will the search queries for Tiger overtake Panther?

They're also introducing today a new type of auction called a Dynamic Pari-mutuel Auction. "If this doesn't revolutionize auctions, it will revolutionize gambling." He doesn't have time to give us any details.

Peter Norviq, Google. He points to Google Suggests. It was done by a single engineer as his one-day-a-week project. It looks like autocomplete but it's not: Every keystroke is a request to Google which is then put into a box drawn by javascript.

He also talks about Google Maps. They use iframes because there's a history object you can go back to. [Hmm. I thought I knew what an iframe is, but I don't understand that sentence.]

He shows a personalization slider . [I'm just not as impressed by sliders as I'm supposed to be.] And Google Sets. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] Morning 5: Jeff Bezos

Bezos shows a new feature of A9 search that lets you do vertical searches, i.e., within sources (content and search engines?) within particular domains Amazon has access to. And, through an RSS extension, you can syndicate your search. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

Werner Vogels in the comments corrects the above:

actually the OpenSearch RSS is to allow *any* content provider to be integrated with the search engine to do domain-specific searches. It is not limited to content providers Amazon has access to but to any content provider. Other search portals could adapt to consume OpenSearch RSS and they get instant access to all the domain search available.

Thanks for the correction. And a note to readers: One of the things I most like about etech is that I don't understand much of it. So, keep those corrections coming!

[etech] Morning 4: Danny Hillis

Danny Hillis talks about Applied Minds, his lab for making experimental stuff. There are about 40 different projects going on at any time, with a focus on hardware but including sw. He shows photos of the workshops and movies of little walking devices that get oohs and ahhs. [Humans are such softies.]

He shows a techno-pimped out car with every possible gadget in it. Lots of blinking lights and screens.

And to make sure we don't think it's all toys and gadgets, the talks about a cancer research project that puts a drop of blood through a mass spectrometer that gives a signature for every protein. "If you could find the chemical signature of what made a chemical treatment worked..."

He shows video of a mapping table that lets you use hand gestures to move around the world, zoom in, swipe in new images/data by time. The next table he shows raises mountains in 3D...physical 3D, not blue-and-red goggles 3D simulation. Oohs and applause. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] Morning 3: Firefox

Firefox's Brendan Eich's theme is that the "app is the api." He talks about the extension techniques, but I lose him at contract-id ends in ?type=foo. People here seem quite happy about it, though. He says the new version will have better graphics capabilities and platform improvements. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] Morning 2: Flickr

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, says he has an announcement about the rumored acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo. The announcement is that the next person who asks will get popped in the chin.

He says Flickr makes 62 methods available to developers. He shows some of what people have built on top of the flickr API. Very cool. The site gets 250,000 API requests a day, and 3M pageviews a day, so about 5% of their traffic consists of API requests. [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] Morning 1

Breakfast was a gathering of the tribes around great oranges and bad bagels.

Rael Dornfest kicks it off by reviewing all the ways we're remixing our stuff. (Well, not all of it is strictly speaking ours.) Remixing content, services, applications, IT. It's a good metaphor: Hacking takes things apart and puts them together in new ways, including with new components.

Tim O'Reilly wonders how design patterns (Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language) might affect Internet applications. He is going to find prescriptions based on situations. E.g., "A successful open source software projects consists of 'small pieces loosely joined.'" Therefore, architect your software or service in such a way that it can be easily incorporated in multiple projects. Here are some others:

You don't have to own all the components of your application. Therefore, glue together pieces from others, and keep it open.

Net applications are never done. Therefore, release features incrementally. Perpetual beta.

Let users add value to shared data. But only a small percentage of users will add value. Therefore, make participation the default, aggregating user data as a side-effect of their using your application. (E.g., Flickr's default is make your photos public.)

PCs are not the only networked device. Therefore, design your app from the get-go to integrate across multiple platforms.

Social networks are a by-product of social apps. Therefore, fapture and share the social fabric under your app.

Standard size packets is key. Therefore, understand the optimum "packet size" for your app domain — up a level up from IP packets. E.g., web pages or books.

Other things on Tim's radar:

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML)...the return of Javascript. They use it for Google Maps.

Hardware hacking, including collaborative hardware hacking — shared hw development to mirror open source sw dev.

Ruby on Rails.

Visualization — Fllickr color wheel, IBM's history flow, tree maps, baby name visualizer ...[Sorry, they're going very quikcly and not giving urls or much explanation]

VoIP

People [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

[etech] IRC

If you want to join the chat: irc.freenode.net #etech [Technorati tag: etech]

[etech] Why I'm at etech

A whole bunch of people I like and admire are at sxsw. I went to that conference the previous two years, but this year it overlaps with O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference. I'm currently in a Days Inn in San Diego, ready to go to etech tomorrow. I've been going to etech for the past couple of years because it's over my head, so I learn a lot.

After talking with some women, I considered skipping etech this year because it's too much of a boy's club: Only 9% of the speakers are women, by my count. That sucks.

So, I checked with O'Reilly. They say that 5% of the submitted paper topics came from women. That sucks even more because it's harder to fix. And it's hard to determine why: Fewer women techies? Fewer women who feel welcome at etech? As far as I can tell, though, O'Reilly is behaving honorably, and the O'Reilly organization itself seems to be a good place for women to work.

So, I'm here.

(BTW, O'Reilly rejected my own proposal for a talk on the social effects of taxonomies.) [Technorati tags: oreilly etech]

Bogus Contest:: Tag...Not just for geeks any more

Bob Filipczak was browsing AdCritic.ccom and came across a couple of commercials for a body spray for men called Tag. I don't subscribe to AdCritic ($100/yr), but here's the stub of an article from AdWeek:

* The budget was not disclosed, but sources said initial ad spending would be at least $50 million.

* The campaign employs broad humor and sexual innuendo in an effort to appeal to teens and young adult males, the key target market for the product.

* Commercial scenarios include advances from the mother of a prospective date and reactions to the product's scent in public venues including a drugstore and a sports arena.

AdWeek also requires a subscription. As does Marketing magazine. Jeez, these marketing folks make it hard to get any stinking information about products!

At least Time lets you read an article about it.

Anyway, Bob suggests a tag line:

Tag: Makes Geeks Tolerable.

Bogus Contest: Tag lines for Tag.

My contribution:

Tag: Removes the Stink of Hierarchy...From Your Bottom Up

Hiawatha on Apple scum

Hiawatha Bray has an excellent column in the Boston Globe today explaining just what's wrong with Apple's suit against a fan who blogged about an upcoming product. Nicholas Ciarelli published information given to him by Apple employees. Hiawatha asks:

"What would happen if Apple employees sent their secrets to me, and I made them the subject of next week's column. Would Apple sue The Boston Globe? We should be so lucky. No, Apple decided to tee off on a 19-tear-old kid, hoping to make an example of him. It's a bonehead play...

Maybe Apple has forgotten how much of its extraordinary rebirth is due to fans like Ciarelli..."

So, if you have a Mac, how are you letting Apple know what you think of its bullying behavior?

Shelley's proposal

Shelley's has finished her proposal for a travel book called One Ticket, Please. You can get a taste here. It's not your run of the mill travel book. No surprise: She's taken some beautiful photos.

Quantifying democracy

Joi wonders if the world has gotten more democratic since 9/11, a topic discussed at the Atocha memorial forum.

Tough question. I think I'd say: More democracies, less democratic. More voting, less liberty.

Nightline on blogging

Last night I finally saw the ABC Nightline on blogging that was broadcast last Tuesday. I liked it a lot.

I know it was so basic that the reporter, John Donvan, explained what a link is, but not everyone in the country uses the Web. Just think about what the report didn't do:

It didn't say that bloggers are journalists, just not as ethical or competent.

It didn't focus on A-List bloggers. Not a one.

It didn't say that blogging is important because bloggers brought down Rather, etc. It mentioned those take-downs, but then put them in the larger context of blogging.

It didn't put bloggers down as pajama-clad whackos.

Instead, it focused on bloggers as people in conversation with one another, and showed an example of how Maura, an ordinary citizen (aren't we all?), affected her state government by blogging about an ill-drafted piece of legislation. It was good to see a piece in the MSM that focused on blogging's positive effect on democracy rather than on its dubious effect on, well, the MSM.

Because part of the piece was taped at a Berkman Thursday night blogging session I attended, I know that Donvan came in thinking Nightline was going to do yet another "Bloggers Take Down Journalists" story. His research, including that Thursday night meeting, changed his mind about why blogging matters. The piece reflected that, and I was impressed by Donvan's openness...which I think is called "good reporting."

The wrap-up by the host, on the other hand, sucked. Once again, bloggers were little failed journalists, cute but inaccurate and unfair. You could practically hear the snap of the disconnect between the host's wrap-up and Donvan's reporting.

Here is Steve Garfield's own cut of the Berkman meeting. I'd link to the Nightline piece but ABC doesn't make aired programs available over the Net because, um, they don't want people to pay attention to them? [Technorati tags: nightline blogs berkman]

Airport parking upgrade, privacy downgrade

Bruce Mohl has an excellent article in the Boston Globe today (read it fast before it gets flushed down the archive hole) about Logan Airport's advanced parking system. It snaps your license plate on the way in, optically decodes it, and watches which floors you enter, so it knows roughly where you've parked. Every night, humans snap all the cars, so the computer generates a daily report. Benefits: Signs can direct you to a floor with vacancies, and the 25 people/day who lose their car can be directed to it. (I have never been more than three of those people.)

On the other hand, Logan doesn't ever get rid of the data and seems to have no concerns about sharing it with the police.

Word for readers

[See note at the end of this post] Microsoft Word lets you view your document in several modes: Normal (=draft), Web page, printed page, outline, and print preview. Yet there's no view designed strictly for readers. That's too bad since many of us end up reading Word pages we have no editing rights to.

If Word added a Read view, it could have special functionality:

At the bottom of each screen would be Next and Previous buttons

Adjust font family and size with a click of a button...and save your adjustments as a theme

We could highlight text and have it saved on a per reader basis

Typing would automatically open up a comment window

We could choose to share our comments and highlights

We could easily set bookmarks for going back to particular spots

One click and you're googling!

Copying and pasting into another document would (optionally!) create a footnote with the appropriate bibliographic information as entered by the author

Why not just take all of the best features of the existing e-books and turn them into a Read view for Word? And if not Word, then why not OpenOffice?

Helpful reader Shannon Clark points out in the comments that Word 2003 already has a Read view with most of these features. Damn! I knew I should have upgraded! (Thanks, Shannon.)

Frankston on Brand X

Bob Frankston talks about two important Supreme Court cases coming up — Grokster and Brand X — with an emphasis on the latter. In Brand X, as I understand it, an ISP sued because it was denied access to a cable company's broadband lines. At stake is whether cable companies, granted munipal monopolies or near-monopolies, will be able to create walled gardens. (Bob provides an excellent set of links so you can read it about it on your own and correct my misrepresentation.)

Bob notes elsewhere that these cases are well-timed for discussion at David Isenberg's Freedom2Connect. (I'm speaking at it and, yes, I feel good about plugging it. It's not a product placement if you mean it and you're not getting paid for it.) [Technorati tags: frankston f2c brandx]

Two feet from Soros

David Isenberg has photographic evidence that, unbeknownst to me, had George Soros sneezed as Ethan Zuckerman was talking at the Safer Democracy conference, I would have been mopping major philanthropic fluids from my pate. Damn! That's like taking a taxi ride and only finding out afterwards that you were sharing the cab with Mick Jagger. (Btw, that's privacy maestro Marc Rotenberg next to Soros.)

Meta-reflective Postmodern recreation of Las Meninas, this time titled "Four Fools with Three Cameras"

Ethan has posted about 15 seconds of an odd moment at Martin Varsavsky's party. Of Ethan, Joi, and Dan G, I seem to be the only one with the good sense to be holding a glass of wine instead of a camera.

CiteULike

CitULike is del.icio.us for academics. It saves citation details and exports them in a couple of standard formats. It aggregates journal articles for your posting pleasure. It encourages long-ish descriptions and lets you assign stars. Nice!

(Thanks to Lisa Williams for pointing to a posting in WeblogToolsCollection about it.)

Why Americans shouldn't be allowed to buy, choose or drink wine

In the Madrid airport this morning (or was it last night? Hard to get my biological clock rewound), I was aimlessly browsing in the duty-free shop and decided maybe I'd buy a bottle of wine. I sampled a bigger variety of wine in the past two days than I did during my twenties, thirties and half of my forties, and all of it was just delicious. I saw a bottle that looked familiar, and figured if I've had it in Madrid, it must be good. So, for 11 euros (about $14 in real money), I bought the bottle and carried it home.

When I finally got back to our house tonight, I realized why the label was familiar. It's the very same bottle of wine I have open in our kitchen. (I go through about a bottle a month.) I had bought it blindly at Trader Joe's...where I paid $9 for it.

This headline is not about Michael Jackson

I'm in a hotel room in Madrid listening to CNN. What's the lead story? Michael Jackson was late to court.

How do the journalists there -- people who got into the business because they are committed to an informed democracy -- feel about this outlandish pandering?

[sd] Press conference

After the public session, we went over to the press building and held a press conference.

Ethan Zuckerman begins. He says it's very challenging to think of the impacts of the Net on terrorism and terrorism on the Net. Ethan says our group focused on the ways in which the Internet and its openness is a great way for democracies to combat terrorism. We had intense technical discussions, especially around anonymity. We feel that it's impossible to eliminate anonymity and attempts to do so would eliminate the positive benefits of anonymity on the Net, e.g., allowing dissidents to speak. Our hope is that democracies can learn from the openness of the Net that has made the Net so resilient and so conducive of conversations in different cultures.

El Mundo asks how to define the role of bloggers as an alternative to the mainstream news.

Ethan: Readers are discovering that they need to become participants. There's a synergy between bloggers and professional journalists.

Q: Shouldn't we regulate Al Qaeda off the net?

John Perry Barlow: Who would regulate it and how? Al Qaeda spreading its views is part of the marketplace of ideas.

Joi Ito: This conference is about democracy. People sometimes forget that the press used to be a check on power, but now the press is owned by large media companies and is selling content. The press should look at blogs and the Internet to fill some of the gap. If you really believe in democracy and the freedom of expression. We need to be able to beat Al Qaeda in debate and expression. He tells of a friend who works with Hezbollah TV; Joi doesn't want to receive email from her because that may put him on the terrorist watch list. That's a chilling effect.

Barlow: Terrorism is motivated in part by a sense that no one is listening, that you're out of the human conversation. And we have a tendency to objectify terrorists. When you can read what they're saying and thinking, you have an opportunity to re-humanize them.

Q: We can all be journalists but we can also all be policemen. What is the role of individuals in the fight? Can they attack terrorist sites?

Rebecca MacKinnon: The war on terrorism is really a fight for hearts and minds. What's most important is to fight bad speech with more speech.

Q: Professional journalists like us have problems with the lack of quality and rigor in citizen journalism.[At least that's what I think he said. My Spanish isn't that good.]

Barlow: If you say something that isn't true on the Net, there are many people who can correct it. It's a conversation, not a broadcast medium

Dan Gillmor: People who are the readers have come to expect that professional journalism makes an effort to try to get it right and offer some balance. It does worry people that there is this explosion of unverified voices. But, there is a self-correcting part of it. Over time, people will find new sources they trust and new kinds of journalism. In the new world, the reader will have to do a little more work, at least for a while, while we recalibrate what we can trust. I think that's a healthy process.

Rebecca: MSM in the US is undergoing a crisis of trust. But weblogs won't replace professional journalists.

Dan: I learned a long time ago that my readers know more than I do. As a journalist, that's an opportunity. The news must stop being just a lecture. It has to become more like a seminar or a conversation, or people will find other ways to get informatoin.

El Mundo: Is Jeff Gannon the dark side of the blog? At Talon news, after Gannon was exposed, Gannon's stories were expunged.

Dan: Bloggers have become press critics.

Me: Are all bloggers journalists?

Dan: No. Most of them write simply about what matters to the individual blogger.

Barlow: But you can never tell when a blogger will discover something that becomes a large news story. [Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

[sd] Statement

After a very compressed bout of social editing, here is the brief document the working group is presenting to an open session at the Madrid conference on democracy, security and terrorism.

NOTE: This is available on the Global Voices wiki.

The Infrastructure of Democracy
Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World

March 11, 2005

I. The Internet is a foundation of democratic society in the 21st century, because the core values of the Internet and democracy are so closely aligned.

1. The Internet is fundamentally about openness, participation, and freedom of expression for all — increasing the diversity and reach of information and ideas.
2. The Internet allows people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems.
3. The Internet unites families and cultures in diaspora; it connects people, helping them to form civil societies.
4. The Internet can foster economic development by connecting people to information and markets.
5. The Internet introduces new ideas and views to those who may be isolated and prone to political violence.
6. The Internet is neither above nor below the law. The same legal principles that apply in the physical world also apply to human activities conducted over the Internet.

II. Decentralized systems — the power of many — can combat decentralized foes.

1. Terrorist networks are highly decentralized and distributed. A centralized effort by itself cannot effectively fight terrorism.
2. Terrorism is everyone's issue. The internet connects everyone. A connected citizenry is the best defense against terrorist propaganda.
3. As we saw in the aftermath of the March 11 bombing, response was spontaneous and rapid because the citizens were able to use the Internet to organize themselves.
4. As we are seeing in the distributed world of weblogs and other kinds of citizen media, truth emerges best in open conversation among people with divergent views.

III. The best response to abuses of openness is more openness.

1. Open, transparent environments are more secure and more stable than closed, opaque ones.
2. While Internet services can be interrupted, the Internet as a global system is ultimately resilient to attacks, even sophisticated and widely distributed ones.
3. The connectedness of the Internet – people talking with people – counters the divisiveness terrorists are trying to create.
4. The openness of the Internet may be exploited by terrorists, but as with democratic governments, openness minimizes the likelihood of terrorist acts and enables effective responses to terrorism. fertile ground...

IV. Well-meaning regulation of the Internet in established democracies could threaten the development vof emerging democracies.

1. Terrorism cannot destroy the internet, but over-zealous legislation in response to terrorism could. Governments should consider mandating changes to core Internet functionality only with extraordinary caution.
2. Some government initiatives that look reasonable in fact violate the basic principles that have made the Internet a success.
3. For example, several interests have called for an end to anonymity. This would be highly unlikely to stop determined terrorists, but it would have a chilling effect on political activity and thereby reduce freedom and transparency. Limiting anonymity would have a cascading series of unintended results that would hurt freedom of expression, especially in countries seeking transition to democratic rule.

V. In conclusion we urge those gathered here in Madrid to:

1. Embrace the open Internet as a foundation of 21st Century democracy, and a critical tool in the fight against terrorism.
2. Recognizing the Internet's value as a critical communications infrastructure, invest to strengthen it against attacks and recover quickly from damage.
3. Work to spread access more evenly, aggressively addressing the Digital Divide, and to provide Internet access for all.
4. To protect free speech and association, endorse the availability of anonymous communications for all.
5. Resist attempts at international governance of the Internet: It can introduce processes that have unintended effects and violate the bottom-up democratic nature of the

[sd] IRC transcript

I've posted a transcript of the morning's IRC session.

And here's the afternoon session.

[sd] Photos

I've posted on Flickr a few photos from the Madrid conference. Search for SafeDemocracy.

[sd] Wednesday morning #2

Now we are talking about the positive values of the Internet as a way of spreading and preserving democracy.

Marc Rotenberg says that this conference seems quite aligned with the values of the open internet. He suggests four ways of talking about the Net that work with the conference's values.

Pekka Himanen worries that we are answering terrorism with "fearism."

Desiree suggests that we build more "trusted spaces" where people with divergent views can talk. (E.g., ThreeFatesForum.) Should government finance these? She also worries about the "war on terror" inculcating fear.

Dan Gillmor worries about the mass media dumbing us down and the effect that has on our ability to govern ourselves. Now we have the ability for all people to communicate with one another. It's "massive and wonderful thing." We need an ecosystem of media, he says, from citizen journalism to mass media. Finally, Dan asks if this is a binary question: Do we have to choose between privacy and a working Internet. He suspects not. (John Perry Barlow comments that in general, if someone presents you with a binary choice, he's trying to control you. :)

I say that we should phrase our report by talking about how an open Internet supports democratic values. We should be very careful about our vocabulary and metaphors. (E.g., "anonymity" is probably not taken as a positive value by state leaders.) And we should stress, I believe, that the Net is a force for global democracy not just because it enables people to publish dissents, but because it allows people to connect, and that's at the heart of democracy.

Rebecca MacKinnon talks about the need to have voices other than the media in conversation. The media tend to magnify extremists, she says. We should bring in the "silent majority," which of course means addressing the digital divide.

Andrew McLaughlin says that he's heard these issues raised so far: Terrorists attacking the Network, terrorists attacking the real world by coordinating over the Net, terrorists using the Net to market themselves. And he's heard, as a theme, that there's a single response to all of these: Maintain an open Net. He proposes this as a framework for discussion.

There's good discussion of how to talk about these issues to government leaders who don't think in these terms. And Andrew McLaughlin pointedly asks how we can maintain the value of anonymity in a city where terrorists were caught because their communications were tracked back to them.

To follow the conversation, go to the IRC: irc.freenode.net #madridopendemo [Technorati tag: SaferDemocracy]

Tags visualized

This site draws the relationships among tags at del.icio.us. (Thanks to Henrik Schneider for the link.)

[sd] Wednesday morning

(Joi has pointed out that media are not allowed into this hall, but bloggers are allowed to blog it. Interesting.)

John Gage, of Sun, gives an introduction to how the Net is viewed by the international leaders to whom we will submit a one-page set of recommendations. Our vocabularies are different, he says, so making a succinct statement is going to be difficult. Our metaphors about "openness" don't work. And, he says, security agencies had thought they were in the control business, but now they're being told that they need to share information. They're confused and we need to understand their needs and way of thinking.

Conference room

Wendy Seltzer of the EFF says governments believe if we could track everyone and every message, we could catch the terrorists. But, she says, we need to preserve privacy. Currently, very little of what you do on line is truly anonymous, unless you take active steps.

Paul Vixie says that the Net was initially left uncontrolled because you had to be an academic with a university affilitation to get onto the network. We have no "admission control" for email or for data packets. When the attack comes from 10,000 servers each sending you a couple of packets a secoind, there is no practical way to track them all back and stop them. "The robustness we feel about the internet is illusory." Any angry teenager with a couple of hundred dollars of equipment can take down a site. We have to preserve anonymity if only to allow political dissent to continue, but we also need to fix the vulnerability, he says.

Paul: I'm advocating admission control not because I like it but because otherwise it's too easy to bring down the Internet. To ensure that there are no forged headers, we have to agree to turn a few knobs on the routers. To make this work, we'd have to regulate the ISPs to require them to turn those knobs, and this would have to be done through international treaty so it wouldn't just move overseas.

I asked Paul about this during the break. He says that admission control would have no effect on the ability of governments to track down dissenters. He is an anonymity advocate and would like to make it easier to be anonymous on the Net. But he's not sure how to do that while also ending the ability to create denial of service attacks. [Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

[sd] Wednesday morning

I'm at the Madrid conference on democracy, security and terrorism. Joi has set up an IRC chat and Ethan Zuckerman is doing a good job of posting the main points of the dialogue as they occur. Go to irc.freenode.net and join the #madridopen channel.

Madrid indoors and out

After a particularly crummy of upright, intermittent sleeping on a crowded flight from Newark to Madrid, the day took a decided turn for the better when I went for a long walk with Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon. We're here for the Internet portion of a conference on democracy and terrorism. It starts tomorrow, in closed session, and then moves to open session session on Wednesday.

What we saw of Madrid was beautiful. And it was a perfect day — maybe 50F and not a cloud all day. We walked, we had lunch (a delicious veggie paella for me at a small cafe), we sat, we walked, we had coffee, we walked, Ethan went to eat ham at one of the Museo de Jambon's, we walked.

Joi Ito, one of the organizers of the Internet portion of the conference, has set up a backchannel IRC, open to anyone who wants to eavesdrop: #madridopendemo on irc.freenode.net. See you there. [Technorati tags: safedemocracy madrid]

It's about transparency, not impartiality

The Boston Globe's ombudsman, Christine Chinlund, revisits the Globe's request last November that tech writer Hiawatha Bray refrain from expressing his political views on his blog. Bray complied. Says Chinlund:

...Bray's anti-Kerry and pro-Bush rhetoric was at odds with the impartiality expected of journalists.

Bullshit.

First, Chinlund's use of the loaded term "rhetoric" is slanted writing. Second, we've established that Bray has political views, so the question of his impartiality remains whether he expressed his views or not. The way to answer that question is to look at Bray's tech reporting. If it's not impartial, then Bray should be disciplined. If it is, then what's the problem? Either way, Bray should be allowed to blog his political views. (PS: I read his tech writing regularly and I've seen no political bias.)

I think it's safe to say that Chinlund meant to say that Bray's political writings were at odds with the appearance of impartiality, which raises the question: Just how stupid does the Globe think its readers are? Do we really believe that tech writers and sports writers and style writers don't have political views? Do we think that out of the office they go slack-jawed when asked who they're voting for? No, we understand that because they're professional journalists, they do a reasonable job of keeping their personal political views out of their writing.

Transparency works better than reprimands. I'd rather know a reporter's views so I can understand where the journalist is coming from and can compensate for those views if they affect the journalist's writing.

Today, the ombudsman reports Bray as saying: "I make no apology . . . for my opinions. But I do apologize for expressing them in a venue that might lead some to suppose that my employers share them."

Hiawatha, you have nothing to apologize for. No one thinks that just because you support Bush, so must The Boston Globe. Hah! And if there's ever any doubt who a reporter is talking for on her blog, all she has to do is put up an explanation: "This is my personal blog. I'm not speaking for The Boston Globe." Transparency is as good as sunlight.

I truly hope we're seeing the last of this foolish idea that journalists are such pure priests of information that they must remain celibate. It is a fiction, and it demeans journalists and readers alike.

Nightline blogging piece now scheduled for Tuesday

ABC's Nightline has been working on a piece about blogging. Rumor had it that it was going to be shown this Thursday. The new rumor is that it will be shown this Tuesday.

Technorati finds related tags

At the beginning of next week, Technorati will launch a new tag aggregation feature: When you search on a tag, you'll be shown a list of "related" tags. The relationships are automatically discerned by the software, analyzing the other tags used by people tagging the same set of pages and photos. Dave Sifry let me play with a beta of it, and the suggested tags were generally quite relevant.

There are two types of relationships the "related" tags help with. First, they suggest slightly divergent topics so you can browse off the path you were heading down. Second, they help get over the problem that people use different words to flag the same ideas; the "related" tags can help you find more sources that are directly on the path you were heading down. So they help with both digression and focus. [See my disclosure statement.] [Technorati tags: technorati tags taxonomy]

Madrid democracy & terrorism conference

For reasons that are unclear, but I wasn't inclined to argue about them, I've been invited to a "summit" on "democracy, terrorism and security" in Madrid next week, me and my close personal friends Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Dan Gillmor, Joi Ito, David Isenberg, and Bill Clinton...you know, the same old crowd.

About thirty of us (excluding Bill) are in a group talking about the Net, democracy and terrorism, not a topic I know a lot about. I presume there will be some arguing in favor of tightening security on the Net in order to prevent terrorism, an approach me and my jerking knees oppose. I mean, everything I know about security could be written on the back of a tie-dyed t-shirt, but I do think some of the batten-down-the-hatches arguments ignore not only the social and political costs but miss ways an open, worldwide network can help in the fight against terrorism. But I'm willing to listen and learn. And the format of the conference sounds like it should facilitate learning: The first day we meet behind closed doors and on the second we engage publicly.

The Summit is sponsoring an online forum about its topics right now... [Technorati tags: madrid terrorism]

[wk] Last session: Five years hence

We divided into three groups and talked about what we think the news media will/should look like in five years.

The groups tended to believe that citizen reporters will be integrated into the "ecosystem," with the media operating as aggregators of information, or as places, perhaps clustered by topic. Open source content. Creative Commons licensing. Training the young. Niche reporting and advertising. On demand. Cross platform, off PCs and onto mobile devices. Slice-and-dice. More globalized. Conversation is the entry point to the culture.

Jeff Jarvis summarizes each of the three groups' presentation with a word: Trust, transparency and conversation. [Yup. And how does this compare with the news media's current values of, approximately, trust, authority and accuracy?]

I believe that if questioned, the groups would disagree about the likely specific fates of, say, The New York Times, the BBC, etc. E.g., will citizen journalists be working for the news media or will the news media of the future be loose aggregations of content, some of which is created by professionals but much of which won't? Will the business model come top down or will there be small changes and experiments so the business model can grow organicallly?

Media ecology

Rebecca points to Kent Bye's New Media Ecosystem. I haven't read it, but the snippet looks interesting, and I look forward to reading it.

I have an overly simple view of the media ecology: News is getting commoditized. The momentum — for better or worse — is on the side of voice, passion, connection and bias. The space between commoditized news (the AP) and the voices expressing that news increasingly belongs to aggregators, not to the news media.

[wk] Friday morning #2

Discussion of how user-led coverage ought to be. Occasional, isolated, and relatively random points:

Jarvis: On the blogs, you'll find lots of discussion of social security and not much of Michael Jackson. In the mainstream newspapers, it's just the reverse.

Brian Reich: There's a generation gap here. We need to start training the younger generation in journalism. That's the only way the news business will accept young people as credible journalists.

Lisa Stone: Don't forget email. It's key.

Jim Kennedy (AP): Let's not throw journalism out. Instead lets rethink how journalism enters the culture. [Applause] [This has been Rebecca Mackinnon's point as well.]

Katherine von Jan (Faith Popcorn's group): We want to hear more directly from the source of news. Plus we're becoming a more viusal society. I don't see how we can translate old newspapers into something relevant today.

Halley: If we could get the NY Times on XBox, we'd be there!

Jay: Sociologist Raymond Wilson said that there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses. There are ways of talking to people as masses, and those ways have histories. For journalists to survive as socially significant creatures, their function lies in engaging and addressing people as a public. The notion that we're going to continue to be "consumers" is in my view retrograde.

Me: I think we're seeing a growing bifurcation between commoditized news that is aggregation-fodder and personalized views that reflects ideas/events through individual interests and viewpoints. The problem facing the news media is that they're stuck in the middle. [Technorati tag: media]

Coverage

A quick post — swinging unpleasantly between the obvious and the wrong — during the first morning break at the Whose News conference:

Don't a lot of the MSM's woes go back to their commitment to "coverage," i.e., the idea that there's a set of events that the MSM are morally and professionally obligated to report on, even if it's not of particular interest to readers? That creates a bunch of news that no one wants to write and no few want to read. In contrast, bloggers, and Jon Stewart, get to talk only about we want to.

There's a Postmodern point somewhere in this about the idea that there's an independent world of Big Events, but leave that aside for the moment. It's enough that papers feel an obligation to cover events that readers should care about, even if the readers don't. I don't dispute that. I don't want news media to be guided only by reader interest if only because interests are responses more than they are inner states. I want there to be a record larger than my own interests. I want the opportunity to have my interests expanded and educated. And when some story I didn't care about turns out to be tremendously important, I want to be able to go back through the archives (and not for $2.95 a pop, by the way) to learn what I didn't know I needed to know.

I don't know the economics of maintaining something like the AP, which is in the business of providing commoditized, miscellanized coverage. But I think we're heading towards a time when we need the AP more than we need the NY Times. How much better would The Times be if it gave up on its obligation to provide "coverage"? Where will this infrastructure of miscellaneous stories come from? AP? WikiNews? Citizen journalists? Free-agent professional journalists? Free-agent editors? Everywhere and everyone?

[wk] Friday morning #1: Jon Stewart

We begin by watching Rob Corddry's piece on how to become a new media person, on the Jon Stewart Daily Show. Some of us are dismayed that he's taken as news, but most of us seem to think the media need to learn from it. People ask if The Daily Show is popular because it blurts out the truth, is irreverent, is passionate... (Obviously, it's also because it's funny.) Craig Newmark says one of his favorite quotes now is: "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Or else they'll kill you."

Anonymized comments:

Jon Stewart, someone says, is liberated from having to suck up to sources.

It's easier for him because he only has a couple of segments.

Real journalists have to be dispassionate. E.g., if you've ever covered a plane crash...

All we should learn from Jon Stewart is that media literacy in this country stinks.

How do we make what we do as lively, interesting and engaging as what Stewart does, but with more content?

We shouldn't pander to our readers by adopting Stewart's irony.

Stewart plays the valued role of court jester, but nothing more than that.

My 25-year-old daughter would say that this discussion shows that we're a bunch of old fogeys.

We live in an ADD culture. We don't have enough time. We want to get news and entertainment.

This is the what the customer wants. We ought to listen.

The news industry is the only one that tries to adapt customer behavior to what it wants. (Murmurs of disagreement. It's called "marketing.")

Discussion of the role of passion in journalism: Is it an obstacle to fair reporting? Or is it a requirement to keep news human? Rather's mistake was that he was unable to admit that he made a mistake.

(Me:) Stewart is a jester, but the point is that the jester is now more trusted than the king. Stewart's object of derision is the mainstream media. If the MSM would follow a clip of, say, Cheney saying "I never said X" with the four clips where he did say X, we wouldn't be watching Stewart.

Half the country hates Stewart. There's still plenty of room for non-Stewart news sources.

Do the media provide a product or a service?

The media don't really know what their customers want.

Stewart focuses narrowly — the White House press corps, primarily — and his relevance is limited.

If the media were more transparent, people would be more forgiving.

It's not about journalists' passion. It's about the audience's passion.

[Jay Rosen, star of the Daily Show segment, walks in late and gets a standing ovation. Except for a couple of people.] [Technorati tag: media]

Regulating the Blogosphere

In an interview at CNET news, Federal Elections Commission chair Bradley Smith said:

"The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law."

Omigod. Have we completely forgotten what democracy is about? Scary. (Thanks to Salon for the link.)

[wk] Fourth session

Just a couple of highlights because I'm getting tired.

Len Apcar (NYTimes Digital): I'm ecstatic we bought About.com because it says we're not a newspaper company. It's the second largest acquisition in our history; the largest was the Boston Globe.

Dan Froomkin: We're not delivering enough value. Newspapers create little articles and then we incrementally update them. We should instead be delivering the value that's in the newsroom: Time lines, context, blogs, maps, video...We're not monetizing our value because we're not delivering our value.

Jim Kennedy (AP): We should get past the advertising model and be looking at the Amazon and eBay models.

Jan Schaffer (J-Lab): We've been talking too much about me-too journalism. There's real value in media developing exclusive content.

Now we're doing a list: What should we create.

Use the existing tools to invent new forms of digital story-telling
True Internet video
Distributed revenue infrastructure
Distributed trust infrastructure
Discover which bloggers are saying interesting things
Reputation system for individual journalists
At least one open source journalist at a major media outlet
Let us tag your articles
More niche e-newsletters, blogs, sites, etc.
Training programs for employees and audience
Really attack the cost side of article production
Create value around R&D so more will be done
Geotag everything
More contact between reporters and people, and not just online
Primers, FAQs, timelines — things that leverage the knowledge base of beat reporters
Encourage voice
RSS everything
Be transparent — show us the process as far as possible
Publish drafts and queries when it's ok
Get on the right side of the copyright fight
Open your archives because that's where the common good is
We want to talk with one another, not just comment on your stuff
If you feel constrained from blurting out the truth, what's your business about?
Be interesting, fun
Have some of your folks get involved in sw development to see what they learn
Better partnering

Tomorrow, we're told, we're going to talk about the missing piece in this discussion: Readers.

[wk] What should stay or change

We call out items for two lists, without debate, about what about current journalism should stay and what should go. (I didn't start recording in time to get most of the first list. Sorry.)

What should stay:

Integrity
Speaking truth to power
Commitment to facts
Accuracy
Be a witness
Balance

What should change:

Truth should be acknowledged as plural
Acknowledge the interactive tools
Drop the arrogance of the assumption your audience is stupider than you
Learn to listen
Embrace the customer as innovator and partner
Publicly-traded media companies should change their message to Wall Street to include serving the public trust as part of their mission
Less "silo-ing" of topics
Gutlessness
The fear of looking partisan ("We should only be afraid of being wrong.")
Stenography
Stop passing off infotainment as news
Transparency!
Change the way corrections and clarifications are handled
Learn from Jon Stewart—blurt out the truth
Reward people for collaboration
Independence from politics and product placement
Revisit copyright
Work more with journalists from other outside the US
Drop the US-foreign distinction

Jeff Jarvis reminds us that these lists do not represent consensus, just ideas called out from the group. [Good, because there are a couple of items on the list that are far more important than others and which would require major changes to implement. It was intended just as raw material.]

Matt Thompson explains how he and Robin Sloan at the Poynter Institute came to make EPIC, a "documentary" about the future of media. (I blogged about it here.) They recently updated it and added a more upbeat ending: ordinary citizens making media via social networks. "I hope we can learn from communities like CraigsList and MetaFilter"

Susan Mernit (moderating this session): Are you saying that the readers feel like they have an ownership stake...?

Matt: "People are bowling alone but they're Everquesting together."

Me: The hardest thing for me to explain when I talk with mainstream journalists is the sense of some sites being ours and others being theirs: CraigsList, Wikipedia, even Google feel like ours, no matter how irrationally.

Merrill Brown: I used to feel that way about my hometown paper. I wonder if a paper-based medium can recapture that...

Jay: People used to think of it as our newspaper. Now it's the newspaper. That's because journalists have sought authority by separating themselves, rather than by connecting. They know and we don't. Papers set up boards where readers could have "their say" (ghetto-zing them).

Jeff Jarvis: (Citing a reader of his blog) Newspapers have to stop thinking of themselves as things and start thinking of themselves as places.

Craig: People are overwhelming trustworthy. They'll point out problems. There's a very small number of crazy people. You already have people in your organizations who know how to deal with them. Some can be turned around/ Some have to be barred from the site.

Susan asks which technologies can make real changes. People talk about blogging, content management,

Jeff Jarvis talks about how easy it is to do video from your laptop, turning everyone into a possible contributor to mainstream TV networks. And then he says, memorably: You're going to find a lot of airtime given to Michael Jackson and not very much blog time.

Rebecca: We're too focused on computers. Our communication devices are being distributed far more broadly than that.

Froomkin: It's blogs. Blogs are highly evolved. They're the alternative the media have kept demanding of their detractors.

Matt: Newspapers don't make much of the tremendous amount of information — names, quotes, photos — streaming through them. Why isn't all this put into a database?

Jay: Blogs aren't a big technological advance. But they give our blogs a look as professional as MSM pages. The most interesting tech goes horizontal, enabling there to be self-informing publics.

Halley: We don't need better buggy whips.

Andreas Neus: Audible voice is tremendously important.

Ty Ahmed-Taylor (Comcast) talks about the importance of tags. The NY Public Library put lots of photos on line with a terrible taxonomy; they would have done better to put it onto Flickr, he says. Also, video blogging will be the next big thing.

[wk] Second session: Will the traditions of journalism survive

After you spend a year at the Nieman Foundation, says Jay Rosen, no one at your paper even asks what you learned. If you were Microsoft, sent an employee away for a year to learn, and didn't even ask what they learned, you'd be fired. "This profession doesn't value intellectual capital," Jay says. "It doesn't even really respect learning." New media has forced traditional media to have to learn quickly. "It has not happened," he says. "There's this huge gap between what most journalists know about the Web and what's actually happening on the Web." If the traditions are going to survive, professional journalists will have to jump in and learn.

For example, Jay says, journalists often believe that people on the Web have no neutrality. But Wikipedia shows otherwise. Journalists think what's on the Web is unedited. But the Web has its own way of editing: Readers edit.

The people who started online companies are moving towards journalism. When Yahoo! started, it didn't think it would move toward journalism. Likewise for CraigsList [Craig is here. Yay Craig!]. If professional journalism is going to survive, it's going to have move toward the ways of the Web.

Journalism has protected itself by separating itself from politics, economics, the public... That's how you had integrity. Now the question is how you create connections. "That's very much the ethos that professional journalists absorb."

He is worried about this "learning deficiency."

[Great. I love Jay]

Craig: During any serious change, jobs are lost. There's a need for some sort of self-help. I'd be willing to put links — ones sent to me — about what these changes are about.

Rob Enderle: Big corporations, not just media, don't take advantage of people's learning. It should be up to the individual to drive through the organization what they've learned.

Len Apcar, Editor in chief of NY Times Digital says that there is a 150-year-old culture at The Times. If the website organization of The Times had found room in the newspaper's building, it would have been crushed because of the culture. After ten years, the culture of the website and the newspaper have to come closer together. We've learned that "success breeds success," e.g., Andrew Revkin's blogging a trip through Greenland. I don't need money so much as a willingness to try. If Nick Kristoff wins a Pulitzer for his travel reports, Len wants the web person who went with him to be in the photo. That would be a huge step, he says. [I find it depressing that that would be considered a huge step.] Conclusion: We need a change in culture, not just more money.

Matt Thompson says that we need to talk about what "survive" means.

Dan Froomkin: It's not that the new media branches are up on what's going on and the old media branches aren't listening. The new media branches generally aren't up on what's happening. It comes back to fear. We need boldness and time is running out. "Yahoo harvested online aggregation of breaking news before we even knew what it was." The same thing is happening with hyperlocal reporting. "At least we still have tremendous value in our enterprise reporting and opinions." He ends by saying, "It's very depressing."

Danny Schechter shows a bit of his film, Weapons of Mass Deception. [I don't know why we're watching this.]

Rebecca says it's not the question whether mainstream journalism survives. It's whether journalism survives. the MSM are doing more audience-pleasing content and are less concerned about doing the work that would advance the public good. We need to look at the business model issues, she says. If you're working for a corporation that is most concerned about short-term business interests, can you do good journalism? [Yay, Rebecca!]

Len: I'll go out on a limb and state four square that there are bedrock values: Judgment and editing counts for something. Some people need editors to get their ideas across. There are sometimes no right answers about what the lead should be, but there should be a discussion. He also favors fact-based reporting and true curiosity-based reporting. A good reporter does what happens at Wikipedia: aggregating the views and ideas of experts. That's a useful thing. People don't have time to do it themselves. We need independent media to uncover certain sorts of stories. [He actually gives an example of a story about accidents at railroad crossings. My question is exactly what types of stories are best done by media institutions.]

Jay: Exactly what limb did you go out on? The media system gained power at the expense of other actors such as political parties and old boss systems. During this period, journalists didn't come up with new ways of explaining their value and the grounds of their judgment. Journalists have relied on the most innocent explanations of their work.

Dan: So how do we explain ourselves?

Jay: I talk about citizen journalism.

Rebecca reports on the webcred conference. We should stop talking about the conflict between MSM and blogging. Instead we should be talking about what we can do to keep citizens well informed and how can we help make the citizenry better able to understand what it reads. We're all in this together and need to figure out how to improve the ecosystem. She asks if we really have the tools we need (a point Halley brought up earlier)? And what are the commercial incentives? Do we have the right business model for creating responsible credible media?

Craig: People are frustrated at what isn't covered, at how stories get raised and dropped. [What's most interesting to me is how we're "taking back" not only content but metadata and even what constitutes a story.]

After lunch, we're going to spend time building a list of what should change and what should be preserved.

[Technorati tags: whosenews media jayrosen]

[wk] Whose news? Introductions...

Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Media Center are sponsoring a conference called Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good. There are about thirty people sitting around circled tables and another twenty in chairs outside the magic circle. The invitee list is heavy with mainstream media folks, new media folks, and academics, with a handful of bloggers who blog about blogging. Mainly white, mainly male, mainly American, skewing 40+.

The official agenda:

Mainstream media and the connected society: Will the traditions of professional journalism survive? Should they?

Technology, humanity and the digital datastream: Who or what is in control? Who profits?

We media, the culture and the common good: How we know, how we learn, and how we trust in the emerging ecosystem of participatory, always-on media

We go around and introduce ourselves and an idea we care about. Impressionistically: Change in authority, enlarging and globalizing the conversation, whether journalists are becoming free agents, whether the youngest generation is going to care about news and reading at all, preserving brand, how to "aggregate eyeballs across platforms," how can we measure and monetize trust, what does the market want us to do, can the new media (e.g., MSNBC, NYT online) support the great operations that MSM support, how can MSM embrace the passion arising among readers who are discovering their voices, how do we scale business models, how do we maintain craft, how does our media system serve (or, currently, undermine) democracy, how to give ethnic and alternative media access, how to engage people politically,

This is clearly intended not to focus on blogs v. journalism, which is fine, but as a blogger I am feeling under-represented. I'd guess the MSM folk feel that bloggers are over-represented. And I'm confident the blogosphere feels blogging here is mis-represented.

You can read an opening position paper — actually, a short book — here, written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by J.D. Lasica. I've skimmed it and it looks really good.

[Technorati tags: whosenews media]

The news from NYTimes.com

The NYTimes.com site is re-fashioning itself, launching in April. That's what Robert Larson, director of product management and development of NYTimes.com, told me when I interviewed him for the issue of Release 1.0 that came out last week. (Here's the article's first section.) They're doing something bold and important, which I think may mark a turning point...but perhaps not the one NYTimes.com envisions.

The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See "Note on Links" at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you'll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google's rankings.

I think this may bring about two crises ("crisis" in the old sense of crossroads):

First, if the topic pages don't give away enough information, if they have too many enticing links that make us pay $2.95 to retrieve the article, they will position The Times as a hoarder rather than as an authority; initially, they are thinking about publishing the summaries written for The Times Index, not the archived articles themselves.* It's crucial to our trust in newspapers that we feel they are on our side, working to make us all better informed; it will be a sad day for the mainstream media when we lose that sense.

Second, the first comparison we're all going to make is to the Wikipedia page on the same topic. My guess is that, while nothing can duplicate The Times' 150 years of cultural artifacts if they're made freely available*, we're going to find the Wikipedia page more useful, more current, more neutral, and more linked into the Web. If we don't, we'll edit the Wikipedia page until it's better. And then we'll link it to the NYTimes.com topic page. In this head-on comparison between what the best of the closed systems can do with what the newest of the open systems comes up with, you'll hear the groan of the hawser as the ship of trust changes berths.

*[I added these two phrases after sleeping on it.]

Note on links: Thanks to Dave, the Times does offer bloggers a way to link to articles without having to pay the archive fee, but this only works for articles published after May 5, 2003. Plus, it's hackier than most non-techie bloggers are going to put up with.

Of course Jay Rosen's piece on the NY Times' acquisition of About.com definitely will be on the exam....

Malaysian blogger brought in for questioning

Ethan's got the full story about Jeff Ooi, an outspoken global voice, being pulled in by Malaysia's Criminal Investigation Division for questioning about the content of his Weblog. Says Ethan:

Jeff was questioned for two hours and released. It's unclear whether the authorities will close the case regarding Jeff's weblog, or whether he may be subject to future questioning and harrasment.

So far, he's continuing undaunted in his blogging...

OnFolio for Firefox

OnFolio's new version supports Firefox. Yay! I had bought rev 1 a couple of months before I switched from Microsoft IE, and I've missed it.

OnFolio does something really simple: When you come across a Web page you want to save, it makes a copy and puts it into a folder of your choosing. Of course you can do that yourself, but you end up with component parts all over. OnFolio gives you its own foldering system, lets you add keywords and descriptions, and makes the whole thing hassle-free. (It uses the MHT file format to store all the elements in a single file. [Correction (see comments): It uses MHT to share content with non-users.]) Of course, it does more than that, but that's the functionality that got me to buy it. It's a great way to organize your research.

But here's my worry about OnFolio's fate. If other people are using OnFolio for the same basic service as I am, how long will it be before someone writes a free add-in to Firefox that saves Web pages into MHT format? I'm not convinced that the extra features in OnFolio are going be attractive to enough people...

(Neattricks has an interesting set of reviews of what seems to be v1, with responses from OnFolio.)

Web of Ideas tonight: Net Time

Tonight I'm leading another discussion at the Berkman Center, open to all.

Last time, we talked about Net friendship, and it went really well in part because I only talked for a few minutes at the beginning. It turned into a very interesting, very informal discussion.

That's what I'm aiming for tonight as well. I'm going to open with just a few comments. I'm not sure what I'm going to say, but perhaps something like this:

We have an image of time as a series of "nows" that march past the razor blade of the present. That's an incoherent view (IMO). It's also inconsistent with our lived experience of time which is far clumpier and invested: We experience time as seasons (annual to daily) and memory (the clustering of what matters to us). We can't get to nows no matter how hard we try. (Important note on the domain of discourse: I'm a westerner. I make no claims about other cultural perspectives.) My hypothesis: It's harder to make the time-is-nows mistake on the Net because on the Net we're directly confronted with our tangly threads of interest.

But, because of the way we experience the Net — facing forward, looking at a screen — the fabric of time turns into raveling threads that constantly demand us to re-weave them.

I'd like us to talk about how we experience time on the Internet. E.g., I way too frequently go to do something online and three links later can't remember what I was trying to do. At first I thought this was a sign of oncoming old age, and there may be an element of truth to that, but it seems also to be encouraged by the Net itself.

I also hope that we talk about the ways in which different Net tools — email, mailing lists, IM, etc. — present time.

But obviously if the discussion works, it'll go where it wants.

The session is open to all and we serve pizza. 6-7:30 pm tonight at the Baker House [map] [Technorati tag: berkman ]

Kuttner on Summers

Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe today grades Larry Summers' presentation: C+. It's a well-done piece that takes Summers' remarks on their own terms. (I've blogged about it here, but I heartly recommend Kuttner's comments instead.) [Note: The link will break soon because the Globe has decided it's not worth it to be a long-lasting influence on our culture.'[Technorati tags: summers harvard]

Video tagging

Vimeo lets you assemble video based on author's tags. For example, you could automatically assemble a movie about concerts, about funny things, or all the video Steve Garfield's posted. [Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link. Steve also recommend an essay by Jakob Lodwick on Tagwebs, Flicker and the Human Brain. I haven't read it yet.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy ]

Bond on tag spam

Julian Bond raises excellent issues about dealing with tag spam. The folks at del.icio.us and flickr and the like seem also to be looking at "interestingness" to increase relevancy rankings, where interestingness is some computation of the change in popularity, cluster analysis of tags, and other stuff I equally don't understand. [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags]