GoAl Gore site looking for ideas, content and stuff

Brad of BradSucks.net set up GoALGORE.org with a WordPress installation. (It may not be reachable by you yet - GoALGORE.org is working for me at the moment but not GoALGORE.com.) Now all we need to do is set it up with content so powerful that Gore takes one look at it and decides he has to run.

Maybe it should be a site where people can post their reasons for wanting Gore to run, with links to resources, etc. Anyone want to take this on? Or do you have a better idea? (I'm in the middle of book stuff and can't get to site-building right now, even if I had any good ideas.) [Tags: goalgore al_gore politics]

Bradsucks' open source guitar

BradSucks has posted some potential designs for the guitar he's sanding down. Feel free to alter the PhotoShop.psd file he's posted... [Tags: bradsucks guitar]

GoAl Gore!

"Re-Elect Al Gore in 2008" has become the meme du jour, and I hope the meme du next-two-years. Unlike John Kerry, Gore has learned and grown from his near-defeat. He's not only the Democrats' best candidate, he has the makings of a great leader. His speeches in the past couple of years have been unafraid and full of fire. And he is committed to an issue that can define the Democrats (as well as save the world).

Apparently, and understandably, he doesn't want to go through the nightmare of a campaign again. (Remember how the media shamelessly bought into the Republican lie that he was a liar, and this when running against The Great Prevaricator?) So, what can we do to persuade him that Democrats and independents — and maybe even a couple of Republicans — will vote for him and will work for him?

(FWIW, I've taken the domains www.GoAlGore.org and www.GoAlGore.com. I just registered them this morning and there's nothing there yet. I don't have any good ideas about what to do with them — it was a $18 impulse purchase. If you have an idea for how to use them constructively, let me know and you can have them...) [Tags: al_gore politics]

Why Bush won

Completely unfair, but not untrue. Also, funny. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.) [Tags: bush kerry politics]

Three-column CSS success (and a challenge)

If you checked my blog this morning (Boston time) you might have thought your browsing was flaky because columns were strewn hither and yon. Then, if you bothered to reload, they'd be re-strewn in random ways. Sorry. I was working out the kinks in my CSS layout.

But I've finally gotten it just about exactly where I want it: Three columns of equal length, with the middle resizable, and colors flush from one margin to another. Plus it seems to work as well in IE as in Firefox. It took many many many hours of work and the unstinting help of some generous readers, but it all came together when I discovered an obscure CSS capability. It's called a table.

Ok, so I'm being a jerk. Using a table - an information structure - as a layout tool is the anti-CSS. But after breaking this page pretty badly this morning, and after losing another couple of hours of work time just trying to get it back to basic functionality, I gave in and gave up on CSS. For now. Despite the truly generous help of readers, I could not get it to work. The closest I came was to have a pretty good version in Firefox that, nevertheless, had infinite columns running past the footer. And I never got it to work simultaneously in IE, despite trying untold combinations.

I do understand why CSS is the right way to go. I spent most of the late '80s proselytizing for Interleaf, an innovator in structured editing and declarative markup. I wrote a book on using Lisp to manage structured documents. I was one of the founders of SGML Open (now OASIS). I wouldn't be caught dead hitting the Enter key twice to separate paragraphs in Word. I'm no expert, but I grasp the basic argument and believe in it. But I couldn't get CSS to do what I want. It defeated me, to my embarrassment. And if someone wants to do the job right for me, I will not only thank them, I will give her a gift or donate more than that to a charity we agree on. (Talk to me beforehand so we agree about how much I'm paying.)

Here's what I mean by "right":

3 column layout, with columns of equal length that size to the longest column. (Compromise: The middle column inevitably is the longest.)

A header and footer, centered

The columns are colored as on this page and touch at the margins

The center column's width resizes when the user resizes the window

The "table" is centered on the page

8px padding

The user can swap in 4 different stylesheets (as per the "Colorblind" option on my home page)

The user can toggle the sidebars on and off

The styles are as on my home page

Oversize elements in the center column don't break the layout

It works in IE, Firefox, Opera, et al.

That is, "works" means that it looks like my current home page in the standard browsers and doesn't break under normal use.

Until then, I am beaten and humiliated.

[harvard] Victor Pérez-Diaz

Víctor Pérez-Díaz of Harvard's Center for European Studies is talking about his paper, Markets as Conversations. He is the author of 30 books, most recently several on civil society. [As always, I am at best paraphrasing.]

He says the most important part of this paper are sections 3 and 4 where he interprets markets as conversations. These conversations generally are implicit and non-verbal, but they help to shape the public sphere, politics and policy. [I'm sitting behind him and can hear him only intermittently.]

Emma Rothchild responds after Pérez-Diaz's summary. She looks at various historic reactions to markets. [ I can pretty well hear her, but I'm missing some still.]

The word "market," she says, was quite concrete in the 18th century, so stopping a market was a very concrete action: Preventing a person from taking produce for sale, e.g. Arthur Young [I'm getting this name embarrassingly wrong] she says has a diatribe against the French peasant who walked for days to sell a dozen eggs at market. The peasant isn't valuing his time, he says. But a Marxist commentator [couldn't hear the name] said that the diatribe misses the mark because the market wasn't just about the transaction. It was also about getting the news and gossip, meeting friends, etc.

She talks about some of the historic worries about markets. Adam Smith was concerned about "corporations", i.e., islands of non-market relationships. Some worried about markets backed by state coercive power. In the 19th C, some wondered if markets made people more passive — people becoming more concerned with trivial matters. She also raises concerns about unequal participation in markets by women, ethnic distinctions, etc. "This takes us to the realm of violence, of national security, of the non-market. Many of us have the sense that that realm is increasing in the past two or three years in Europe. Probably in this country as well."

Perhaps, she says, technology has "prodigiously extended" markets. The anonymity of the Internet goes against some of the positive processes Pérez-Diaz points at. Meanwhile the technologies of persuasion work against market openness, as does the rise of the national security state.

Pérez-Diaz replies that he does not expect the market to solve problems such as universal hatred. And, he says, conversations are very ambiguous. His paper talks about Rilke's characterization of Cezanne's artistic process as a conversation of paint with paint. [It's a lovely passage.]

Q: It's not clear to me if you mean "conversation" as a way of regulating markets or as a characterization of markets. And your notion of protecting the market from politics marks you as of a particular generation of social thinkers. I think we need to protect politics from the market.
A: I don't mean conversations as the talk around the market that regulates it. And politics and markets are interconnected.

Q: Markets are limited even when they're at their best. Market conversations are about anything that's for sale. But we don't want everything to be sale, and we want to have conversations also about things are not for sale.
A: (He explains that that's not what he meant.)

Q: I worry about the overuse of the term "conversation." And I'm not as optimistic as you.
A: [I couldn't hear. Plus I have to leave. Damn.]

[It seems to me that not only are markets conversations (thank you, Doc), but the Internet is erasing the distinction. When I read reviews at Amazon — a marketplace — written by people who may not have bought the book or people who already bought it elsewhere — the market and the conversation are indistinguishable. Likewise when I use local.yahoo.com and read what people write. Even when I buy a commodity from the lowest possible supplier, there may be reviews on the site or I may have gotten there by engaging in conversations on other sites. Not only are markets conversations in that we're talking with one another, the marketplaces are themselves becoming inseparable from those conversations.]

Sidewalk Neutrality

Bob Frankston has an extended and brilliant piece that wonders what strolling on a sidewalk would be like if it were managed with the same logic the telcos use to justify Net discrimination. [Tags: net_neutrality bob_frankston digital_rights]

Markets are conversations - Non-Cluetrain edition

I'm going to a talk today by Victor Pérez-Diaz called "Markets as Conversations." It's being held at Harvard's Center for European Studies, 12:15-2pm in the Cabot Room at 27 Kirkland Street in Cambridge. The paper of the same name is about how markets influence politics, culture and society. Looks fascinating and I'm sorry I'll have to leave early for a chat.

From the author's summary:

The points I intend to make here are, basically, three: (a) that markets should be understood, in an ideal-typical manner, as part of a general social order which I refer to by the ancient expression ‘civil society’ (CS); (b) that markets reinforce that order by shaping and influencing culture, politics and society so that they proceed, or function, in a civil manner; and (c) that we may get a better grasp of the way markets act and achieve this effect by developing an understanding of markets as conversations.

...

I develop a view of markets as conversations, that is, as a system of communication (mostly, but not entirely, by non-linguistic means) which works as an educational mechanism shaping people’s habits. In turn, these habits may help them to develop a complex of capacities and dispositions, of civil and civic virtues, which we can bracket together under the rubric of ‘civility’.

The paper has nothing to do with the Internet and does not mention Cluetrain or Doc. Nevertheless, I'm bringing Prof. Pérez-Diaz a copy of the book ;) [Tags: cluetrain victor_perez-diaz markets philosophy habermas]

Weekly World News breaks my heart

In my many years of relying on The Weekly World News to bring me the stories others fear to report — "Boxer knocks opponent into last century," "Couple fall in love when they meet in tornado," "Carpal tuna syndrome" — I was distressed to read a small-print notification on the bottom of page two:

Weekly World News articles are drawn from different sources and most are fictitious. Weekly World News uses invented names in many of its stories, except in cases where public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental. The reader should suspend belief for the sake of enjoyment.

Damn lawyers!

Besides, aren't we supposed to suspend disbelief? [Tags: weekly_world_news news media humor tuna batboy alien ed_anger]

Unlocking the secret of invisibility

In this new theory, which is from that used on modern "stealth" bombers, which bounce radar off their surfaces so they cannot be seen, an object would be encased in a shell of metamaterials and they would create an illusion akin to a mirage, said David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on a second report, which also appears in the latest Science journal.

"Think of space as a woven cloth," Schurig said. "Imagine making a hole in the cloth by inserting a pointed object between the threads without tearing them."

The light, or microwaves, or radar would travel along the threads of the cloth, ending up behind the object without having touched it. - Xinhuanet

So, boring turns out to be the secret to invisibility in both the material and online worlds...

Unfortunately, being interesting does not guarantee visibility in the online one.

Blackberry USB charging - Annoyance #412

My new Blackberry 8700c can be charged via a plain old USB cable attached to a PC. Yay! But unless you install the 35MB of Blackberry desktop software onto your laptop, the device rejects the charge. Boo!

I'm guessing that the software somehow regulates the voltage going out of the USB port, which I suppose is reasonable. It's too bad Blackberry won't allow you to choose to risk it in case of emergency. And it's too bad Blackberry won't let you download a small file rather than the 35MB monster for when, say, you're away for Memorial Day Weekend and only have a dial-up connection.

[Note to potential burglars: While we're away, Chuck Norris is staying in our house, and he's coming down off a sugar high so you do not want to mess with him.] [Tags: whines blackberry chuck_norris]

Fessing up

When I was about five years old, Miss Francis of Ding Dong School showed a drawing I'd made of a fawn, among the set of drawings children submitted every day.

I'd made that drawing by tracing a picture on the show Winky Dink — a show that assumed you'd bought their protective plastic coversheet for your TV screen so you could draw right on it.

My earliest media lesson therefore: If you want to violate copyright, first you have to copy right.

Now vee may perhaps to begin? [Tags: tv copyright]

It's not a war

"President Bush says, just as the United States persevered and ultimately won the Cold War against communism, America will emerge victorious in the war on terror"

This is a dangerously bad comparison...part and parcel of the overall flight-suit version of the "war on terror." Unless, of course, we want to extend the comparison with the war against communism and say that, just as there are still communists and communist nations, there will always be people willing to use the tactic of terrorism against us. And if that's the case, fighting those who would kill us will never be enough.

The way to lasting safety ultimately is through peace. IMO. [Tags: politics terrorism peace]

Psychology of game AI

I'm sure people have studied this already and that some work is already well-known, but I think it'd be interesting to investigate the principles game designers use when creating AI for characters to see if we can learn anything about human psychology at the theoretical level. Game designers aren't trying to model human intelligence; they just want to not have enemies be sitting ducks who don't notice when the character next to them takes one to the head. Given the designers' extreme utilitarian and behavioral intentions, what can we learn about human psychology? Quite possibly nothing, but it'd be fun to learn about. [Tags: games psychology ai]

Bloggers need not apply

Denise weighs in on the NYT story on blogs being held against job applicants. (She points to the Slashdotting of the story.)

Jeez, do we need a norm of understanding, which isn't possible without a norm of forgiveness. And we'll have 'em. It'll just take time. [Tags: denise_howell blogs media]

Me again

Brian Oberkirch has posted a podcast interview he did with me last week at Syndicate. We talked mainly about the way in which many things are miscellaneous, I believe. [Tags: brian_oberkirch everything_is_miscellaneous podcast syndicate]

Day of out(r)age video

Andy Carvin has posted video he shot for Rocketboom of the telco protests outside the Mass. State House. [Tags: telco digital_rights politics andy_carvin]

This page is broken in IE

My switch from a tables-based layout to CSS has worked pretty well in Firefox but in Internet Explorer 6.0 the entire right-hand column is missingpushed down the page. Hmm. I'm stumped. But it doesn't take much to stump me.

[Note: The following problem was fixed, thanks to Yaron's comment, below.] Plus, in both Firefox and IE, clicking on the "archive" or "search" link right below the "Colorblind?" style links causes something very unpleasant to happen. Here's a the default css style sheet.

I know I'm doing something obviously dumb, but it's just not obvious to me. That's the thing about what's obviously dumb - the dumbness consists of the fact that the obvious isn't.

New issue of WordWays

The print-only journal for crazed logophiles, WordWays, has a new issue out. In it are such delights as:

Jeff Grant updates the explanations of some of the words in his 10x10 word square, which includes the "word" "Alan Browne," an American Bank consultant listed in the 1988-89 Who's Who in America. Sorry, Jeff, it still seems like cheating to me.

Eric Chaikin finds a sentence in Entertainment Weekly that inadvertently contains all the letters of the alphabet in just 61 letters. Thank goodness for Joaquin Phoenix!

Anil invents anacrograms: "Take the initial letter of each word in a common phrase, saying or longer quote, rearrange them and form a word or phrase that summarises or relates to it." He calculates the fequencies of first letters in Dickens, Melville, Twain and Ian Watson.

Mike Keith reports on the results of a program he wrote to arrange the 100 tiles in Scrabble into four 5x5 double word squares (i.e., different words going across and down), using only words accepted in Scrabble. In twenty hours, his computer found 121.

Rex Gooch invents and finds antidextrous words, i.e., a word whose first half contains letters only from the second half of the alphabet, and whose second half contains letters only from the first half. E.g., unsuppliable, unoutspeakable, pronunciable, and sunnyside egg. Examples of ambidextrous words include bladder-snout and ambidextrous itself.

Jeremy Morse analyzes the frequency with which letters are not included in the 25,000 crosswords run in the London Daily Telegraph since 1925.

A Ross Eckler, the editor, has a fun piece on books about words we need or words we don't need. "Blurb" comes from a 1914 book on words we need. "Ucalegon" — "a neighbor whose house is on fire" — is a word from Webster's Second Unabridged that we could probably replace with "Hey, get out of your freaking house! It's on fire!"

WordWays so needs to be a blog! [Tags: wordways linguistics puzzles]

Global Voices voices

Global Voices has produced its first podcast, 17 minutes of voices from around the world. It's an interesting melange, covering lots of places, topics, styles and, well, voices. [Tags: globalVoices gv podcasts]

CSS

Does Joho look today a lot like it looked yesterday? Are your eyes still burning from the greatest concentration of orange outside of the MinuteMaid headquarters? Still headachey from reading posts so narrow your eyes have to trace a zigzag pattern with the turning radius of a 10th Century spiral staircase? Then I've succeeded!

Yes, today's Joho is a faithful simulation of the original, now done in 98% pure CSS! Gone are the nested tables within tables within tables within tables and the "enough exceptions make a rule" mentality.

Now let the breaking of a formerly stable page begin! (And thank you for all the help! You're a nice bunch of folks.) [Tags: css]

Allow me to kick off the growsing. If you click on the "archives" or "Search" link right below where the home page page asks you if you're color blind, in FireFox you get taken to the proper spot on the page but everything above that is cut off. Gone. Not easily brought back. I'm using a simple href=#archives. I didn't see anything on the Web about this. Anyone feel like a little debugging?

I neglected to thank PositionIsEverything where there's a spiffy interactive CSS generator for the CSS code for a page with equal-height columns. Well-done!

Preparing for CSS

I use a bunch of CSS on this page already, but I'm preparing to make the big jump from tables-based layout to using CSS to do the job. Take a look at the source HTML if you want to see why. It's a freaking mess. Or run this page through a validator. It's hopeless.

Making the small change required to make this site more readable on mobile devices requires making huge changes. So, I've spent a few hours translating this page into a non-table-based, CSS-based layout. Thanks to massive copying of templates (thank you, Web!), I've got something up and running that seems to work. (One enhancement I can't figure out how to do: Have the left and right boxes be fixed in their size while allowing the center one to resize as the user resizes the window. I spent a few hours last night failing to get that to work.)

The new page looks like this one, but the cleanup behind the scenes is massive. But I haven't posted it yet because I'm sure it's going to break every way a page can break. I'll try it later tonight, I think, while some of the US time zones are asleep. [Tags: css html]

I'm trying to get my new pgae to pass the w3c xhtml validator I'm down to a mere 15 infractions. They are of two sorts. First, it doesn't like Movable Type's tags. Is there a "loose" DTD somewhere I should be using? If so, what is the exact and precise syntax? Second, it doesn't like dollar signs and spaces embedded in name tags, as MT insists. So, it flags this line:

<a name="<$MTEntryID pad=" id="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>

Suggestions? Or should I just learn to love being an outlaw?

Net neutrality - The video

Day of Telco Outrage

Tomorrow is a day of national outrage about the telecommunication industry's attempt to remake the Internet to suit their own interests. There's a rally in Boston 1:30-2pm in front of the Mass State House, and other rallies in other cities. More info at SaveAccess.org..

[berkman] Jack Goldsmith

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor who wrote Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World with Tim Wu, is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. He comes from studying multi-jurisdictional conflicts. [Note: All quotes are approximate at best. I'm paraphrasing throughout.] The book is a history of why the vision of the Internet as something apart from meatspace governments didn't work out. The book makes three claims, he says:

1. Nations can do a great deal to regulate Internet transactions within their borders. States can do a lot more than people thought.

2. The Internet is becoming bordered by geography, i.e., it's becoming balkanized. Some of the borders come from states applying their laws. But a lot is coming from bottom up pressures, i.e., Internet consumer demand. "This is most obviously true with respect to language." A great deal of the information that people want is about local stuff. Geographic identity technology lets applications know where Internet users are in real space; this has started not because government regulators want it but because advertisers do.

3. This emerging bordered Internet is not a terrible thing. "Obviously, in most respects it's a bad thing in China," although the fact that the Chinese Internet is in Chinese is a good thing for the Chinese (Jack says). The bordered Internet is good for the same reasons federalism is a good thing: You can maximize people's preferences if you allow them to have law at the local level. E.g., France forbids eBay from selling Nazi goods. Among democraciess, the differences in free speech are legitimate. A bordered Internet allows the French to use its own free speech laws, and the alternative would be for the US to impose it's view of free speech on France or vice versa.

Self-governing Internet communities can't flourish without government, he says. E.g., eBay relies on the government, including for fraud control. eBay employess 800-900 fulltime people who work closely with state and local prosecutors to minimize fraud. Without government assistance, eBay would be overrun by fraud. Also: Contract enforcement, postal services, etc. Government sponsored public goods are essential for the fourishing of Internet communities.

One of the lessons of the book is, Jack says, that geography matters and government matters. "The experience of the Internet over the past 10 years is an antidote to the breathless claims of globalization."

Q: How about the segmentation of the Internet outside of democracies?
A: China's deprivation of free speech is a bad thing. But the bordered Internet is good for the Chinese people in the use of the Chinese language and by the relaxed rules on IP. But the bordered Net argument doesn't work as well where citizens don't have control over their government.

Q: Corporate response to this?
A: I have much less of a problem with Google than Yahoo. As far as I can tell, the Chinese people are better off because Google is there. As far as I can tell, no one is made worse off by Google being there. Contrast that with what I think Yahoo is and was doing: To the extent to which a corporation's making money requires turning people over for engaging in political speech...But it's also a fault of the US government.

Q: So you must think the Global Online Freedom Act doesn't have much chance?
A: I haven't followed it since the hearings, but I don't think there's any chance of it passing because it would mean that US companies can't do business in China.

Q: What about issues that can't be controlled by individual governments, e.g., the Internet naming system?
A: Actually, that's an example of something controlled successfully by a single country. Originally people thought ICANN was going to provide private control of the Internet. But it's firmly under the control of governments. US control of it is not sustainable.

Q: [me] You've said a bordered Internet has advantages. The examples of natural clustering — around languages, e.g. — are not controversial. But the ones where it's enforced by law are more so — e.g., French laws about eBay sales. If it's goods for states to have this control, is it an implication that it'd be better if we altered the Internet infrastructure to put in more info to enable more local control, e.g., a copyright bit, author bit, adults-only bit, etc.A: I haven't thought this much. But I suppose if you could increase the degree of control within democracies, that might be an implication. But you'd have to weigh that against the harm done within totalitarian states. But the bordered Internet is a metaphor. Most nations don't care about most of what goes over the Internet. We're talking about the small percentage of neutral between different regulations in demorcacy...or I don't even want to go that far. I'd have to think about it in a discrete context. I guess I don't have an answer to this question. [Hard to capture this. Jack was thinking out loud and an open and frank way. Nice to see.]

A: This book isn't optimistic about what public international law can accomplish. Treaties aren't happening. There are lots of things can't control very well: gambling, pornography. Every new tech has a shock on the government. State authority persists. The state as an institution will survive this revolution because the revolution needs the state. In fact, every communication revolution has strengthened the state.

Q: Amara's law says that first we overestimate the consequences of a new technology and then we ignore the long time consequences. There's a possibility that we'll start seeing each other around the globe as being more like one another than not. It seems to me inevitable that we're becoming more alike. Our interests are necessarily merging if we're to survive. That's my normative statement.
A: Reinhold Niebuhr said that knowledge of difference increases hatred. Every communications revolution has said what you say, but it hasn't worked out. It's impossible to tell which way it's going. Rorty claims that as soon as we see people as humans not as foreigners, we'll cease to have as much conflict. That's the hope of globalization. But I think the opposite is just as possible. I don't know which force is more powerful and I don't think we can say systematically. [Tags: jack_goldsmith globalization tim_wu net_neutrality]

Forced beginnings for mobile devices

Now that I've gotten a Blackberry — a satisfying device so far — I've found just what a drag it is to view JOHO on a tiny screen. To get to the blog posts, you have to scroll through an eternity of left column stuff.

Is there a way in HTML to flag which element should display first on a device? I'd like to be able to specify that the top of the middle column is the best place to start if you're on looking at this page on a tiny screen.

Yes, I could put a name tag such as "start_here" where I want and load the url www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html#start_here. But everyone else would be stuck scrolling through from the beginning when they probably really came for the middle column. So, is there a general solution to this problem? [Tags: html mobiles blackberry]

Last chapter - Beginning of the end

I'm working on the last chapter of my book. I should be done with it in a couple of weeks. Everything I've written is in rough draft, so there's tons still to do. Nevertheless, it has me thinking about what it would be like to wake up and not be writing a book.

I've been mildly obsessive about working on this book for the past 3 years or so, and more so in the past ten months of actual writing. I think of almost nothing else. It is a rich problem set and an interesting writing challenge. I feel privileged to be allowed to think about this stuff. Nevertheless, I do find moments of fear breaking through my usual baseline anxiety: What will I do when I'm not working on this book?

I'm jinxing myself even by talking this way in public. The book isn't done. Must finish book. Must...finish...book... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]

Skype and Chinese censorship

Rebecca and Isaac Mao hold Skype's feet to the fire for partnering with TOM Online in China. TOM censors Skype IM messages.

These are tough issues. I am not convinced that companies should entirely spurn China rather than give in to any measure of censorship. I'd feel differently if I thought a worldwide boycott by tech firms would actually make a difference to the Chinese totalitarian government. But from what little I know (basically what I've read by Rebecca, Isaac, and at the Skype site), TOM seems like an egregiously bad choice, and it would indeed be good to know what the banned list of words is. Some public outrage from Skype would probably make me feel better, although it wouldn't actually do much. [Tags: china rebecca_mackinnon isaac_mao democracy skype]

McCain at the New School

Here's a transcript of John McCain's talk at the New School, where he was jeered and booed.

On the narrowest possible issue — McCain's attitude towards blogging — he makes a little but telling joke. When he was young, he says, he was sure he was right and loved to argue:

All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Ouch! Blogs being teased! He goes on to say "It's funny, now, how less self-assured I feel late in life than I did when I lived in perpetual springtime." Sen. McCain, that means you should feel even more at home in the Blogosphere.

On more important matters, he makes the same point as Gov. Warner: We Americans love to argue, and that's a good thing. But, unlike Warner, he doesn't conclude that therefore no one can know she's right. Instead, he uses it as a way of softening the audience for the statement that he supported the decision to invade Iraq. He rejects three reasons for supporting the war — empire, racism, cheap oil — but doesn't explain why he supported it, other than that he believed "rightly or wrongly, that my country's interests and values required it." Specificity would be really helpful here. It'd also be nice to know whether it was rightly or wrongly. If he believed we were going to be attacked by WMD's, how does he explain the wrongness of his belief?

But this is a commencement address, so he skips that topic in preference for saying we ought to respect the opinions of people with whom we disagree:

Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in – that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature's Creator.

Then he tries to curry some favor by using Darfur as a case that unites us all. We all believe (where "all" means something like "right-thinking Americans"), he says, that "people have a right to be free." He then explicitly rejects relativism as a "a mask for arrogance and selfishness." He says, rather effectively, I think:

All lives are a struggle against selfishness. All my life I've stood a little apart from institutions I willingly joined. It just felt natural to me. But if my life had shared no common purpose, it would not have amounted to much more than eccentricity. There is no honor or happiness in just being strong enough to be left alone. I have spent nearly fifty years in the service of this country and its ideals. I have made many mistakes, and I have many regrets. But I have never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I wasn't grateful for the privilege. That's the benefit of service to a country that is an idea and a cause, a righteous idea and cause. America and her ideals helped spare me from the weaknesses in my own character. And I cannot forget it.

He closes by recounting (again) the story of his relationship with David Ifshin, a Vietnam war protestor who changed his mind about America and became McCain's friend. It's a good story, but it's somehow slightly odd to hear a story about someone else's journey of self-discovery. It's the sort of story speakers usually tell about themselves. Anyway.

This is the type of speech that will, I believe, convince swing voters that they'd rather have McCain as president than someone more ideologically/politically motivated, even if they marginally agree more with the ideologue's positions. Yes, I'm talking about Hillary. Gore, Biden, Warner, Edwards, Oprah, not so much.

And, by the way, I hope the students unwilling to listen to this speech read it now and regret their rudeness. Thirty-five years ago, I probably would have joined them. Now I'd wear a peace symbol, but I'd listen. I'd walk out on a Donald "Abu Ghraib" Rumsfeld commencement address and it beats the hell out of me why Boston College would choose to give an honorary degree to Condi Rice, but if you can't respect McCain enough to listen to him, what does a person who disagrees with you have to do to get you to listen for twenty minutes? Agree with you?

(I am now officially my parents. Sigh.) [Tags: john_mccain politics new_school al_gore mark_warner]

Draft blogging survey

Paul Gillin is preparing a survey of bloggers for a book he's working on about social media. He's looking for comments on a draft of the survey... [Tags: paul_gillin]

Rageboy rants, Ethan contemplates

Two learned, serious friends sorting through the world:

The oft-unraveling RageBoy is raveling like mad. In Spiritual but not Jewish he's on about the connection of New Age thinking and the history of racism. I love the title of his post, making concrete exactly what one who says "spiritual but not religious" is rejecting (where one substitutes the speaker's religion for "Jewish," as appropriate). Since I think "spiritual but not religious" exhibits the Fear of Being Historical that is the basis of so much of the West's self-loathing, it works for me. (There's nothing as pathetic as a culture that loathes itself for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, has a culture ever loathed itself for the right reasons?)

Meanwhile, Ethan recently had a fascinating and detailed post about the languages of the Web now and upcoming. Also not to be missed: Ethan on what the US can learn about Net neutrality from Africa.

[Tags: chris_locke rageboy ethan_zuckerman net_neutrality newage spirituality language web]

Boston BarCamp

<plug>

I'm plugging Boston BarCamp because it sounds like it will be a fun, informative, community-building unconference. So, if you're a geek - or geek camp-follower like me - consider coming out to Monster Worldwide in Maynard, June 3-4.

(I can only be there part of the time, probably Saturday evening through the Sunday. I think I'll hold a session on Everything Is Miscellaneous.)

</plug> [Tags: barcamp conferences boston]

Global warming - Coming soon to a newly-submerged coastal area near you

[Tags: environment politics al_gore film]

Phenotext, genotext, let's call the whole thing off ... Plus Cheap Shot #462

Last week AKMA struggled with the precise meanings of genotext and phenotext. I have no idea what either term means, but there is a certain joy in watching someone as smart and honest as AKMA trying to understand something in public. Before blogging, where would we have had the opportunity to see this?

AKMA writes that he thought that an Eric Idle sketch in which a talk show is conducted in enthusiastic gibberish provided a good example of the distinction between the two terms. (Remember Andy Kaufman's foreign man routine?) And that reminded me of the following unrelated cheap shot:

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself. — John Searle, Intentionality, Introduction, p. x.

The key to meaning is simply that it can be part of the conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of requirement) of my intention that its conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of things required) should themselves be conditions of satisfaction. — Intentionality, p. 28.

Got it?

PS: Congratulations to Nate. [Tags: akma philosophy monty_python]

Around with Shel in 23 days

Shel Israel and Rick Segal are going around the world this August, looking for "companies that may prevail because they are empowering communities of people, rather than attempting to command and control them." But little did they know when they set out on this journey that the biggest treasure of all was right in their own backyard.

(No, that last sentence doesn't make sense. It just seemed like the obvious ending.)

[Tags: shel_israel rick_segal travel]

Over one billion served

In late 2005, the Internet got its one billionth customer. The rumor is that the lucky winner received a lifetime supply of pornographic spam and genuine Nigerian scams. Just like the rest of us.

According to a report from eMarketer, 845M use the Internet "regularly." About 250M households (how many people per household, I wonder) will have broadband this year. Although the US has the most Internet users and broadband households, Asia-Pacific has almost 40% of the world's broadband households. Latin America is growing fastest.

For more details - like why with, say, 2.5 people per household, the total broadband population number seems implausibly high - please send $700 to eMarketer. And then spill the beans about what you find out. [Tags: internet]

Mark Warner's commencement

Gov. Mark Warner has posted the text of his commencement address at Wake Forest University. After some opening comedy (not bad, actually), he focuses first on his theme that America is special because everyone gets a second chance: "Being able to fail, pick yourself up, wipe off the dust, and get back into the game is what is uniquely special about our country." I heard him use the same theme a couple of months ago in a speech, and there's something about it that doesn't work for me, perhaps its assumption that we're all equally in the game.

Then he discusses the need for civil discourse:

Turn on the TV. Listen to the radio. Click on almost any blog. And, you'll see what I'm talking about: personal and partisan attacks, complex issues reduced to easy-to-digest sound bites, and way too much cross-fire and not nearly enough cross talk.

My kneejerk response is, of course, that I don't like seeing blogs being lumped in with the mainstream media. But that's just me being a (knee)jerk since Gov. Warner's point is:

If you remember nothing else of what I say to you today, remember this: No one-no one-in politics has a monopoly on virtue, on patriotism, or most importantly, on the truth.

I of course agree with this. It's what makes me a liberal. But it's precisely what a big chunk of the country doesn't believe. So I'm glad to hear Warner say it. But if he says it in a political context, the next set of questions will be about where he draws the line: He's not a pacifist, so whom is he willing to kill to defend the virtue and truth on which he has no monopoly? Anti-absolutism is admirable, but I'm pretty sure existentialism is not a winning platform in this country. (But jeez it would be fun to hear it discussed seriously.)

Anyway, I liked the commencement address. And I don't envy anyone the task of writing one. [Tags: mark_warner politics]

NSA Q&A

Have questions for the NSA? Here's where to ask them... [Tags: humor]

Wish list to reality

MySociety.org, which runs some of Britain's main non-partisan democratic websites (e.g., TheyWorkForYou, PledgeBank), is asking for proposals for websites that "will give people really tangible benefits in the democractic and/or community aspects of citizen's lives." They'll build the ideas they like. [Tags: politics mysociety democracy]

Businessweek on business blogging

BusinessWeek Online has a two-parter on business blogging that's smart enough to cite Jeneane Sessum, among others. (Part 1 Part 2) [Tags: blogging jeneane_sessum]

When is a tree a metaphor?

Sean Coon muses about how Silly String completes trees. Well, actually, he muses about the shape of language, wrapped in an homage to his felicitously-named mentor, Bill Readings.

I like a lot what Sean says and the people he quotes from. And it makes clear just how un-tree-like is the structure of language. Ferdinad de Saussure, whom Sean quotes, talks about words not as leaves on forking conceptual branches — a picture Aristotle might have liked and that WordNet assumes — but words as standing in distinction from other words. Saussure's view does not resolve into anything like a tree. At least as far as I remember. Likewise, when the British philosopher John Austin says that the word "real" usually doesn't signify some positive quality but merely flags a distinction in mode — we only talk about a real gun if we need to distinguish it from a toy gun, a fake gun carved from soap, or a pretend gun made by pointing a finger — the meaning of "real" does not consist of its position in a tree.

Language, it seems to me, generally lacks the basic properties that make a tree a tree, with the one important exception that sometimes concepts contain other concepts. But there's lots more to trees than that. E.g., a tree structure has a top and bottom. The elements are discrete. Each element hangs from one branch. All the branches signify the same basic relationship. The branches inherit essential characteristics from the branches they're attached to. Branches have essential characteristics. Meanings can be traced and paths can be followed. The organization is neat, not messy. And even the basic notion of containment is a metaphor and way too general: Does "color" contain "red" the way "nation" contains "city" and the way "actor" contains "David Caruso" ? And, by the way, "yard" does not contain "dog" even if your dog is in your yard and "stomach" does not contain "peanut" even if you've just eaten one.

Sean's post doesn't get stuck in the tree metaphor. On the contrary. He uses Silly String to remind us that the tree of language has messy connections among its leaves. He points out that language isn't a single tree, the same for all. He refers usefully to Saussure and Barthes.

So why stick with the tree metaphor at all? It's gotten in the way of understanding for about 2,000 years now. (Porphyry is usually credited with being the first to draw categories in the shape of a tree.) Except in the limited domains where we carefully structure language into a tree, I think we ought to drop it.

I tried to get at this, or at least hint at it, in my reply to Julian Bond's comment on a post of mine a few days ago. Or, as a certain book puts it, everything is miscellaneous...although that phrase by itself is misleading unless we immediately ask: Then why didn't it stay that way?

The door creaking shut

Mitch Ratcliffe posts about yet another threat to our Internet: "Wisconsin Republican F. James Sensenbrenner's draft legislation that would require Internet service providers to deliver records of users' surfing to the federal government." [Tags: digital_rights mitch_ratcliffe]

Funny Digg

EatMyHamster.com is Digg for humor. The site — a living beta — lets users submit funny pages and raise them or lower them on the list. Good idea and well implemented.

The site authors say they're doing to introduce some form of social filtering or groups, to handle the extreme differences in taste in humor. Or maybe some form of categorization and/or tagging. Maybe an entire Dewey Decibellylaff Classification system is in order... [Tags: humor]

Are trees natural?

EirePreneur has a fascinating post on research by the Weizmann Institute of Science that a "tree-like hierarchy...may be a basic underpinning of language."

There's no question in my mind that arranging concepts so that A includes B which includes C is fundamental to how we think. But I'd only call that a tree if C can only hang from one branch. If it can hang from lots of branches simultaneously, we have something way messier and more complex.

From the article about the article:

Mathematically, these concept vectors can go in many directions, and reading the text can be thought of as a tour along paths in the resulting network. The multidimensional concept vectors seem to span a "web of ideas." The scientists' work suggests this network is based on a tree-like hierarchy that may be a basic underpinning of language. The reader or listener can reconstruct the hierarchical structure of a text, and thus the multidimensional space of ideas, in his or her mind to grasp "the author's meaning."

Hard to to tell from this exactly what the research showed. I haven't yet found the original... (Thanks to Lisa Williams for the link.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eirepreneur]

Resolving tags

Yesterday's post about what tags should link to has spurred some really interesting discussion. As a result, I've mocked up a page that has some of the features and properties I'd like. It's where you'd be taken if you clicked on a tag at the bottom of one of my posts. (I use "taxonomy" as my example.) It aggregates all of my posts tagged "taxonomy" and includes pointers to the Wikipedia "taxonomy" article, Flickr photos tagged "taxonomy", and Technorati's aggregation of everyone's posts tagged "taxonomy." One of the advantages of this approach: The page is mine and is (in theory) dynamic, so if Technorati (say) goes out of business, I can change the template and thus not have every page contain a broken link.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to code create such pages automatically. [Tags: tagging tags]

Scissors are conversations

Someone during a break at the Syndicate Conference told me about the Fiskars scissors site where users are engaged in lively conversations about scissors! Scissors! I would have said that a commodity like scissors would not develop enough interest to support this type of thing. But I would have been wrong. [Tags: marketing fiskars]

Open namespaces for tags

Some people, including me, feel awkward about using Technorati as the namespace for our tags. (The namespace is the place that your tags link to.) I use Technorati not because — disclosure — I am on their board of advisors but because I mistakenly thought I had to if I wanted my tags indexed by Technorati. Nope. Even if you link to some other site, Technorati will index your tags.

So, what other namespaces are there? I asked Dave Sifry and he suggested Wikipedia as an obvious choice. That would mean that the tags at the end of your article would link to the Wikipedia article by that name. I've done that with the tags for this post, so if you click on the tag "tagging," it takes you to the Wikipedia entry on tagging. Normally, my tags take you to the Technorati page that aggregates other pages tagged with that tag.

E.g., Instead of <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/tagging" rel="tag"> tagging</a> I'm using, <a href="http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/tagging" rel="tag"> tagging</a>

Of course, where there is no Wikipedia entry, e.g., "everything is miscellaneous," you get a broken link.

So, shouldn't there be a non-vendor, open site that can serve as a namespace? But what would that site do with the tags it's aggregating? And what would it take for it to aggregate those tags? Wouldn't it have to have Technorati's infrastructure? In other words, wouldn't you have to rebuild Technorati?

I happen to be a fan of Technorati (and not because of my relationship to the company). I know and trust Dave Sifry. But there's always a risk to counting on a particular company to be a continuing part of your own infrastructure. If Technorati goes under, or gets bought and becomes evil, I have several years of posts pointing at it. Plus, I actually like the tag services Technorati provides. So, I'm not sure what to do... [Tags: tags technorati taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

[syndicate] Richard Edelman

Richard is head of Edelman PR, the third largest PR agency in the world. [Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, reporting to Richard.] Eric Norlin is interviewing him. (Robert Scoble bowed out because his mother is ill. Best wishes, Robert.)

[Josh Hallet has posted the audio of the this session.]

Q: Why are you pitching bloggers without reading them?

A: On behalf of the PR field, I apologize. There's a better way. If not, bloggers will revolt.

Q: What's different about Edelman?

A: We try to be a good example. We don't always succeed.

Q: So, how would you pitch Robert Scoble?

A: You'd probably send him an email saying that you saw something he wrote, that you represent a company, would you like a sample without any strings attached? Would you like to get info about this company in the future? Permission based!

Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?

A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We're saying that if you want to be credible, you can't control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.

Q: If your product doesn't suck, why do companies worry? It's like 7th graders on the playground.

A: Marketers want to know they're getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can't have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We're saying it's a horizontal conversation, peer to peer. It can turn bad for a company but that's good because you can learn something. We you do media training you learn the message triangle: Always come back to the three same messages. Kerry lost the debates because he was media trained while Bush came across as a regular guy. So, the message triangle is gone from Edelman's lexicon. That you can only communicate three messages is baloney. It's a great opportunity for PR if done properly. If it's message triangles and top down and spin, we'll be flushed down the toilet of history.

Q: Are the ad agencies getting this?

A: Somewhere between panic, fear and nerves. The ad agency world has a huge reservoir of people who know how to make 30 second films. They don't have a model for making money in the new world. The best work being done in ads is being done by younger agencies that don't have an installed capability of doing 30 second ads. The ad guys are terified. It's ruining their revenue model. They should be at this conference, but they're not.

Q: Who reads press releases these days?

A: I had a discussion with _____ [missed it] who said the press release needs reinvention. Add tags to the press release: This is the company description, this is the supporting quote. He said he doesn't want our news judgment because PR companies don't have news judgment.

Q: Plus every company is the leading provider of...

A: It's a word that will go away.

Q: So what replaces press releases?

A: We'll give a set of information with tags, so you'll organize it the way you want. [Sounds like a microformat to me.]

Q: How does a PR agency deal with the fact that a 12 yr old in Australia can break news as quickly as John Markoff of the NY Times? (A Scoble question.)

A: You have to be listening to the voices, and not limited to those you've always thought of as your sources of news. Stories can start with those of little "authority" (in Technorati speak). Second, stories frequently start in the blogosphere; the PR agencies don't generally understand that. The Dove Real Beauty campaign started when Gawker noticed. We're working with Technorati on a system that will work across seven languages — PR agencies willl be able to watch seven languages, real time, for your clients.

Q: Are big clients up on all this?

A: It's a challenge. We're working with having our clients show bloggers their products in advance of launch.

Q: What about Wal-Mart? Did you pay bloggers? [This is not actually what the accusation was. The issue was that some bloggers used pro-Wal-Mart information from Edelman without attributing it to Edelman or Wal-Mart.]

A: No, we did not pay bloggers. We look for bloggers who are positively inclined toward Wal-Mart, our client. Then we try to establish a conversation with them. A guy from our DC office sent a message to bloggers identifying himself as a PR agent and asking whether the bloggers would like more information about what Wal-Mart is doing about health care, etc. That got misrepresented by the NY Times. But: We identified ourselves and our client, told them our interests, and asked if they wanted a conversation. We followed every rule of engagement. It's our right and our responsibility to do precisely this.

Jeff: The NYT requested a standard of bloggers that the NYT doesn't hold to. It wants bloggers to identify where their info came from.

Richard: It would have been better if the bloggers had atttributed that the info had come from us for Wal-Mart. We didn't say "You must mention Wal-Mart's name as the source."

Jeff: Bloggers don't know the rules. They need training.

Richard: We will tell bloggers that they should mention the source.

Eric: What will PR look like in 5 years?

A: PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We'll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don't see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger [hey, that's me!] thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don't see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn't want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the bvalls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)

Q: What's the retraining process at Edelman like?

A: It's not easy. We have 30 people blogging. We probably have 15-20% who are regularly in touch with bloggers. That's pathetic. I have to be tougher about it.

Q: (Audience) A blogger got sued by an ad agency, who then dropped the suit. Is it a good idea to sue bloggers.

A: No.

Q: Are you modeling the topology of the blogosphere?

A: There isn't a model yet.

Q: Is PR getting smarter by looking at how groups interact, etc.

A: PR agencies are getting slammed for bad behavior, as they should.

Q: Who among the consumer brands get this best?

A: Unilever gets it.

Q: Who's the best publisher - newspaper, magazine, etc.?

A: Washingtonpost.com is interesting.

Q: Do you advise clients to do executive blogs?

A: If the executive has an interesting voice.

Eric ends it by having a moment of silence for Robert Scoble and his mom. Amen. [Tags: pr richard_edelman syndicate]

[syndicate] Jeff Jarvis: The UnKeynote

"Conferences suck..." is Jeff's opening slide at his opening keynote at Syndicate. He's going to let us talk about what we want to talk about. But for this we have to figure out what we mean by "syndication." He gives us three choices. Syndication is about: 1. Media; 2. Media; 3. 3. Technology. We choose money and syndication as our topic.

Jeff kicks it off. RSS is a great way of distributing stuff, he says. To monetize RSS, we need metrics: How many views, how many users, etc. Bittorrent has put a wrapper on torrents so they can be sold. Can we put a similar wrapper on feeds, Jeff asks. He also talks about an open source ad marketplace for blogs that he wrote about in AdAge last week. Advertisers want to advertise through blogs. For this we need metrics and a marketplace. Next he wonders whether there's a place for paid, subscription-based feeds. Finally, he raises the issue of DRM.

Person: People steal my feed. they put it on their sites. So I put ads in my feed.

Person: If you have an open source ad marketplace and open source metadata, then how about open source algorithms for filtering what we get?

BlogPulse: What kind of data about bloggers do you need? Content? Keywords? Traffic? etc.

Eric Norlin: Marketers don't know what they want because their model is that they capture something about the users and then blast something to them when they don't want it.

Jeff: We could look at who initiates conversations. The demographics of the authors matter...

Doc: You can't measure everything that matters.

Me: The static maps of links that establish "authority" miss the flow of ideas and conversation that may start on low-ranked sites, flow across, up and back. The static maps overemphasize that type of authority.

Jeff: Flickr's "interestingness" works without dealing with popularity (because the nudies would always be the most popular). Instead Flickr looks at the social relationships — especially when people look at photos outside of their social group. Not the wisdom of the crowd but the taste of the crowd.

Scott Abel: We should be selective about what we syndicate. I want to make people come to my site where the ads are. I'll syndicate some little things.

Most people in the room provide full text. The guy from USA Today only provides headlines. People in the audience don't like this. USA Today is looking at how to provide full text with ads.

Jeff: We want to be able to subscribe to a tag within a blog. jeff talks about Edgeio which lets you tag an item for sale, or a job posting, etc., so you can have a decentralized marketplace. Likewise, we should be able to find restaurant reviews by looking for items tagged "restaurant," "mexico" and "nyc." [How structured does this metadata need to be? Microformats? Semantic Web?]

Person: More metadata on feeds?

Person: Is there info about how many people read feeds only in their aggregator.

Feedburner1: There's no material difference in clickthroughs for full and partial feeds. [Surprising!]

Feedburner2: We provide data on subscribers, views, clicks and a measure of reads.

Jeff: I wish my aggregator would tell me which ones I'm not reading. Also, I'd like temporary feeds: A World Cup feed that dies.

Jeff: I use tags for internal navigation. Others use them to indicate for others what a post is about. I want both. And then I'll be over-tagged like I'm over-bookmarked.

Person: Technorati tags suck. They don't show up.

Dave Sifry (technorati): Sorry! We're not perfect. I'm sorry we missed your tags. Talk with me later...

Person: Why are the same blogs featured on Technorati all the time?

Sifry: If you claim your blog and put in your photo, you should be featured...And about tag spam: Spam only becomes a problem when it has no accountability. One person's Spam is another person's dinner. The key question is whether it's accountable. [No, the question is whether it shows up when I don't want to see it.]

Jeff: How about the machine-generated spam blogs?

Sifry: That's solvable. We'll talk...

Person: There's not enough metadata. Dave Winer doesn't even put titles on his posts, so why do you think people will put tags on their posts?

Person: Technorati doesn't fit in with Delicious, etc...

Me: We need an open source tag namespace innstead of having to use the Technorati url...

Sifry: You are wrong, sir! You can use any namespace you want. [Yay!]

[That is: Instead of <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/sampletag" rel="tag"> sampletag</a> You can use whatever url you want, e.g., <a href="http://www.somewhere.com/sampletag" rel="tag"> sampletag</a>]

Person: Technorati didn't pick up any of my tags...

Sifry: I'll be right there...

[Tags: syndicate jeff_jarvis tags technorati]

Bogus Contest: Punny, content-free headline

Undoubtedly because everything I brought with me, including the inside of a toothpaste tube, got soaked last night as I walked the few blocks from the train station to the Syndicate conference, I woke up this morning with a punny headline in my freshly-rinsed brain. Your job is to come up with a news item for which it would be appropriate:

As always, the prize consists of winning. [Tags: puzzles syndicate]

Headings,meet Tags. Tag, meet Headings

Abby at LibraryThing has a great post about the strengths and weaknesses of tags and professionally-devised subject headings, and why it's helpful to have both, as LibraryThing now does.

As she says, one of the advantages of a taxonomy is that it can capture the difference between Philosophy > History and History > Philosophy, whereas simply having those two tags on an object doesn't tell you enough. Of course, with enough tags and fiercely clever algorithms, it's possible a computer could automagically tell the difference, but the human taxonomizer is likelier to get it right. And, as she says, tagging opens up the possibility of a book being "sort of" a (say) dystopia or "78%" a dystopia (to take Joshua Schachter's example).

We need both. We have both. Let the intertwingling continue! [Tags: taxonomy librarything everything_is_miscellaneous tags ]

Puzzle: An apples

Can you find a meaningful, non-weird English sentence that contains the two consecutive words "an apples" without capitalizing "apple" or adding an apostrophe? Hint: It involves a cliché.

The answer is in the firstthird comment. [Tags: puzzles]

Howard Dean does the right thing

David Isenberg blogs that Howard Dean reacted quickly and correctly when alerted that he was on a Board of Directors of a group that was part of a Bell campaign that looks like it's all about Net neutrality when it's really about preserving the incumbent's privileged position.

Thank you, Dr. Dean. [Tags: howard_dean net_neutrality politics democrats]

Beyond Broadcast bloggery

After being away all weekend, I'm just catching up...before heading off for a day at Syndicate. First off, Ethan did some of his usual worldclass conference blogging of the Beyond Broadcast shindig. Items tagged by participants can be found at del.icio.us. Here are the flickred photos. And here are some more links, taken straight from Amanda Michel at the Berkman Center:

Jessica Duda at Beyond Broadcast overviews panel focusing on new tools for public broadcasters.

Barbara Abrash at Beyond Broadcast reviews The War Tapes.

Andy Carvin gives the stats on college students' Internet use.

Andy Carvin paraphrases Brendan Greeley of Open Source Radio.

[Tags: beyondbroadcast media]

Beyond Broadcast podcast interviews

Jennie Attiyeh's ThoughtCast site has a bunch of interviews with participants at the Beyond Broadcast conference I missed this weekend. (I was at a World Resources Institute offsite to work on communications strategies. Fascinating group of people and they're working on one of the most important issues on earth. I was thrilled to be included, but sorry to miss the BB conference.) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast thoughtcast jennie_attiyeh wri]

Metapedia

Does anyone have any examples of a metapedia, i.e., an aggregation of entries from Wikipedia around a particular topic, possibly with additional original or linked content? (The sites that merely republish Wikipedia content in its entirety don't count.) Thanks.

Serendipitotally

Steven Johnson takes on those who complain we lose serendipity on the Web. I'm with him 100%. Even if you only go to carefully curated sites that you carefully choose, you are always one link away from the serendipitous. In fact, it takes super-human will power to get from A to B on the Web without first getting sidetracked to C,M,R, C again and then a site with photos of obscene carved pencils.

I think of the Web as an enormous distraction engine, and I share Steven's frustration with this serendipity meme that will not die. [Tags: serendipity steven_johnson everything_is_miscellaneous]

Species are miscellaneous

In a day that would have shocked people just a few centuries ago — but, then, what day these days wouldn't? — not only was the first polar-grizzly hybrid confirmed, but the first new genus for an African primate in 83 years was created. The Tanzanian monkey, the kipjuni, is now part of the genus Rungweebus, named after the mountain where it was found. At first scientists thought it was a mangabey but they've decided it's more closely related to the baboon even though it's anatomically different. The reclassification was cinched when scientists discovered it shoots laser beams from its eyes. (All according to the AP.) [Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

Beyond Broadcast

Berkman is holding what promises to be a great conference, called "Beyond Broadcast" today and tomorrow. The webcast is here, Second Life is here, the question submitting tool is here. (I'm really unhappy that I'm on the road and can't attend in any of these forms!) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast media]

Camp Jabberwocky sunders

In a remarkably sad story, Camp Jabberwocky (posts here here and here) — the Martha's Vineyard miracle of a camp for the severely disabled — has been split in two. Most of the campers and counselors are going to a new camp on Nantucket. The issue that split the camp sounds hardly worth it: Whether counselors can have a beer or a glass of wine after hours. But it was just the proxy for far deeper, Shakespearean conflicts.

May both their houses flourish, although I suspect the magic has moved to Nantucket. [Tags: jabberwocky cp]

Colonoscopy - More than you want to know...or see

I had my first colonoscopy today. They didn't find anything, except a piece of fruitcake I ate in 1978. But I figured if Katie Couric can show her colon on national TV to encourage people to get checked, then I can talk about mine.

In colonoscopy, they stick a garden hose up your ass and take a peek. Your are narcotized into an odd and enjoyable state of semi-awareness. The after-effects of the procedure are gassiness — one of the benefits is that for a couple of hours you can claim your farts are therapeutic — and wooziness from the anesthesia. Your butt is surprisingly unsore.

If they find polyps, they'll biopsy them on the spot and make you wait at home for 7-10 days to find out if you have colon cancer. You probably don't. The biopsies can cause a little bleeding, apparently. (I was polyp free.)

The difficult part of the procedure is the prep. They gave me an early morning appointment because I'm diabetic. So, I stopped eating on Monday night. Through Tuesday, I could only have clear liquids, jello, etc. (Because of the diabetes, I didn't eat anything with sugar. Non-diabetics can have sugary liquids.) Tuesday afternoon, I started drinking a gallon of electrolytes flavored with CountryTime Lemonade. It tastes like lemony sweat. You drink a glass every ten minutes for about four hours. Not a lot of fun. But it does flush you clean. By the end, you're pooping lemonade.

By midnight of the night before, you stop drinking even water. So, by the time you show up for the procedure, you haven't eaten in 36 hours.

The prep in the hospital is much like what happens before you go in for surgery: You sign a form allowing doctors to do whatever they want to you, including use you for BB gun practice. You get an IV inserted, chat with the exceptionally pleasant staff at Harvard Pilgrim in Kenmore, Boston, and make the same really bad poop 'n' tush jokes that everyone before you has made. (They ought to just print them up and save us the trouble.) The whole process really isn't that bad. In fact, the anesthetic is sort of fun.

So, if your doctor recommends a colonoscopy, and if your health plan pays for one, do it. Except for the fasting, it's not a big deal. And it sure beats colon cancer.

Violating the principle of Gut Neutrality,
a Disney bit elbows aside amateur bits.

(By the way, the background of that shot is just a random colon snapshot I found on the Web.) [Tags: colonoscopy healthy net_neutrality too_much_information] (On march 11, I did a little cleanup of this post which I'd written while groggy from anesthetics.)

Bar Camp comes to Boston

Bar Camp, which the organizers insist is pronounced "Bah Camp," is coming to Boston — well, Maynard, actually — June 3-4. Bar Camp is a sleep-over for geeks (and for admirers of geeks such as moi). The time is unstructured and the schedule is made up by the attendees. Dress is business casual. (Just kidding.)

Bar camp was invented as a response to Foo camp. Foo camp is O'Reilly Publishing's "Friends Of O'Reilly" sleep-over that I so much enjoy. Because Foo is by invitation — there's limited space in the O'Reilly back yard — Bar was created to be open to all.

If you're in New England and like the smell of unshowered geeks in the morning, Boston Bar is the place to be.

[Tags: bar_camp geeks]

The phone call that saved the Internet

If you're an American, call your representatives. Now. Urge congresspeople to support Ed Markey's amendment. Urge senators to support the Snowe/Dorgan Internet Freedom bill. The future generations will thank you. (You remember the future generations, don't you? They're the ones that will be paying off the Bush debt.) [Tags: net_neutrality digital_rights]

One Web Day - The Meetup!

OneWebDay — Earth Day for the Web — is having an organizational and social meetup tonight at 7pm at John Harvard's Brew House (33 Dunster St., Cambridge, MA) at 7pm. Susan Crawford herself will be there. A $10 donation will help cover the costs of appetizers, dinner and drinks.

I'm kicking myself that I can't go because of a scheduling conflict that I can't reschedule or unconflict. Damn! [Disclosure: I'm on OWD's board.] [Tags: onewebday susan_crawford]

Attention shoppers!

Nicholas Carr at RoughType sorts through the Dyson/Cerf exchange on how much economy is in the attention economy. [Tags: attention nicholars_carr esther_dyson vint_cerf]

Vonage going public

One of the things I like about American business processes is the merciless confessional process companies go through as they do an initial public offering. Vonage is stripping itself naked right now. Among the risk factors: It's losing money at an increasing rate as it buys ads to gain marketshare - It's got 1.6M users. It's in violation of the E-911 regulation (which does not fit easily on VOIP providers). Vonage chairman and founder settled with the SEC over fraud accusations at his previous company; he will own 33% of the outstanding common stock. Plus, of course, Vonage could be wiped off the board if carriers are allowed to violate Net neutrality by charging more for Vonage's VOIP bits than for their own. (There's also stuff at the top of p, 20 about the dilution of common stock. Is that usual?)

Vonage is enabling its early customers to participate in the IPO, which is nice of them. I'm eligible, but won't participate: I'm a happy Vonage customer but I almost never buy stocks. (I should perhaps note that a blog post from a couple of years ago about Vonage continues to attract comments about how awful Vonage's customer service is. I personally have no complaints.) [Tags: vonage ipo voip net_neutrality]

Cousins reunion

I'm off to NYC for a cousin's reunion. I'll be seeing relatives I haven't seen in over 30 years in some cases, which means the last time we met, they were just starting to date. (No, not each other.) We're meeting at a restaurant for a few hours this afternoon.

I'm hopeful that my weeks ot practicing dropping the phrase "As I was saying to Their Majesties -Surely you know the Duke and Duchess? ..." will pay off. Also, I am now able to hold my gut in for 1.5 hours at a time, which means I just have to schedule one bathroom break when I can unzip my pants and exhale. Also, I've been getting quite disdainful looks from various waiters around town, so my supercilious eyebrow arching seems to be having an effect. Unfortunately, my toupee is late arriving from Amazon, so it looks like I'll have to keep my top hat on the entire time.

Wish me luck!

Descartes' Baby

I just read Descartes' Baby by Paul Bloom and found it fascinating and annoying simultaneously.

Bloom is a psychologist who argues for "intuitive dualism." The fascinating parts are the many experiments he cites that show babies are more sophisticated than we usually give them credit for. At a very early age, babies are aware of the constancy of objects, that appearances may be deceptive, and that other people may hold false beliefs.

The annoying part is what Bloom makes of this. Bloom thinks those experiments obviously show babies are dualists because they distinguish objects from belief-holding humans. But Cartesian dualism isn't simply the belief that there's a difference between people and objects. We were making that distinction before Descartes. Cartesian dualism consists of conceiving of the mental and the physical as so distinct and different that it doesn't seem the two could ever even interact. And that's not a distinction babies make.

From the fact that babies seem universally (although I suspect most of the experiments were done on babies born into Western culture) to be aware that there's a difference between faces and balls, that they are aware that the faces may have false beliefs, and that the faces care about what happens to them, Bloom jumps to conclusions.

First, he thinks Cartesian dualism is a natural outgrowth of baby dualism. But baby dualism isn't even necessary dual. I can believe that you are different from a log because you are aware of and care about your world without thinking that you are made of two types of substance. For example, I can believe fish are different from birds without attributing to fish two substances, animality and swiminess. Getting to Descartes requires abstracting and fragmenting our experience in ways that babies don't, many non-Western cultures don't, and our culture didn't before Descartes. I don't think Bloom has shown much more than that babies are aware that logs don't think and feel, but people do. That isn't Descartes. It's not even dualism in any interesting sense.

Bloom seems precise when dealing with baby psychology. He's not so good when he heads into art, religion and philosophy, which constitutes the bulk of the book. His explanation of why we can be moved by "anxious objects" — edgy art such as Warhol's Brillo boxes, pure white paintings, a real dead horse — is prosaic and oddly disconnected from the dualism that his book is about. He goes through the predictable reasons we like art — it pleases the eye, we look smart by valuing difficult art, etc. — and then comes back to the special case of anxious art. And what he says is distinctly wrong about anxious art:

We still have not fully explained why some of us like anxious objects.

In appreciation of these artworks all of the ingredients of pleasure discussed earlier come into play, but there is at least one more that we have not yet discussed: we enjoy displays of skill, of virtuosity, both physical and intellectual.

Ok, but anxious art can share that feature with the least anxious of art — "Look at how realistic those dogs playing poker seem!" — and much anxious art does not seem very accomplished technically. In some cases, that's exactly what makes it anxious. But, Bloom drops this line of thought. He instead concludes that some art we like because we like what it shows — the pleasant view from a hilltop or Mary nursing Jesus. Other art, the more anxious type, we can only like because we're able to see it as more than what it represents. We're able to see the human intention in it. But, again, that's true of all art, not just anxious art. His investigation does not come close to answering the question he raises.

More important, art refutes dualism. As Bloom acknowledges throughout the chapter — belaboring the obvious — we react to objects differently if we know they were created as art. So, here's a physical object that embodies something mental and intentional. The artwork has no inner life, but it can't be understood apart from the intentionality it embodies. Art and all objects we create are inseparably infused with matter and spirit. Monism is far more important to our experience than dualism.

The book is muddled over all, except for the fascinating research on babies scattered throughout. For example, his section on our "natural" belief in intelligent design confirms what I think we all already suspected: Children are "consistently more creationist than their parents." (p. 62). Bloom is careful to say that creationism is not necessarily only for the immature. It is "a natural by-product of a mind evolved to think in terms of goals and intentions." (p.63) Ok. So is animism. So what? How does this help? And what does it have to do with dualism, unless you define it as weakly as Bloom does?

The book suffers from overstatement. He defends essentialism, but so waters it down that it becomes merely the belief that humans think in categories and are capable of assigning an object to a category based on non-visible characteristics. Wow, that is so not what essentialism is. He knows this, too, contrasting it with Plato's and Aristotle's view of essences as eternal, immutable types. He argues against that strong view because it leads to evils such as racism (51). But racism can follow from the "essentialism lite" that Bloom propounds. Both types of essentialism say that there is a real way a thing should be categorized. Plato and Aristotle happened to think that that real way is eternal and immutable. Bloom thinks that the real category "is clear once we consider again what concepts are for. Tomato is a good category, because once you know something is a tomato, you know things about it, including that it is good to eat." (41) So suppose a lite essentialist believed that dark-skinned humans have the mental and spiritual capacity of cattle. The problem with racism isn't that it is based on eternal and immutable categories. The problem with racism is that it's based on false facts and the false categorization that follows from them.

Besides, what Bloom calls essentialism lite just isn't essentialism. Essentialism implies that there are clean lines between things and clear criteria for deciding what they are. Neither is true in the world of tiny, purple, winter, hybrid, genetically-engineered, insect resistant, square-cornered-for-easy-packing tomato-cantaloupes.

Nevertheless, the book is full of interesting ideas, historical references, and an open-minded back and forth on the issues. It's fun to read and exceptionally engagingly written. It just doesn't hold together. At least for me. [Tags: descartes descartes_baby paul_bloom books taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous psychology]

AKMA replies. I can addres part of his concern: I didn't mean to imply that art is distinctive in its fusion of matter and intentionality. The same is true for all our artifacts. Not did I mean to say that to understand an artwork is to understand the artist's intentions; rather, to take it as an artwork one must see that it was created intentionally. Bad writing on my part. But AKMA's point is broader and more important than that.

West Point - Defender of Free Speech

The Army has warned an anti-war group called West Point Graduates Against the War to stop using the words "West Point" in its name, saying it is a violation of a registered trademark. — AP

Dear Mom and Pop,

Today was a typical day here at the Academy™. Thursdays are light days academically — I have a Lit seminar and not much else. We're reading Death of a Salesman®. Willy Loman^sm is so depressing! Our prof spent thirty minutes explaining why his saying "You gotta know the territory"™ is ironic because Loman^sm doesn't know his own family. He must think our heads are made of 100% Wisconsin Cheddar™!

Anyway, that was only an hour and a half seminar. Then we got to go on the rifle range. Dad, I think you're just wrong about the M-16™. It's a heck of a sweet shot.

Then me and my new plebe™ friend, Tad, went and had hot gay sex in the shower. ("Don't ask, don't tell,"© wink wink.) We started in the West Point™ Back Saddle^sm position, with me on bottom, and then we flipped over into the West Point™ Truckdriver^sm position, which is one of my favorites. Then he took his enormous West Point™ and gently rubbed the base of my West Point™ until he got to my West Point™, and before you know it, there was West Point™ all over the place!

So, over all I'm enjoying this man's army™, and am sure glad it's not an Army™ of One® :)

PS: I could not find a trademark notice on the West Point site. [Tags: army west_point free_speech copyright copyleft politics]

Messy podcast

The podcast of my "Web of Ideas" session at the Berkman Center on messiness as a virtue is now available. It's a long 'un and more of a lecture than usual.

My topic wasn't why you really should tidy up your office. (You know you should.) It's about knowledge and why we have thought neatness is a sign of a proper understanding of a topic, why it's good that our mental categories are messy, what Aristotle got wrong, and whether the Semantic Web is too much of a fuss-budget for its own good. [Tags: berkman everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge km semantic_web]

Yeah, StarForce cares a lot about piracy. Sure.

StarForce is one of the most notoriously inept DRM schemes around, famous for taking over and then screwing up people's computers. According to Computer Gaming World, StarForce provided a link to an unprotected copy of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lord, a PC game that is doing extremely well in retail sales even though it ships without copy protection (Yay!). If StarForce were named Soprano, it'd look like a protection racket.

The Galactic Civilizations' attitude toward copy protection is admirable and is likely to result in more sales rather than fewer. [Tags: digital_rights galactic_civilizations starforce drm copyright]

Koslosky on connected healthcare

Bill K is starting a discussion of connected health care, prompted by a presentation hosted by the MIT Enterprise Foundation. [Tags: healthcare bill_koslosky]

Gov. Warner podcasts

Mark Warner, ex-gov of Virginia and a declared undeclared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has put out a 1.37 minute video podcast in which he talks about the importance of technology and getting over the digital divide. You can get it at iTunes, which I like. And I like the fact that he stumbles over a word and they left it in.

But...we're fighting for the life of our Internet right now, and today would have been a perfect day for Gov. Warner — the founder of NexTel — to go beyond an expression of generalized support. Today would have been a perfect day to come out firmly and squarely for Net neutrality.

Maybe tomorrow? The Internet needs champions, Gov. Warner. [Tags: mark_warner politics net_neutrality]

American tollbooth

Since this seems to be Photo Day at Joho, here are two photos that are circulating through email. I know who I got the email from, but I don't know where the photos came from:

Captions anyone? E.g.,

1. Debugging the highway's the new packet collision detection module...
2. The Dept. of Homeland Security introduces the new "Double Quick"™ emergency evacuation procedure
3. Lube - not just to be taken internally any more - JiffyLube

(Thanks to ABW for the email.) [Tags: photos humor tollbooth]

Greatst diorama ever

BradSucks has blogged a terrific Japanese music video that, he points out, seems to have, let's say, inspired the Jack White Coke commercial. Brad has links to the YouTubes of both... [Tags: bradsucks music marketing yuki coke]

What knowledge looks like

I got to talk with Brian D. Farrell, a professor of Biology and Curator in Entomology at Harvard the other day. For my book, I wanted to see the chain of authority that lets us know that this particular beetle is a member of that particular species. Here are some photos:

One of the thousand cabinets housing Harvard's 7+ million specimens. About half are beetles.

One of the drawers

The red labels indicate that the insect is "type specimen," i.e., the reference to which all species identifications point. It's the argument settler. Some of the insects in the collection are almost 150 years.

This drawer has no red-tagged beetles because it was assembled for an exhibit. This drawer, in other words, was assembled based not on taxonomy but interest. But, because of the metadata, the specimens can of course still be found.

More socially useful than Paris Hilton. Prettier, too.

This ledger - one of six - lists what the numbers on the red tags refer to. Without this, the collection is just a pile of dead bugs.

No one part of this system — ranging from pins and red labels to an institutional commitment that's spanned generations — is knowledge. All of it together is.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge entomology harvard ]

Crumpler bag (no longer) for sale

NOTE: Someone has taken the offer. I've sold the bag.

My backpack wore out, so I got myself a Crumpler bag I'd been admiring. It's quite admirable, but you wear it over your shoulder, and I carry too much stuff, plus I have a bad back ("Bad back! Bad!"). It aggravated my back. So, I'm selling the bag.

It's a Crumpler Part and Parcel bag. Crumpler's site is so hip that it's unusable. (That site seems to be down at the moment. Try the original Australian site. Hmm, I'm not getting to that one either. Here's the description at the Palm store.) Plus, Crumpler keeps changing the names of its bags, so it's hard to figure out which is what when. The Part and Parcel is at the higher end of their offerings. It's well padded and this particular one will hold a 15" computer (although apparently not all 15" computers).

I found it hard to find information about the interior of the beast, so here are some photos showing the zippage:

I had the bag for one week. So it looks like how a new bag will look one week after you bought it. Crumpler bags are very well made.

The price at most online stores is pretty consistently $145.00 (sans shipping). I bought it new at eBay for $106.43 + $9.50. Because I'd rather sell it to someone I know than to a stranger at eBay, I'll sell it for US$65.00 + $9.50 shipping to the first person who sends me an email (selfevident.com). This offer is only good for shipping to addresses in the US. And it's only good until tomorrow. After that, it goes up on eBay.

(Note: If today is not May 4 or May 5, 2006, please do not send me an email about this. I am not a Crumpler dealer. This is the only bag I'm selling.) [Tags: crumpler personal_commerce ebay]

We Media conference

The We Media conference is happening now. The BBC is covering it here. [Tags: wemedia]

da Vinci decoded

I read the first page of The Da Vinci Code and didn't like it, so possibly I don't count as a leading expert on the topic. ToTheSource has apparently read the whole thing:

People often ask, "How much of The Da Vinci Code is true?" I wearily answer that Paris is in France, London is in England, and Leonardo da Vinci painted pictures. Let's look at four areas where Dan Brown's history is bunk.

In case you're wondering, the four areas are: Constantine, the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, and da Vinci as a flamboyant homosexual. There's also a sidebar about the guy who made up the stuff about the Priory that, apparently, Dan Brown fell for. [Tags: da_vinci_code]

Replacement Acrobat

Mark Gibbs recommends Foxit Reader, a free, faster replacement for Adobe Acrobat. So far it's working for me... [Tags: adobe acrobat pdf freeware mark_gibbs]

I'm (probably) on Talk of the Nation tomorrow

I may be on NPR's Talk of the Nation call-in show tomorrow at 3pm EDT. The topic has to do with who you are online. (We don't get the 3pm portion here in Boston. But it's Webcast.) [Wednesday morning: Apparently, I'll be on starting at about 3:40pm.] [Tags: full_of_myself tireless_self_promotion]

On the way to voting in town elections tonight - my vote didn't register in the optical scanner so I might as well have not gone - I turned on On Point and there was danah boyd talking about who we are at MySpace. Brilliant as always. (You can listen here.)

[berkman] Lewis Hyde on Fair Use

At Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center Lewis Hyde talks about a Fair Use conference he went to, called "The Comedies of Fair Use." Fair Use is a "carve out" from copyright protection. He says that a Harvard lawyer told him years ago that "Fair Use is a defense, not a right." Among the examples: A documentarian taped a scene on a street when someone's cell phone rang, using a copyrighted ring tone. She ended up paying thousands of dollars to get the right to use that bit of the tape. Lewis passes around a pamphlet (online here) explaining Fair Use to documentarians. (The pamphlet's guidelines suggest that the documentarian shouldn't have paid for the ring tone.)

BTW, the Berkman Center has written up the legal rules around podcasting, in a similar manner.

Derek Bambauer says that "exclusions and omissions" insurance makes it worse. E and O insurance protects a filmmaker from suits alleging copyright violations. One results, says Derek, is that the insurance companies insist on clearing everything, Fair Use or not.

Lewis also recounts an encounter between Joy Garnett and Susan Mieselas. Mieselas took a photo in 1979. Garnett based a painting on the photo's image. Mieselas sent a cease and desist order. Apparently, Mieselas was clearly within her legal rights, but many have sided against her. But, says Lewis, when Mieselas presented her case, it no longer seemed so simple: It was a photo of a Sandinista that she has allowed to be used widely in Nicaragua. The painting, she feels, strips it of that important context, and turns it into a mere image. [Tags: lewis_hyde fair_use copyright digital_rights]

Web of Ideas: Messiness as a virtue

I'm leading another discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center tomorrow (Wednesday), 6-7:30pm. I'm going to talk about the traditional idea that a properly structured organization of knowledge is neat, and why messiness works so well in the digital age. If what I say mirrors Chapter 8 of the book I'm working on, I'll talk about the over-simplicity of org charts, Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, and the "smushy" conception of the Semantic Web. There will be, I hope, a lively discussion that either carefully explains why I'm wrong or entirely swerves around what I'd said.

It's open to all. We serve pizza. (Map) The session will be webcast here. [Tags: berkman taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous rosch semweb]

Interview at Management First

I'm interviewed (via email) about commerce, knowledge management, security and the like over at Management First. [Tags: ecommerce km security]

Let's Impeach the President - The Lyrics

Here are the lyrics to Neil Young's "Let's Impeach the President"

Let's impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He¹s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let¹s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government¹s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let's impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he¹s racking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God

And here's a link to an interview with Neil Young on Showbiz Tonight in which the first question is "You've got a song called 'Let's Impeach the PResident.' What is the song about?"

The Neil Young site is still streaming the entire album. The album in some ways reminds me of John Lennon, who I still miss.

[Tags: bush impeachment neil_young]

State of the blogosphere

Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted part two of his April "State of the Blogosphere" report. [ [Disclosure: I am on Technorati's board of advisors and Dave is a friend.]

Part One said (as per Dave's summary):

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

Part Two dives into the internationality of blogging. Dave writes:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

It also finds that 47% of posts have an author-generated tag or category associated with it — the blogosphere is a nation of metadata monkeys! (And Lor' bless 'em, every one.)19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

[Tags: blogosphere tagging david_sifry technorati]

Abortion and gay marriage in Salvadoran blogs

There's lots of discussion on Salvadoran blogs about that country's highly restrictive abortion laws and the possibility of passing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. As always, Global Voice has the scoop. The GV round-up also points to Chuck Stewart's blog that rounds up (in English) news from and about the region.

GV also reports on the role of Lebanese bloggers in addressing tough issues and building bridges with Israeli bloggers. [Tags: global_voices gv salvador lebanon]