Our new car

[NOTE: Read the note at the bottom of this post where I explain that it was our fault, not the Yaris'. Now we've had it for a few weeks, and we're enjoying it, and it's been trouble-free.]

Our '96 Saturn bit the dust a few days ago. After seriously considering a $4000 Jetta that turned out to need $2200 in work, we bought a brand new Toyota Yaris.

That was yesterday.

This is today:

It intermittently doesn't start. It's as if the battery is dead, except: 1. It starts without problems sometimes; 2. It has failed to start after having been driven for 45 minutes continuously. I'm no car guy, but the intermittency of it bothers me if only because the Gods of Perverseness just about guarantee that it's going to start fine at the dealer's.

It's a manual transmission, so an intermittent failure to start is particularly dangerous: Some of the people in my family have been known to stall in traffic. (Ok, me too.)

I haven't found any serious starting issues discussed on the Web by Yaris owners, so it's likely that this is just one of those problems things put together by humans have. And until it stopped starting (which is preferably to its starting to stop) it was fun to drive, the back seat is roomier than you'd think, and it gets 34 mpg in town and 40 mpg on the highway, if the Feds are to be believed. Not to mention that it's red.

The dealer, Toyota of Watertown, has acted honorably about the whole thing so far. [Tags: cars autos yaris toyota]

It turns out that it was totally our fault. You have to push the clutch waaaaay in for the starter to start. further than you have to push it in to disengage the clutch. What a bunch of schmucks we are. But, the dealer has been kind. I assume they are only mocking us behind our backs.

Greatest Bloody Sunday

Found at Pink Dome thanks to Andy Oram:

Omigod. [Tags: george_bush mashup bloodysunday youtube video broadcast_flag]

You can add your name and good wishes to the virtual birthday card the Republican National Committee is sending to our President on July 6. You'll have to make a campaign contribution first, though. Great idea! That's how I'm going to manage my next birthday!

Kerry blogs to save the Internet

Sen. Kerry blogs about why he opposes the Commerce Committee god-awful Internets bill. Yay.

It's a good post. It doesn't sound like him.

Of course, who knows what John Kerry really sounds like? [Tags: john_kerry net_neutrality blogging]

Pictures as tags

Dan Bricklin does a great job explaining what makes StyleFeeder — just acquired by Top10Sources — especially interesting. Briefly: StyleFeeder lets you grab an image off a page and use it as a tag for remembering the page and for letting others quickly browse. It's designed especially for bookmarking products you're interested in buying, but there are other applications as well.

(You know you're a geek if you assumed "StyleFeeder" was about CSS, not about clothing.) [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous dan_bricklin stylefeeder top10sources tagging ]

How I saved the Internet

Sen. Ron Wyden is going to fillibuster to try to derail Sen. Steven's godawful, sell-it-all-out, death-to-the-Internets telecom bill. Go Sen. Wyden!

By the way, my wife and I are responsible for Wyden getting elected. When we were living in Portland, Oregon for a year, Wyden was running for Congress for the first time. My wife called his office with a question about his platform, and Wyden called her back and talked for about twenty minutes. As a result, we campaigned door to door for him. So you can see why I take responsibility for every good thing Ron Wyden has done as a congressman and then a senator. The bad votes are, of course, his own responsibility.

But seriously, there is a lesson here somewhere. The little effort we put in has been paid back many many times over in the course of the career that we very marginally helped to launch. Totally worth the handful of rainy afternoons we spent leafletting. [Tags: net_neutrality ron_wyden politics internet ted_stevens]

Help me be interesting

AKMA thinks it says something about his family that two weekends ago his family went to see A Prairie Home Companion and this past weekend they saw An Inconvenient Truth.

I can't speak for AKMA's family, but those were the last two movies I saw and, yes, it says everything you need to know about me. I am 100% stereotypical. If you know one thing I believe, you know everything I believe.

So, I'm thinking of developing a quirky belief. Something out of left field, so to speak. Something that will make me memorable and give me something to talk about beyond the usual "I know, and what's even more appalling about 'President' Bush is..."

For conversational purposes, the quirky belief has to have some quirky reason I believe it. I'm thinking about:

Favoring capital punishment. Not for revenge or deterrence but because "a society that can't kill, can't love."

Supporting the Star Wars missile interception program because the R&D might prove crucial in preventing the spread of avian flu: "Imagine a flock of infected swallows flying over our southern border..."

Opposing gay marriage because "homosexual promiscuity is the last reminder that freedom is the joy of sex."

Opposing animal rights because "rights result from verbal contracts, and 'Bow-wow' isn't recognized as a binding contract in any court in the Union."

Supporting nuclear power "because the possibility of melt-downs and the dangers of storing nuclear waste remind us that life is composed of risks both acute and chronic. No place to hide, baby."

Supporting drilling in Alaska as a declaration of our species' commitment to winning The War on the Wilderness.

I'm not saying these make sense. I'm just saying they'd make me interesting. And believe me, I could use some of that.

[Tags: akma politics humor liberals birkenstocks volvos]

Superman: The Tag

In this case, it's a physical tag...a pretty piece of chrome with the Superman logo on it, suitable for wearing around the neck or attaching to keys. It says "Go Forward" on it, a courageous message from a person paralyzed from the neck down.

A set of two costs $10. All the money goes to the Christopher Reeve Foundation.

Disclosure: I'm on a marketing advisory committee for the Foundation and am blatantly shilling for it in this post. [Tags: superman]

Nothing is worse than burning a flag

Torturing prisoners is better than burning a flag.

Crushing our children with debt is better than burning a flag.

Burning up the earth with CO2 is better than burning a flag.

Making America a hated nation is better than burning a flag.

Conclusion: Making it illegal to burn a flag is the single most important issue facing this country...at least now that we've come through the lying-about-adultery Constitutional crisis. [Tags: usa patriotism politics obscene_idiocy]

Me at the CMO Summit

I led a discussion at the Corante Innovative Marketing seminar. Here's a podcast of it. I haven't listened to it. [Tags: marketing corante]

Liz's Pulp

Liz Lawley has come forward with what she' been working on: A library mashup called "personal ubiquitous library project" (PULP...yay for good acronyms!) that harnesses Microsoft Research's AURA project to make it easy to scan in your books. There's lots lots more to it. Sounds great. [Tags: liz_lawley libraries taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

[supernova] More video interviews

More of my interviews of Supernova attendees have been posted, including:

Michael Copps, an FCC Commissioner, talks about whether the four Internet principles have been weakened and his hope for Network neutrality.

Robert Levitan of Pando Networks talks about the role of peer-to-peer in the spread of user-generated video.

Michael Goff of Megalomedia talks about the terrain between blogs and sites.

Axel Schmiegelow of the Denkwerk Group has an early claim to the invention of social bookmarks and tagging. The site is still active: OneView.com

Stan Joosten (part 1 part 2) is a marketing guy at Procter and Gamble who believes the customers are in charge. His issue: How do you have a conversation with 2 billion of them?

Mary Hodder, the founder and CEO of Dabble talks about what we're doing with video and what the network needs to be like to support it.

Dan Shine (part1 part 2) is in charge of AMD's 50x15 program, trying to connect 50% of the world by 2015.

Doug Kaye of Conversations Network has a grand vision in which more and more of public speech is saved in a public place.

Dan Gillmor, the journalist who is now a citizens media advocate, is in a fired-up mood, grabs the mike, and...

Kevin Werbach, Mr. Supernova, talks briefly about how the conference is going, and then ducks away to moderate the last panel.

[Tags: supernova vlogs]

Dewayne Hendricks on one gigabit wifi

Gerry Blackwell writes about Dewayne Hendricks' initiative to deliver one gigabit per second to every citizen wirelessly.Very cool stuff, and way past what we've been led to expect. [Tags: wifi dewayne_hendricks]

Jay sums it up...

...and brings it to a point: The people formerly known as the audience aren't just facing forward on the couch any more. [Tags: media jay_rosen]

A modest proposal

Not only should English be declared the official language of the United States, we ought to make the official language English without an accent. That's how much of an American patriot I am!

(Please check out what "modest proposal" means before flaming me. Thank you.) [Tags: humor immigration]

Jaron Lanier (and me) on Radio Open Source

Christopher Lydon had me on in the final segment of Open Source Radio to talk with Jaron Lanier about his article, "Digital Maoism." I came on after James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds argued with Jaron about whether crowds are ever wise, although there was more agreement than argument. Suroweicki made one of the right points: Jaron focuses on a few examples that Jaron considers to be negative, slighting the importance of collective thinking in top down environments.

Then Ze Frank , the comedian, came on to talk about his experience letting readers write comedy for him on a wiki. He was the most serious and thoughtful of us all, I thought. Damn comedians. (I'm a big Ze Frank fan.)

Then I came on. I'm not happy with how I did. I tried to say that Jaron is warning us of something, but his examples of the danger don't hold up and, even if they did, they are exceptions, not a trend. The article focuses heavily on Wikipedia. But the Web isn't really becoming like Wikipedia, and Wikipedia isn't the result of "hive mind," which I take to mean people who all believe the same thing, just as Maoists supposedly all chant out of the Little Red Book. In truth, Wikipedia results from vigorous conversation (and some rigorous administration, but I left that out), the opposite of hive mind. Not to mention, I don't agree that Wikipedia is an example of what's wrong with the Web. Yes, it's voiceless, but that's appropriate for an encyclopedia, and it is definitely not typical of the Web. Jaron denied that he meant "hive mind" as anything negative — then what is his article about? — and repeatedly went back to his unsupported assertion that anonymity dehumanizes discussions. (I have a cheap suspicion that his animosity towards anonymity has something to do with the fact that Jaron is a highly visible public personality and thus thinks we all should be equally comfortable speaking strongly in public. But we're not all like that.)

BTW, Jaron claimed on-air that his research shows that the more edited a Wikipedia article is, the less accurate it is. I wish I'd said that that research should have been included in "Digital Maoism." It would have made the piece much stronger. I hope he publishes that research now.

And since this is my blog, I'm going to take the opportunity to dispute Jaron's on-air denial that his article is mainly negative about blogging. Here is the substantive paragraph about blogging:

...it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.

If you're going to lob handgrenades, you ought not later claim that the handgrenades were meant only in the best sense.

Clay Shirky's excellent response to Jaron's article is here. You can listen to the Radio Open Source show in its entirety here. I'm afraid to. [Tags: jaron_lanier open_source_radio wikipedia digital_culture ze_frank james_surowiecki]

WSJ notices LibraryThing

The Journal writes up LibraryThing — Del.icio.us for your books — and makes the article available online. [Tags: librarything taxonomy tagging everything_is_miscellaneous]

Fon news

It's a big news day for Fon. (Disclosure: I'm on its board of advisors because I favor Fon's social goal of spreading wifi, particularly in areas that can't afford it; advisors get some stock options.)

Fon is going to heavily subsidize a million routers: You pay $5 and agree to share your wireless connection for a year. If you don't, you keep the router and are charged $45. The new routers are smaller and cuter than most I've seen. Giving them away is a big financial risk, but Fon has to get over the chicken-egg problem somehow. If it works, people will have a good reason to sign up with Fon and to start sharing wifi. If it doesn't, Fon will have gone through a lot of the money it raised a few months ago. (Both Google and Skype invested.)

Other news:

You can now be a "Bill," i.e., someone who shares her Fon connection and receives half of the $3 (or €3) per day charged to those who aren't Linuses, i.e., people who share their Fon connection in exchange for free roaming. A five-day pass is $10. (Bills get half of the $3 after taxes and payment service charges are subtracted.)

There are a whole bunch of new features, some of which are pretty cool, including the ability to see a travel log of where you've been based on the Fon routers you've accessed, and the ability to add personal information to the page that others see; you can also allow people to go to a couple of sites of your choice for free. (I still hope Fon includes mesh networking in the routers because of the potentially transformative effect that could have, overlaying local communities with local Web communities. Maybe someday.)

There's also a South-Parky video of Martin Varsavsky, Fon's founder, explaining Fon.

[Tags: fon wifi]

[supernova] Supernova reflections

1. Supernova attracts a great set of folks. In addition to the usual Web enthusiasts, Supernova gets people in traditional companies genuinely trying to figure out how to apply all this. And we get to hear from them how it's working out, what's just webby hot air and what's truly transformative. I like that a lot, although it means that some ideas you've treasured come out sounding odd. For example, what we create on the Internet comes out as "user-generated content." Ok. It's still thrilling to see companies that five years ago would have thought the idea ridiculous now believe it's going to change the way they build products and talk with their markets.

2. Judging from the line-up of speakers, one of the secret messages of Supernova was that the online organizations that blow the roof off of expectations are the ones that are devoted entirely to their users. I don't mean this in the "We have to focus on our customers" sort of way. I mean it in the CraigsList way. CraigsList doesn't focus on its "customers." It is its customers. Now, not every company can be CraigsList. But every company can be a hell of a lot more like CraigsList.

3. The thing I like least about Supernova is its devotion to the panel format. Panels are how you make interesting people boring. It works like magic! Some panels were better than others, of course, but Supernova would be better if panels, with occasional lectures, were not the only format. E.g., the Wharton workshops day the day before allowed for more interaction and learning.

4. The backchannel (= the IRC) was well attended (see #3) — over 50 people at times — and was flipping hilarious. Omigod there were some funny people on it. It tended more towards humor than the supplementing of knowledge that we like to pretend is the backchannel's point, but there was some of that too. We laughed, we linked, we fell in love, and we made potty jokes.

By the way, I do not like it when backchannel transcripts are published. I say some things that sound way meaner out of the context of the racing river of real time conversation. The rhetoric of a ringing, zinging IRC chat can be that of a roast, and the "all in good fun" spirit gets lost when read after the fact. In other words, I'm sorry, [Tags: supernova]

ThreadsML lives. I.e., it's been obviated.

The Atom feed standard now has an extension that lets an item point to what it's a reply to and what has replied to it. From that metadata an application can reconstruct the thread of a discussion. This is helpful because so far the Internet has not had a good, standard way of capturing its basic molecules of conversation.

This is what ThreadsML tried to do a few years ago when Steve Yost proposed it. ThreadsML wasn't supposed to be tied to a particular feed format, but ThreadsML wasn't going anywhere, and the Atom feed standard will. So: Hooray! (Thanks to Jay Fienberg for the link.) [Tags: threadsml conversations standards steve_yost feeds atom]

News, not news, citizens' news

This morning I admired a front page article, by Bryan Bender, in the Boston Globe:

...a 12-person office to develop quick strategies for combating homemade bombs in Iraq — has quietly expanded into a $3 billion-per-year arm of the Pentagon, with more than 300 employees and thousands of contract workers, according to Pentagon data analyzed by the Globe.

Also on the front page is an article about people who have gone from PDAs back to pen and paper. The article cites the popularity of two sites that offer templates for notepaper (but we don't know how many of the readers ever owned a PDA), an increase in popularity of a particular paper little black book (but not for the black book market overall), and the drop in PDA sales, (which the article correctly attributes to the rise in smartphone sales). "Three people start carrying paper notebooks and blog about it: Unknown number of PDA users appreciate cool paper templates" isn't news; it's just the Globe's paper-based nostalgia. Get used to it. Paper is going the way of the legitimate theater.

So, I was wondering this morning how we're going to keep getting excellent reporting like the first article as newspapers continue their scary economic decline. And along comes Dan Gillmor blogging about News21, a multi-year project involving five universities looking into "the intersection of security and liberty." One piece is a group blog, US Military Abroad, about the group's investigation of the shift in our military presence. There are also project blogs about privacy, immigration, and homeland security's "money trail."

Is this the future of journalism? I don't know. But something is.

[Tags: media newspapers dan_gillmor boston_globe pdas]

Supernova video interviews

The video interviews I did at Supernova are coming on line. Up now are three pages worth:

1. Jan Jannick of imeem; Kevin Marks on Net neutrality; Mitch Ratclliffe on the real costs of building communities; Craig Newmark of CraigsList on goodness.

2. Hans Peter Bordmo of Plum; Lili Cheng, the usability honcho for Microsoft Vista on social computing and the new operating system; Esme Vos, muniwifi activist; Rohit Khare and Tantek Çelik on the first birthday of microformats. (Someday soon we're going to get Rohit's name spelled correctly on the page. Sorry, Rohit!)

3. Kapenda Thomas of jookster; Linda Stanford of IBM on innovation; Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs and Second Life; JP Rangaswami of Dresdner and Kleinwort on why a financial services company is being so progressive about social software.

More are on the way... [Tags: supernova vlogs ]

Drinks on a plane

Least important question of the day:

On my flight out to San Francisco, the woman next to me ordered bloody mary mix and added vodka from a little airline bottle that she'd brought with her. The attendant not so nicely told her that she's not allowed to bring her own alcohol onto the plane.

Can the airlies really do that? Is that legal of them? I say this as someone who's been known to smuggle a box of candy into a movie theater. (And if that turns out to be the reason I burn in Hell for all eternity, I will really kick myself.)

[supernova] Michael Copps

Michael Copps of the FCC has two messages: All is not well in Washington, and we "need to do a lot more about that."

Access to the Internet could reasonably be considered a civil right, he says. The Net is crucial, yet the US is falling in terms of per capita access to broadband. And the FCC counts 200kb as broadband. And if there's a single person with broadband in a zip code, the FCC counts the entire zip code as having access to broadband. He says we're the only industrialized country that has no national strategy for getting the country connected. He suggests that other countries have better competition policies or incentives.

"Let's get the facts, do the research, do the analysis, consider our options" and implement.

"Decentralized end user control is increasingly at risk." "The concentrated providers have the ability to build networks with traffic policies that restrict how you and I use the Internet." Although they say they're not going to do that, but history shows that concerns with the ability and the incentive frequently give it a try, he says.

What's the FCC doing about it? Mixed bag. The FCC has reclassified broadband to information services, not telecommunications. Telecom is supposed to be non-discriminatory, but not info services. Thanks to Copps, the FCC issued a four-point statement of principles for Net users: You can see what you want, use the devices you want, etc. [Yeah, but the new commissioner added footnotes vitiating them. See Isenberg on this.] The providers would invert the architecture, making a smart pipe for dumb users, rather than keeping the architecture open and dumb so smart users can innovate.

Copps talks about the FCC's current deliberations about allowing yet more media consolidation. He wants the deliberations to be opened. The Internet will not halt media consolidation, he says, because it could be heading down the very same road. "The only way you win is to make sure it's not a business as usual process." We should take our story not only to capitol hill but all across America.

I ask him about partnerships and alliances we haven't formed that we should. He responds by talking about coming up with ways of talking about the issue that shows the importance of the issue to all Americans.

(I interviewed Commissioner Copps; it'll be posted on the Supernova vlog site tonight or tomorrow.) [Tags: michael_copps fcc net_neutrality digital_rights supernova ]

[supernova] My video blogs

A bunch of the interviews I did at Supernova are posted on the site, including (in random order): Kevin Marks on Net neutrality, hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, Jann Jennick of imeem, Rohit Kahre and Tantek Ccedil;elik on microformats ... and there seems to be a problem with the page at the moment. More will be posted soon. [Tags: supernova]

[supernova] Join in

The Supernova webcast, podcast, and etcCast are all here.

[supernova] Craig Newmark

Go, Craig!

He begins by saying that he doesn't have the capacity to think in terms of "user generated content." [Did I mention: "Go Craig!"?]

He says CraigsList is a flea market. People go there to buy and sell but also to talk with other people. The only only way the site can run is by counting on people policing the site as much as possible themselves. "People are overwhelmingly trustworthy." As a result of counting on self-policing, trust develops.

He contrasts this with corporations that don't trust their customers. "I work with too many cops now that want me to be feisty. I'd rather have a nap."

"I count on doing customer support only for the rest of my life. After that, it's over.

The wisdom of the crowds works. "We do suffer from the problems of any kind of democracy." The site gets spam, worst being political disinformation. In fact, Craig says he was just "swiftboated."

By way of hope, he points to Dan Gillmor's Center working on understanding citizen journalism and projects such as Congresspedia, a wiki about's who's buying Congress and what's written on the price tag.

He says that in his little world, one of the thing's that's worked is remembering what it's like to be left out, and then include people. [Go, Craig. My hero.] [Tags: supernova craig_newmark craigslist]

[supernova] Jonathan Schwartz

The new CEO of Sun says that some workloads are not outpacing Moore's Law — SAP, CRM, for example — and Sun is not going to chase those applications. Sun wants to find the apps that need more hw. He says 100% of companies want the tech that will let them connect with their customers. So Sun has to pick and choose. The companies that look at IT as a cost center are not as important to Sun as companies that look at IT as a way of growing their business. [Don't tell Nicholas Carr!]

He lists commodity companies: Exxon, Citi Group, Google. Commodities are ok business, if you're able to leverage R&D. [I wish our Net providers would understand the commodity markets can be profitable.]

Kevin: Where do you prioritize your R&D?
Jonathan: For one thing, on making our systems energy and space efficient. Security and provisioning. They are not going to build end-user products. They're going to drive standards. "I'm not worried about demand. I'm worried about intercepting demand."

Kevin: Web 2.0?
Jonathan: It's no longer a read-only Web. [And it never was.] All client devices will be functionally equivalent, distinguished by form factor. Companies can no longer design products from on high. We're putting consumer reviews of our products on our site even if they criticize because I'd rather have them do it in front of us...

Kevin: Last year you said every CEO should have a blog. Not a lot do. Why not?
Jonathan: Five years ago, most CEOs had their admins print out their email. The job of a leader is to communicate.

What's the core R&D for Sun? "The era of custom hardware is on its way out." Make sure that every device that connects to the network can interact with it. [Tags: supernova jonathan_schwartz sun]

Journalism?

Democrats, GOP spar over Iraq war timeline

by Liz Sidoti
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Months before congressional elections, Republicans and Democrats maneuvered for political advantage Wednesday as the Senate debated the Iraq war and the future of 132,000 U.S. troops in the war zone.

What a cynical way to open an article, dismissing all concerns, on all sides, as mere political maneuvering.

Is this reporting?

[Tags: media]

Dan Rather ought to start a blog faster than a five-legged mule rollin' downhill.

Esme Vos, one of the people who just may save the Net, blogs about why the media keeps writing the same damn story about muni wifi.

USA Today has a feature that wonders whether Adam Sandler will be accepted in a role where he doesn't play a "moron." "Will the fanboys buy Sandler in a role where he has to deliver dramatic monologues and even tear up a little? They haven't in the past." The article then points to the box office failure of Spanglish and Punch-Drunk Love.

Interesting premise. Unfortunately, the accompanying filmography that lists both the "juvenile humor factor" and box office receipts shows pretty much the opposite. Billy Madison (according to the article) gets a 4 out of 4 on the juvenile scale but only made $25.6M. Little Nicky is the other full 4 and it made only $39.5M. Happy Gilmore scored 3 out of 4 and only made $38.8M. Anger Management, 50 First Dates and Big Daddy each got only 2 on the juvenile scale but made $135.6, $120.9, and $163.5 million. Even the "failed" Spanglish, which gets 0 on the moron scale, made $42.7M, which is more than his full moron movies.

So, the USA hypothesis is robustly proven, in the sense that the opposite of it is true.

[supernova] Engaged market conversations

Tara Hunt moderates. We have four speakers who in fact will be workshop leaders: Christopher Carfi (Cerado), Francois Gossieux (Corante), Brett Hurt (BazaarVoice) and Robert Scoble (Podtech.net).

We break into four groups to work through different issues in a sort of case study way. The group I went into wondered how a smaller company could use social media to survive the announcement by a Microsoft or Yahoo of a product with similar functionality. It was an interesting conversation that veered from social media pretty quickly. We could have divided into Shirts and Skins, with most participants thinking of marketing in terms of consumers as targets and the rest hoping that goodness will also be good marketing. In response to some comments about authenticity, I found myself saying that "authenticity" is a term that means less and less the more you think about it, but the companies we think of as authentic frequently are companies that are clearly on our side.

Anyway, it was an interesting discussion. We'd need another few hours to get to enough common ground, though. And it was generous of Tara to step away from the front of the room so that we could talk amongst ourselves. [Tags: supernova marketing]

[supernova] Wharton West Workshops

I'm at the workshop day of Supernova. The conference-y conference starts tomorrow. The IRC, currently up, is irc://irc.freenode.net/#supernova. The "media center" aggregates the feeds, etc., from the conference; I suspect it will be in full swing tomorrow.

The Wharton day starts with a session on "the personal infosphere."

Dalton Caldwell of Imeem gives a demonstration; it integrates IM and social networking. It does tags, but does not (yet) take in tags from other sites, so you hvae to make your Personal Infosphere investment in Imeem.

eSnips, an Israeli company gives you a gig to snip 'n' share Web content. I's a social site and, as the slide ways, "The only social site where mainstream people are ... and teens aren't!" It's focused on the content, not the people, says Yael Elish. (Here's a folder of optical illusions I stumbled upon.) You can control who can see content. Anything you upload is given its own Web site. It's tagalicious. It's intended as a "pure consumer brand," not an enterprise tool.

Ben Golub of Plaxo begins by giving a history of computing that claims that the Web wasn't about people connecting to people until web 2.0 Aarrrggghh! I hate that meme! Anyway, he goes on to talk about how many people are connecting to other people. Lots. Plaxo is "the industry's first smart address book." It lets you "leverage your address book." [I don't know. I'd still rather see a distributed solution. FOAF and Plaxo should meet and have babies.]

Tariq Krim of Netvibes is an aggregator. I've played with it for a few minutes and the UI is very very easy. Cool even. He says that Netvibes is being designed by users and that it's trying to be completely open.

Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum says it gives you a persistent way to aggregate all sorts of content in one place so you can share it or not. You can save deliberately or you can set it to save every site you go to. It indexes everyting. It will be tagalectable.

In the discussion, they agree that standards are good.

Mitch Ratcliffe asks a killer question about whether the motive for hosting content rather than managing it in a distributed fashion is in fact to give the hosting company an asset.

They discuss whether enterprise software is going to become indistinguishable from mass end-user software. Because these are non-enterprise sw folks, they push against the idea.

Do these services create new silos? Stated answer: Nah! Real answer: Yeah, probably.

By the way, for now I'm going to tag posts as "supernova" and not "supernova2006" on the grounds that the systems that sort through tags should be able to sort by date. Could be a tragic error on my part. [Tags: supernova]

Ethan on Flexgo

One of the revolutionary ideas of the last few years in the technology industry is that the poor are a market. C.K. Prahalad's "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" has helped businesspeople realize that people in poor nations have both disposeable income and investment income. People will buy goods that will better their lives, if the right goods and the right business models are made available....

Which brings us to Microsoft's recent announcement of FlexGo(TM) "pay as you go computing". While FlexGo is endorsed by Prahalad in Microsoft's press release, it appears to me that it's far more likely to be an exploitative than a liberating technology for most users.

Read more... [Tags: ethan_zuckerman microsoft flexgo poverty]

Open source faceted classification

Flamenco, the pioneering faceted classification system, has gone Open Source. Woohoo!

Faceted classification allows users to browse a complex tree of data by dynamically deciding which branch is a branch of which branch. (Demos here.) Flamenco is a project led by Marti Hearst at UC Berkeley School of Info. It was an important influence on commercial providers such as Siderean.

FLAMENCO is an acronym that stands for FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations. Or, as I prefer to think of it: FIAUMINC. [Tags: faceted_classification flamenco open_source taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous marti_hearst]

BlogBridge Library

Pito Salas, the person responsible for the free, open source aggregator, BlogBridge, has a new project underway. I wasn't so impressed with it until we had coffee together this morning. (Disclosure: I'm a BlogBridge user, and I'm also on its board of advisors. If Pito offers his new project commercially, there are unlikely circumstances in which I could make a little money from it. Frankly, my friendship with Pito is more likely to distort my opinion than the far whiff of money.)

The idea behind BBL is so simple that my first reaction to Pito was: Surely this has been done a thousand times already. But I think maybe it hasn't. BBL is designed for a group that wants to build a shared online library with some degree of centralized control and management. So, someone comes up with a way of slicing up the topics, hierarchically. BBL has tagging built in so if you prefer to skip the tree, you can. (Or at least you will be able to — BBL is still quite draft-y.) Different branches can be administered by different people. Everything is RSS-enabled. BBL inhales and exhales OPML. Dynamic folders can show the current contents of a remote OPML structure, raising the possibility of creating interlibraries. The aim is to make it dead easy for a group to build, maintain and make accessible a structured online library. It's cooler than I at first thought.

If you've got comments, go to BlogBridge and let Pito know. He's an open-minded, open-hearted sort of guy.

(Ironically, the links for posts about BlogBridge Library need to be organized better. Here's a link to the tag. And here are some key posts: 1 2 3 4. A preview is here. And there's a SkypeCast about it on Thursday.)

[Tags: blogbridge libraries blogbridgelibrary pito_salas taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

Videoblogging from Supernova

I'm on my way to San Francisco for the Supernova conference. I expect to spend almost all my time in the hallways, once again grabbing people to video-interview for CNET (with AT&T as a sponsor). The links to the podcasts, livecasts, etc. will be here.

I expect there will be some lively discussion of Net neutrality, but not just that. Supernova attracts a great bunch o' folks... [Tags: supernova vblogs]

The DRM Debate

The Wall Street Journal has published a conversation on the effect of DRM on innovation. On the one side is Fritz Attaway with the MPAA. On the other is Wendy Seltzer, law prof and Berkman fellow. Wendy was formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to renew your membership?). It's a terrific exchange and Wendy's responses, one after another, are so crisp and insightful that she had me chuckling with delight. This is a must read, IMO.

The WSJ wisely — and somewhat ironically — is allowing unsubscribed access to this exchange. [Tags: drm copyleft copyleft digital_rights wendy_seltzer mpaa fritz_attaway berkman]

Blue/Green Alliance

Environmentalists and workers unite! No, that's not an imperative. It's a description. The Blue/Green Alliance brings together the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers.

This makes sense to me since it's recently come to my attention that we've just got the one planet and no do-overs allowed. [Tags: blue_green_alliance environment labor politics]

Lit on maps

Gutenkarte mashes together the public domain literature at Project Gutenberg and MetaCarta's geolocator that scans the text and plots the place references on a map. Pretty durn cool. It's even AJAX-y. There are some other projects of a similar Web 2.0 ilk over at MetaCarta Labs. (Disclosure: I did some consulting work for MetaCarta a while ago.) [Tags: project_gutenberg maps gis metacarta web2.0 gutenkarte]

The most secret word ever

Bank of America's phone support person just asked me four questions to verify that I am who I am: My name, the last eight digits of my ATM card, my home address, and the amount and date of a recent ATM withdrawal. After I complied, she said that if gave her a one-word verification, the next time they could verify me much faster. And what is that one word that will open my bank account to anyone with a touch-tone phone?

My mother's maiden name.

When I suggested that an enterprising felon, a malevolent family member, or anyone who has ever worked at any of the 12 million other companies that have asked for my mother's maiden name would not have much trouble getting my mother's maiden name, the support person said I could supply another word, but that they would not be able to give me a hint. Apparently having a hint field in their database would cause an information overload with cascading effects that would bring down the world economy.

Besides, aren't we embarrassed talking about our mothers' maiden name? [Tags: whines banking digitalID security]

MythTV progress

I've been working for months, on and off (mainly off, occasionally on), trying to get MythTV — Open Source TiVo — working. Bit by bit, I'm making progress. (I should note that for some people - better people than I - MythTV simply installs and runs.)

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that's about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you've given your sister boils for seven years.

Nevertheless, progress has been made, including last night when I actually got the Linux box to output to the TV. Rather than having to watch TV on the computer screen, I could actually watch on my TV. Woohoo! Of course, I don't yet have sound, the IR Blaster required to control the cable box still doesn't work unless you shell out of MythTV and give it a raw Linux abracadabra, and it doesn't record the shows you've told it to record. (I'm guessing that that last problem has to do with how I've set up Zap2It, the publicly-available channel guide.) One step at a time, my friend, one step at a time.

Last night's breakthrough in getting "tv out," as it's called, was achieved by following instructions at WriteMe. I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card, so I was able to take the instructions verbatim, especially when it came to the lines updating /etc/modules.conf. (If you use KnoppMyth to install MythTV, as I did and which I recommend, you'll want to brush up on your vi, since that's the only text editor it comes with, at least AFAIK.) And before you do anything else, make sure that within the MythTV graphical interface, you've gone to the TV setup page and have clicked the box saying that you want the video card to output to the TV. Not that anyone would be foolish enough to miss that step and then spend hours cursing MythTV, Linux, Open Source, and the post-Industrial Age.

Now that Congress is about to reinstate the Broadcast Flag, requiring digital hardware to prevent the unlicensed copying of digital content — i.e., you can't record a frame of the Simpsons unless The Man lets you, and you may not, by the force of law, skip over the commercials (no kidding) — MythTV is a better idea than ever. Plus, once it's up and running, you have free TiVo with all the innovations that clever hackers can devise. It's TiVo with a future. Reclaim your eyeballs! [Tags: mythtv]

Buzzy Berkman

This is from the weekly roundup of new stuff from Berkman fellows:

* Ethan Zuckerman questions coverage of Internet filtering in Africa.

* Derek Bambauer praises the virtues of inefficiency.

* Bill McGeveran provides background to the Science Commons Addenda.

* Dan Gillmor questions the Sharesleuth.com statement of intent.

* Rebecca MacKinnon digs into corporate filtering differences in China.

There's lots going on at the ol' Center... [Tags: berkman ethan_zuckerman dan_gillmor bill_mcgeveran rebecca_mackinnon derek_bambauer africa china yahoo science]

A blogging survey

Paul Gillin is writing a book called The New Influencers about blogging — the book seems to be about marketing in the blogofied world — and has posted a pretty painless 25-question survey. (Here's a column by Paul on the virtue of welcoming your critics.) [Tags: paul_gillin blogs marketing]

Organizing Wikimania

Wikimania, the big Wikipedia confab, is happening Aug. 4-6, on the Harvard Law School campus. It looks like it's going to be terrific. And because the Berkman Center has been involved a bit, I've gotten to see how Wikimania is being organized.

I'm happy to say that it is being done entirely bottom-up. For example, take the meals. Everyone brings what they think is the best food. So, perhaps you place your organic peanut butter on the buffet table. I remove it, because clearly my Tofurkey is objectively better than your PB — better tasting and better for you. If you disagree, you can "roll back" the table to your PB, although I'm within my rights to re-replace it with my Tofurkey. This goes on until we come to some neutral food offering (NFO), such as peanut-butter-and-Tofurkey salad. Thus the issue is resolved, at least until some non-NFO bastard replaces our joint offering with some godawful sweet and sour soy ball crap.

See you there! [Tags: wikipedia wikimania humor]