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]

Heaton on Nielsen Norman on RSS

Terry Heaton has an insightful response to the Nielsen Normal research about the marketing effectiveness of RSS. Along the way, Terry raises a key point about usability: It aims at making user experience better but not always for the sake of the user. [Tags: terry_heaton usability rss]

What part of "abort" don't you understand?

I am a satisfied user of CounterSpy, the anti-malware program, but that won't stop me from whining. When you click on the "Abort" button when it's running a scan, you get a dialogue box that says "Please wait while ConterSpy is working..." with only one button on it: "OK." If it were OK, I wouldn't be trying to abort!

It reminds me of an old short cartoon in which a character encounters a rope dangling from off screen. The rope has a sign that says "Do not pull." After much hesitation, the character finally of course pulls the rope. Another sign appears: "Out of order."

Jefferson's playlists

Thomas Jefferson built a formidable library. Back when having 200 books was a big deal, he eventually had over 6,700, which he donated to the Library of Congress after the Canadians (those belligerent bastards!) burned it down.

Sometime before 1783, Jefferson started creating a catalog of his library, dividing books into three major categories that accorded with Sir Francis Bacon's divisions of the faculties of the mind: Memory (history), reason (philosophy) and imagination (fine arts). Before then, however, he had made numerous reading lists. According to Douglas Wilson, in the excellent monograph Jefferson's Books:

In some of the numerous lists he compiled for law students, which were usually not confined to works on the law, he arranged the recommended categories of books by the time of the day at which they should be read..." (p. 34)

Before 8am, you should read "Physical Studies, Ethics, Religion, Natural Law" and save "Belles-Letres, Criticism, Rhetoric and Oratory" for after dark.

Jefferson, by the way, did not think that the organization of knowledge — or, at least of books — had to reflect a single, GodNature-given order. In 1815, he wrote to the Librarian of Congress that a "physician or theologist" would arrange the books differently. Organization should reflect utility, he believed. In fact, one of this slaves reported that Jefferson would routinely have twenty books open at a time, spread out on the floor, not to mention the five he could have open simultaneously in the spinning book holder he apparently invented.

One person's mess is another person's desk. In the age of the miscellaneous, we can accommodate every type of mess and order simultaneously.

According to the monograph, Jefferson's personal favorites were Greek and Latin authors, in the original languages. We know that Locke was a big influence on the founding fathers, including Jefferson, but somewhere someone has written about the influence of the Greek playwrights and Roman poets on Jefferson's political thinking. Any leads? I'm just curious... [Tags: taxonomy jefferson libraries everything_is_miscellaneous]

Direct-to-Consumer Press Releases do suck

Steve Rubel disagrees with David Meermen Scott about the value of "direct-to-consumer" press releases. According to Steve, they suck.

Yup, they do. There are two basic reasons why they suck:

1. Press releases are a weird rhetorical form, one-sided in the extreme, non-credible, and written in a bizarre form of speech found nowhere else.

2. Direct-to-consumer press releases are spam.

Plain old press releases need to be deep-sixed. They already are nothing but wastebasket fodder for editors. Mulch waiting to happen. The idea that their reach should be extended to customers I find actually depressing.

Is anybody doing this, or is it just David's own PR plan?

(Disclosure: Steve works for Edelman, to whom I consult.) [Tags: pr media marketing]

How to tell you're out of shape

1. Go for a routine stress test and have to give up after 13 minutes, with the treadmill ratcheted up to "Lollygagging," because that's all your little chinchilla legs can take.

2. When the medical technician takes your blood pressure, she says, "Hmm, looks like I'll have to get the smaller cuff."

But seriously, I'm fine.

[berkman] Traci Fenton on organizational democracy

Traci Fenton, founder of WorldBlu.com, is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk about organizational democracy. Excellent turnout, especially for the most beautiful day of the year. I'm especially glad to see that Traci has drawn first-timers, from union reps to workplace managers, in addition to the usual Berkpeople. [I'm paraphrasing throughout this post. As always.]

She says: In a democratic workplace, people get to decide which projects they work on and have access to the financial info about the company. This is the case at the GE Durham plant —150 employees and one manager. They make jet engines. All future GE plants will also use a democratic working style.

Organizational democracy = "democratic principles applied to a business context." She cites Drucker, Wheatley, Senge, Hock, Semler, Collins, Fairtlough and Bower as sources of the idea. It's not about everyone voting but everyone having a voice. It's about operating out of freedom, not fear. Peer-to-peer, not paternalism. Humility and resolve vs. ego. Transparency vs. secrecy. Fluid networks, not hierarchy. It can become the norm, she says.

David Isenberg points out that the managers at GE (for example) get paid disproportionately high. How does this growing gap fit with the idea of democratic organization?

Traci says that people are rebelling against this. Whole Foods, for example, caps the disparity. Fairness is one of the characteristics of organizational democracy. GE overall suffers from the disproportion, but GE Durham does not. She points to other companies, too fast for me to keep up, except for Southwest Airlines...

Why should any one care? Context, cash and change.

The business context is changing because of technology: Employees have a voice on the Net and want one in business. Also, there's been a reaction to Enron. And more of the world lives in democracy. And Gen X and Y have different expectations about work. And there's a search for meaning going on (embracing our humanity). She says we're going from the industrial age, to the information age, to the democratic age — networks, engagement, individuals...

Semco in Brazil flattened its hierarchy, gave employees a say in decisions, started job rotation, let people choose their boss, and let people choose how to be paid (e.g., hourly, by goals, royalties, etc.). As a result, their sales doubled, they launched 8 new products, and revenues went up 35%. Traci says that within this freedom, there is a tremendous sense of discipline. This happened because Ricardo Semler, the owner (his father founded it), at 25 was killing himself with stress.

Organizational democracy leads to more cash because it increases engagement. A Gallup poll showed that 73% of US workforce is not engaged by their work. Five years ago, that was 54%. This drives down revenues. Organizational democracy increases retention, increases efficiency, increases competitive advantage...

Organizational democracies have a positive ripple effect on their communities, decreasing corruption and increasing peace and stability.

WorldBlu wants to build 1,000 organizational democracies by 2020.

Q: People have been saying this for a long time. What's the resistance?
A: People don't understand how. Business leaders freak out because they think they have less control. I tell them they're just giving up the illusion of control.

Q: People running the companies would have to give up a substantial amount of money personally.
A: At organizational democracies I don't hear people complaining about the money piece.

Q: Does this work for low-skill or only for high-skill?
A: Atlas Container makes boxes. The average worker hasn't finished high school. But they're run democratically. Everyone knows what it feels like to be disengaged.

Q: (me) Is this a cultural change or can it be done incrementally?
A: It usually starts at the top, although I've blogged about how a junior employee can get involved. It can be rolled out at various paces.

Q: At GE Durham, people divide into teams and are given quotas. The team decides how many hours they're going to work, they cover for each other, and suddenly they're peer-accountable. I got the religion when I heard that.

Q: What's the role for labor unions?
A: [Union organizer in the audience] This kind of model can work with the union. It seems like a natural pairing.

Q: Is this equally appropriate in rising and falling industries? And how does this play out with globalization and outsourcing?
A: I don't know. How do the ethics of capitalism and the ethics of organizational democracy work together?

A: [audience member] Outsourcing can increase the knowledge work done by the people in the home plant.
Q: Are the outsourcers part of the organizational democracy? [Ouch!]

Q: Are these principles transferrable to very fluid industries where the parameters are changing rapidly?
A: Pandora is a startup using organizational democracy. It allows a company to adapt very rapidly.

Q: What's your advice to new companies that want to start out right?
A: It's not a matter of having standard processes that can be put in place but in adhering to a set of principles. At Gore, they use a lattice structure where everyone is related to everyone else. They share knowledge. "You have to find an answer that works on the scale you're at."

Q: What are the most common problems democratic organizations face?
A: At Pandora, the make-your-own-radio-station, people feel so engaged that they can be over-confident about the value of their participation.

Q: There are parallels between organizational democracy and the organic movement. The organic movement got coopted by the FDA. How are you working with large organizations so that the concept of org democ isn't diluted?
A: You are in my head. We're working on some proprietary tools that we hope will create a standard.

Q: Seal of approval?
A: There can be a backlash to that.

Q; Saturn seems to have gone from democratic to undemocratic.
A: At one company, they axed the CEO after the company missed one quarter, and the board brought in someone with a command and control background. I asked the old CEO if the employees had the strength to go forward. He said that there aren't other job oppportunities. It's unresolved still.

A: I love the idea of org democ, but it seems like it only works so long as the guys at the top say it's ok.
Q: Yes and no. The movie The Take is about workers in 200 companies in Argentina demanding organizational democracy. Southwest Airlines also survived the replacement of the CEO.

Q: Why would the board care so long as the company is generally delivering? I something else going on?
A: Probably.

Q: Is one of your 12 qualifications having a certain percentage of staff on the board?
A: We don't have set policies or processes. We recommend the adoption of principles. The Orpheus orchestra in NYC has no conductor. But their board doesn't get it.

Q: (me) To what extent does the lack of democracy have to do with the fact that most companies are run by men?
A: Male CEOs who can run their companies democratically have this wonderful balance of the masculine and the feminine. They don't have anything to prove, which is an important characteristic of leaders and workers in democratic organizations. Democratic organizations need a blend of compassion and discipline.

Q: What happens if the workers don't accept change? Suppose they just want to follow rules?
A: A democratic company is not for everyone. Employees need a high degree of self-knowledge and confidence. Sometimes people have to leave companies that make the transition.

Q: I think this would work better in America than in some other countries. For one thing, when you're responsible, you have to manage stress.
A: I don't believe it has to do with culture. I think it has to do with the type of person you are.

Q: Does this work better for particular sized companies?
A: Smaller companies frequently are democratic just naturally.

[Tags: business democracy worldblu traci_fenton berkman]

[berkman] Traci Fenton on organizational democracy

Traci Fenton is the founder of WorldBlu, a company and a foundation dedicated to increasing organizational democracy.

Not sure what organizational democracy is? There are still some spaces available for tomorrow's Berkman lunchtime conversation (12:30-1:45) with Traci. If you're interested, send an email to Erica at egeorge cyber.law.harvard.edu. [Tags: democracy worldblu traci_fenton]

Blogosphere loses its examples of corporate blogging

Robert Scoble has announced he's leaving Microsoft. On the heels of the promotion of blogger Jonathan Schwartz to the position of CEO of Sun, the Blogosphere has lost its only two examples of corporations productively allowing non-CEO employees to blog.

Pundit Doc Searls commented, "Now we're down to three CEO bloggers and like a gazillion teenagers writing how much they hate their English teacher."

In a note pinned to its site, the Blogosphere said it was going to "shut up about itself" for a while until it had time to come up with some new examples. [Tags: scoble humor blogging blogosphere]

PS: The Boston Globe illustrated its AP story about Scoble with a photo of Shel Israel, Robert's co-author. You can see just a bit of Robert's ear and eye where he's been carefully cropped out of the photo.

PPS: Best of luck, Robert.

Global Voices on Zarqawi

Salam Adil at Global Voices aggregates posts (here and here) about the death of Zarqawi. [Tags: iraq zarqawi global_voices gv]

Coke and Mentos

A video showing the world's oddest Bellagio Fountains emulator. (BTW, I initially mistyped this sentence and wrote instead about "Bellatio" fountains, a phrase just begging for a definition.) [Tags: coke mentos video humor]

Joho for Mobiles

I've created a versiion of this blog for viewing on mobile devices: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/johomobile.html. It's just another Movable Type template with a whole bunch of stuff removed. Because there's no left sidebar, the posts come to the top of the page. If you have suggestions for making it better...

By the way, the script I was using that displays a link to the posts if your screen is small works fine on large screens where it's not needed but doesn't work on my Blackberry; the Blackberry browser seems not to evaluate the "if (screen.width < 201 )" command. But, now I don't need it because I have the separate template.

Al Gore for President retroactively

Here's a 13-minute campaign video made by Spike Jonez for the 2000 Gore campaign [Part 1 | Part 2]. It looks like maybe it was intended to be shown at the Convention. And it's clear that the aim is to show Gore without the 3-foot aluminum rod stuck up his butt.

Pretty durn good, though.

Go, Al! (Thanks to Sven Cahling for the link.) [Tags: al_gore politics]

The Abominable (and hilarious) Attorney

The publisher sent me a copy of Jeremy Blachman's book, Anonymous Lawyer (book|blog). It's hilarious. In fact, it's far better than it has any right to be: It's told in the form of blog posts, with occasional email asides, which would seem to be a tough limitation, and it's about a one-sided character who is the most career-focused, shallowest, nastiest person you've ever imagined. But Jeremy pulls it off because he is a deeply talented writer. He is also fearless. A lesser author would have tried to curry the reader's sympathy. Nope. Not Jeremy. That takes guts. But it pays off in laughs...appalled laughs.

I don't want to set your expectations too high, because that's a sure way to kill a humor book. But I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

PS: In his personal blog, Jeremy reviews "Keeping Up with the Steins" and says: "The movie didn't know what it wanted to be — a farce about the excesses of bar mitzvahs, or a tug-at-the-heartstrings family comedy. And so it floated in between, and ended up not terribly satisfying." Anonymous Lawyer does not suffer from that problem. [Tags: anonymouslawyer jeremy_blachman books humor]

While we're talking about the intersection of blogs and books, you might want to take a look at the site for a book in progress, Search Analytics for Your Site, by Louis Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins. Lou Rosenfeld's new company, Rosenfeld Media, (Disclosure: yes, I'm on the board of advisors) is trying to be innovative and open about the publishing of books. They're also publishing Card Sorting by Donna Maurer, with whom I got to bond over Eleanor Rosch at the Information Architecture Summit

PennTags - When card catalogs meet tags

I talked with Laurie Allen yesterday during the lunch break at the Annenberg conference on hyperlinks. She works on U of Pennsylvania's PennTags project that allows readers to tag catalogued books. Some people use tags for personal bookmarking. Others tag more socially. It's a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so!

By integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy), you instantaneously get the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

I didn't talk with Laurie about this, but my guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don't have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, but the folksonomy could supplement it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for "recipes" could take you to the "cuisine" category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here's the tag cloud for the node you're browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project.

(U of Penn's Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you're interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, the death of the Internet due to the venal stupidity of Congress, etc.) [Tags: penntags laurie_allen taxonomy libraries folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous tagging ]

[annenberg] Links

I'm on this panel, so can only do spotty blogging.

Eszter Hargittai, the moderator, shows a video of users go wrong with links. E.g., confusing sponsored links with what they're actually looking for.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet talks about a survey they couldn't do because it was too hard to figure out the purpose of a search, the credibility and origination of a link, the meaning of a link, etc. Instead he talks about four conclusions from various research. 1. People start as a skeptics when they start looking for links. If people know it's commercial info, they become more suspicious. 2. People can be fooled. They can get lost. They can trust the wrong info. 82% of search users couldn't always tell which results are paid and which aren't. 3. Despite those problems, 87% of general search users say they find info most of the time. They are most successful finding commercial info, and least successful in finding political info. 4. When people are confused in a search, they ping their networks. They use links to start conversations.

Peter Morville ("Ambient Findability") explains how he got here. He started out as a librarian. He read a paper by Marcia Bates and realized that queries are interactive and iterative: the query changes as our search continues. He became an information architect. (In fact, he's one of the founders of the field.) How do you enable people to move between searching and browsing modes. As a librarian, he thought he could organize systems to help people find things. But usability testing showed the power of words, which then can be hyperlinks that jump people out of the browsable structure. Besides usability, there's also desirability, credibility and accessibility. "Ambient findability" means being able to find anything from anyone, anywhere at any time.

I say (briefly) that links are little acts of generosity, which means the architecture of the Web is fundamentally moral, i.e., every link recognizes that there are other people who matter. [I'm paraphrasing.]

Seth Finkelstein points out that Google measures popularity and that not all is sweetness and light. Popularity does not distinguish between the famous and infamous, knowledge and crackpot, hateful ideas. Popular results become more popular precisely because it shows up more in the search sites. And most people don't go past the first few returns. "When you type a search into a search engine, there's a lot of social politics involved in the search," and this, Seth says, needs to be discussed.

[The interactive discussion begins...] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety peter_morville seth_finkelstein lee_rainie]

[annenberg] Mapping

Matthew Hindman talks about mapping traffic between political websites. He shows a way cool animated graphic of traffic between sites. Mainly the cross-position traffic is name-calling. 45% of the conservative traffic goes to FreeRepublic.com because it gives lots of links to the five other largest conservative sites. Liberal site are less concentrated.

Lada Adamic breaks the male-only panelist barrier. She teaches at U of Michigan and talks about how cascades happen. The fact that nodes cluster doesn't mean that all the power is in the hub nodes. A meme can start on a small site and spread to the hub nodes. In a "barbell distribution," it'd be interesting to see how info flows.

Tony Conrad of Sphere.com talks about his service that seems to be the anti-Technorati. He stresses that Sphere.com does not rank purely (or mainly?) on how heavily linked a site is. For example, it gives special weight to the first post on a topic.

Matthew Hurst of BuzzMetrics shows a graphic of an overview of the Blogosphere. [Why think that the Web has a top-down view?] The social political blogs are at the center of the English-speaking Blogosphere. Geographically, LiveSpace bloggers are spread out in a way that maps roughly to the Blue States. Xanga, meanwhile, maps to Red states.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research shows his graphic display of Usenet interactions. He concludes by pointing out that we're leaving traces behind everywhere we go.

Q: (me) The maps that show the gap between sides are used often to demean the Internet because it's just a re-concentration. But the question is whether the Net makes us more democratic than before (as per Yochai Benkler and Mary Hodder). What do we compare those with? With how many dinnertime conversations fairly include the opposition point of view? Barroom conversations? Even articles in magazines?

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Blogs aren't trying to be media. It's people in conversation. How many times do Democrats hang out at Republicans meet-ups? Vice versa? But together they do make democracy.

Q: How does what you do help Microsoft's business? [very rough paraphrase!]
A: The future of computing is social.

[Does the online Contemporary American Literature group have to have 50% of its links going to romance novel sites and medieval discussion groups or else democracy has failed on the Web?] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety maps politics]

[annenberg] Hyperlinking in Web 2.0

Fantastic set of panelists: Jimmy Wikipedia Wales, Ethan Global Voices Zuckerman, Nicholas Debunker Carr, Martin NYT Martin Nisenholtz, moderated by Saul NYT Hansell.

Nick: Content is being atomized, fragmented. Each of the fragments has to stand on its own economically in the marketplace. But, the market works well for toasters, but not necessarily with books and articles. The cross-subsidies have provided much of what's good in newspapers and magazines. E.g., the classified ads pay for reporters to go to Africa. In an atomized world, you lose the cross-subsidies.

Martin: About.com is actually our biggest property on the Net. Our task is to turn people who come in through a side door (e.g., Google) into regular readers who engage with us as a package (as opposed to engaging with NYT atoms).

Jimmy: We have four employees and Wikipedia has four times the reach of About.com, compared with 150 there. And we have more than enough money to pay the bills each month. Communities can build content that others want to see using an economic model far less expensive...

Ethan: A lot of the old models haven't done a good job of covering the developing world. While I have enormous esteem for msm like the NYT, it's worth pointing out that the system isn't without its flaws. Writing for an interconnected world is much different than reporting for a newspaper...

Saul: Why don't Nick and Jimmy go at it...?

Nick: It's a myth that Wikipedia is an open collective without any centralized control that naturally gets better as the community engages. Wikipedia is evolving more and more hierarchical structures. In the history of culture, you could throw out all the collectively written stuff and never miss it. The myth sucks the air out of the market for any professionally created product.

Jimmy: I've been saying for years that Wikipedia is driven by a core community. That's always been the case. The "Edit this page" link gives people the wrong impression that it's about millions of people each writing one sentence. As far as it driving others out of business: That's their problem. And, btw, Wikipedia is more highly read in Germany than in America, and [the German encyclopedia publisher] Brockhaus' sales are up 30%. Maybe it's because Wikipedia reminds people that encyclopedias are cool.

Martin: Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.

Jeff: I find it fascinating that this has turned into a panel on economics. And economics is about control. You, Nick, fear it, but the horse is out of the barn.
Ethan: Few of us want to lose the media's ability to put a reporter on an airplane. But we do want recognition of what's going on bottom up. [Paraphrasing!] Global Voices has 120 people around the world, but they're bloggers, not reporters. They have a different, complementary take on what's being reported by the msm.
Martin: We bought Blogrunner to make sure we can insinuate the Blogosphere at the article level.

Q: Nick, isn't Wikipedia really a hybrid model in which the small group of amateurs who run it are becoming professionalized? And, Ethan, is there anything we can do to make things work better in the next five years.
Nick: You're right. Wikipedia is moving toward a more professional structure. But there's still a question about how good it will be. Right now, it's mediocre with some very good entries and some very bad ones. But, because there's no money in it, there's no incentive for competing products, so you're left with less choice.

Jimmy: No money means less choice? Take a look at the Blogosphere. And the fact that Wikipedia is freely licensed means people take it and do all sorts of interesting things with it.
Martin: We have over 600 editors because we're trying to get at the best possible facts. We think the two worlds can coexist.

Ethan: There's been a revolution in mobile phones in Africa, but not laptops. Mobile phones are relevant to people lives because it's an economic tool: Should I bother going to a market, etc. Laptops are not relevant that way. Some of the communal tools online are developing on mobiles phones and talk radio. But that doesn't connect globally. We found during Live 8 that there's a disconnect that actually can be healed.

Q: Students rely on Wikipedia?
A: I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, "For God's sake, you're in college. Why are you citing an encyclopedia?" We tell people to be aware of what it is. It's pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It's generally "good enough."

Q: How do links change society?
Ethan: At GV they let people around the world talk. When you see the next billion enter the Net, you'll see them build this into a medium of interconnection.

Saul: Spend some time on MySpace where people are turning their lives into media spaces.
Nick: So, we're training our children to gather information in shallow, superficial ways, and lose their ability to be contemplative.

Saul: Didn't we lose that with TV? Aren't we taking a half step back from TV?
Nick: I worry that understanding something will mean understanding it in how Google's Larry Page's algorithms understand the world.

Q: How do we help people become media literate?
Martin: Whenever we talk about professional versus non-professional, we're getting it wrong. They're complementary.

Saul: I think we're going to get very savvy about media.

Q: Is Wikipedia really different from OhMyNews and the like?
Jimmy: OhMyNews is exactly what I have in mind when I talk about hybrid models. [Tags: annenberg wikipedia global_voices nytimes nicholas_carr hyperlinkedsociety]

[annenberg] Hyperlinks

I'm at an Annenberg conference on "the hyperlinked society." Subtitle: "Questioning connections in the digital age." (Program Panelists No known stream, although apparently it's being taped. IRC: irc.freenode.net #annenberg. Bloggers include: Jeff Jarvis Ethan Zuckerman Jay Rosen Seth Finkelstein Mary Hodder ... this is a rough list. sorry if I missed you. It's early.) [As always, I'm paraphrasing, at best.]

The first panel is led by Jay Rosen. It's on "mainstream linking."

Tony Gentile of Healthline talks about his site's interest in getting people linking to it. Healthline indexes 170,000 sites it considers reliable. In one case, they contractually required a partner to link to them, although it's usually more mutual. "Pretty much everything is driven off of the links," including their REST-based API.

Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing, has an advertising and journalism background. Google was a turning point in the history of hyperlinks, he says. Google gave links intrinsic value [because links boost page rank]. One intended consequence: Link spam. The spamming "is beginning to erode the value" of linking "and we need to do something about it."

Eric Picard works for the advertising side of Microsoft. His group tries to understand "the economic model of hyperlinking: connecting people to information and to businesses relevant to that information." E.g., how do you put linked ads into a virtual world that brings value to both the user and the vendor, "or at least doesn't piss off the user."

Jay Rosen says that returns to Raymond Williams who says in Culture and Society: There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. People are unique, but you can address them as a mass. The Age of Mass Media, says Jay, is about the art and science of seeing people as masses. But today all these ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart. They;'re not as effective. People don't stand for it any more. So now we have to learn how to see people not as a mass but as a public, a community, knowledge producers. Links connect us horizontally, not just up and down. "All the professions that specialize in seeing people as masses, or as the market, are having to contend with a world where horizontal communication is so much more effective." Often, if people can meet each other, they don't need the mass world, says Jay. And, as a blogger, he says, through the "magic of links" he was able to talk about the press without having to go through the filter of the press. "So, for me linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom."

Q: (Jonathan Kaplan) Comments on the new telecom bill that does not have network neutrality protected?
Tim Hespos: So now we may have another variable about links: How fast it is. That's a shame.

Tony Gentile: It's not something people will stand for. We'll find a way to route around it.
Eric Picard: My personal opinion is that I'd like to see things stay as they are, without tiered access fees.
Jay: I've often had the feeling that blogging can't last because it's too open and too democratic. A sense of foreboding that they won't let us keep doing this. It's too much fun and it's too free. But I think people won't stand for it.

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Google is capturing the wisdom of the crowd. (We do need to figure out how to outsmart the spammers.) Links give power to the people and the collection of links is our collective knowledge.

Q: How does one get links?
Tony: Don't ask for one. I need to come to know your writing first.

Q: (Me) I asked a rambling question about worrying about commercial interests in getting links, and ego interests in getting links, disrupts the semantics of the web. [Then I was too upset to be able to grasp the answers :( ]
Jay: It has to do with how we see other people, value their time, regard their own freedom. The notion that your time belongs to me because I can trick you into clicking this link...that whole idea that you belong to me because I can stimulate you is the difference between the two types of links.

Q: There's no nuance to a link. We could put microformats into links.
Tony: Structured blogging or something like it is necessary because right now links don't imply anything.
Jay: It'd be great to have some sort or urgency, like a triple underscore.

Q: (Consumer Reports) Are you ever approached directly by advertisers? What do they want and what do they give you? Also, it seems like there's enthusiasm here for exchanging one set of gatekeepers for another.Tony: Advertisers don't approach us.
Jay: It's better to be a gatekeeper than to beg a gatekeeper. And the barriers of entry are far lower. [Tags: annenberg hyperlinks hyperlinkedsociety]

[corante] John Hagel

John Hagel has 15 mins to be "provocative." [As always, I'm paraphrasing and will be getting things wrong.]

He says the big shift is from fighting for shelf space to fighting for attention.

Traditional marketing's principles are: Intercept customers, isolate them, and inhibit their ability to engage with other vendors over time. The nirvana: 1:1 marketing: One customer, one vendor.

We need a different approach, he says: Attract, assist, affiliate. (Affiliate: Find other services and values to provide to the customer.)

We're moving from product- and vendor-centric promises ("Buy from me because I have great products and I'm a great vendor") to customer-centric promises ("Buy from me because I know you as an individual customer better than anyone else and you can trust me to configure the right bundle of products and services"). Those who do this, John says, will have the most powerful brands. He notes that he does not mean customer segment brand promises but actual individual customer promises.

Generally, businesses can answer the two questions: 1. What's the lifetime value of your customers, and how is that changing? 2. What's the 80:20 segmentation in your business in terms of customers. But those are going to be critical performance metrics.

We need to focus on Return on Attention, John says.

He points to three ways marketers are falling into old habits:

1. Companies are responding by doing anything they can to grab attention. They're carving messages into the wool on sheep, and running ads on video screens above the urinals. Instead, marketers ought to put themselves in the customer's place.

2. Some say marketers should move from the broad notion of attention to intention, i.e., intercepting people who already intend to buy. John recommends focusing on attention more broadly.

3. Some are too enamored with tools. Rather than inventing new stuff, hoiw can we help our customers find and connect to the environments that already exist?

Ultimately, it's about the assumptions we bring to business. From that stems everything else. So, you should start at the top to introduce organizational change.

[Tags: john_hagel marketing]

[corante] Innovation and marketing

I'm at a conference put on by Corante [Disclosure: I may be on their board of advisors. In any case, I occasionally blog at Corante and some Corantists are friends of mine.] and the Center on Global Brand Leadership called 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, at Colubmia U. (Unfortunately, I missed the keynote by Russ Klein, CMO of Burger King.)

David Sutherland of the Launch Institute does a discussion-opener about "co-creation." He defines co-creation as "when value is jointly created through an interaction of the firm and its customers," i.e., "dialogue." He says companies discover there are three "platforms" for innovation: 1. Insight: Sensing opportunities. 2. Creation: Bringing insights together. 3. Value Capture: Implementation. "Every company that has an innovation process has these three platforms..." At each of those points, you can involve "consumers" and suppliers in a co-creation process.

Co-creation ranges from the latent (e.g., ethnography) to the explicit. e.g., Whirlpool does a lot of ethnography. They videotaped the process people go through in the wash process. They had assumed that cycle time was important, but they found the wash cycle sometimes took days. And they found that people doing lots of laundry often had lots of kids and thus didn't want the washer/dryer so removed that they have to leave their kids. So, they're going to introduce socially-acceptable washer/dryers for living areas.

BMW turned sides of buildings into video screens and allowed people to put their own messages onto them. BMW calls this "show to know," i.e., showing things "in order to understand the people interacting with the brand."

JetBlue has a "storybooth" where customers get to tell a story about JB. (NPR is suing JetBlue over this, apparently, See Rm116.

Paccar co-creates with suppliers.

David uses Foo camp as an example of co-creation, which feels like a stretch to me.

Then we break into discussion groups...

We had an interesting discussion, focusing more on innovation and co-creation than on marketing. Apparently, the idea for Kraft's 100-calorie packs of snacks came from customers. And Lego brought together some of the top Legomaniacs. Also Hyatt came up with it's "stay fit" program by listening to customers, although theidea for the program did not come from a customer; rather it was a response to the customer needs the customers expressed.

We come back to a whole-group discussion, but I'm taking good enough notes on it. One random point: Does co-creation work? How would we know? BMW has run ads boasting that their cars are designed by designers, not by customers. Under what circumstances does it make sense? [Tags: clay_shirky jaron_lanier]

Clay on Lanier

Clay responds to Jaron Lanier's debunking piece, Digital Maoism. I haven't read Clay's response yet (I'm at a conference) but I'm eager too... [Tags: clay_shirky jaron_lanier]

Men

Apparently, there's a consumer electronics store that comes in two versions: One laid out for women 20-30 years old and one for middle-aged men. The one for women gets them in and out quickly. The one for men is designed for leisurely browsing. Yet further evidence that everything men say about women is false about women but true about men. [Tags: marketing men women]

Sopranos finale

Warning!!!! SPOILER. Sort of. I don't actually give away the ending, but if you haven't seen it, don't read this post beforehand because I talk about it in general terms and mention some possible endings that didn't happen. On the other hand, you should feel free to read my predictions from before the start of the season. You'll be amazed at my prescience. Hahaha.)

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The finale makes total sense if you assume that The Sopranos is a comedy. Not just sometimes funny. A comedy. A dark comedy. It has always had a comic structure - we see through the characters' pretensions - and over the seasons it has generally moved toward being a comedy in substance as well.

That's not to say that Adriana's murder was hilarious. And the Big Pussy storyline had the inevitability of tragedy. But the overall premise of the show is explicitly about incongruities — a mobster family with the usual suburban problems, except instead of Timmy hiding the broken vase under the couch, Timmy shoots his babysitter in the head and buries her in five locations. The eruptions of brutal violence are not funny, but they are all the more overwhelming because they happen within a comic framework.

The characters are almost all comic. Tony. Artie. Paulie. Silvio. Janice. Dr. Kupferberg. Ralphie. Steve Buscemi's Tony. Johnny Sack. Tony's mother. These are great comic turns, transcendently written and acted. Carmela, on the other hand, is pulled between her desire to have a normal, happy family and her recognition that her family life is built on abnormal evil; her reconciliation with Tony was, I thought, tragic. (Melfi is resolutely non-comic, which maybe explains why she's one of my least favorite characters.)

So, I imagine the writers sitting around trying to figure out what to do with this semi-last season. They want to give Tony some peace. So, they shoot him in the gut as a way of clearing his head. If Tony is given a second chance, how much of the value in his life will he be able to see? How soft can Tony go? Then we had the Vito story line, which was pure comedy. (And more, of course, because it's the Sopranos.) "I wonder what would happen if we put one of these guys into a sleepy New England town," said one writer. "Yeah, and made him gay," said another. "And can we work the word 'johnnycakes' into it somehow?" wondered a third. (This entire conversation would have happened entirely in David Chase's head.)

And then the writers tried to figure out what ending would shock us. Tony kills Carmela? AJ gets whacked? Furio strangles Tony with his pony tail? Paulie Walnuts is appointed head of FEMA? What final scene would we not be ready for?

When they hit on the idea they went with, the writers must have had a good laugh.

I thought it worked. [Tags: sopranos tv entertainment]

Attila Weinberger

I got an email msg from Attila Weinberger, a Romanian blues musician who was wondering if we're related. I told him my father had Hungarian blood, and Attila's hometown turns out to have been in Hungary for a while. So, there's a pretty good chance we're cousins to some degree.

In any case, I promise you that this is the best Transylvanian blues you've ever heard. He's a damn fine musician who was playing the blues even when the Communists didn't want him to. You can hear some tracks here, or click on AG's Blues Radio at the upper left of his site. [Tags: attila_weinberger music blues romania]

Dropping Knowledge

DroppingKnowledge.org is trying to create a "blogstorm" to support what seems like a well-intentioned project. The site is trying to collect 100,000 important questions facing the species. Then, on Sept. 9, 113 "scientists, social entrepreneurs, philosophers, writers, artists and activists from around the world" will get together to talk about 100 of them.

If they make progress, great. If they focus attention on important issues, great. But wouldn't it be wonderful if, instead of relying on 113 experts sitting around a table, there were some medium by which the people of the world themselves — at least the ones with a Net connection — could talk about for themselves, over the long term? If only we had such a medium...if only... [Tags: droppingknowledge]

McDonalds Games is more in touch with reality than is McDonald's Rain-Forest-Fed Cow Division

McDonald's Interactive has left McDonald's because McDonald's is leading the planet to "global calamity." Interactive is now devoting itself to stimulating mass action on the environment. [Tags: environment mcdonalds games]

AKMA on da Vinci Code

AKMA raises question about The Da Vinci Code that advance the discussion beyond the canapes served at Jesus' wedding and the resurrection of the mullet. (I read the first page of the book and put it down. And I haven't seen the movie.) [Tags: akma da_vinci_code movies theology]

Data retention explained

Bill McGeveran clarifies and evaluates the Department of Justice's plan to make ISPs retain data.

IANAL. Bill is. Good stuff. [Tags: bill_mcgeveran digital_rights do js privacy]

Las Vegas meta-luck

(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)

I'm at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company's annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn't make interesting.

At every intersection in the "village" there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid's wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn't go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.

Actually, I'm assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they're seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they're real, they're a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou'll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here's a meta-gambling ploy I'm surprised the casinos haven't hit on yet:

The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let's say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don't pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!

(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)

[Tags: whines las_vegas gambling casinos florence]

Bogus Contest: Die Hard rev. 4

Bruce Willis is set to make a fourth Die Hard movie, in which his character, John McCainMcClane comes out of retirement "to battle terrorists intent on using the internet to spread their attacks." According to Entertainment iAfrica, the original script was titled Die Hard 4.0, but Willis nixed the pix's title.

The previous Die Hards were titled: Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. So, what would be a good title for the fourth Die Hard given that it has the Internet as its villain? For example:

Die Hard on the Internets
Die Hard 404
Die Hard: Packet Wars
Die Hard: Vista

And what tough guy line might McClane utter in a signature sort of way? E.g.,

Something tells me the Net's no longer neutral.
Time to live? Ten seconds, you son of a bitch.
I'm going to tear you a new open source.
Markets are conversations...and I speak fluent Bullet.
Cathedral? Bazaar? It all makes the same beautiful, beautiful rubble.

[Tags: movies contest bruce_willis]

Captain Copyright: It's gotta be not a joke

Captain Copyright looks like it's a joke, but it's not. The site, set up by the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, suggests lame activities for teachers eager to inculcate copyright totalitarianism in their young charges. It's unintentionally hilarious. (And it's been slashdotted.)

Seth Finkelstein, on a mailing list, points to this bit from the site's own page on copyrights and permissions:

"Permission is expressly granted to any person who wishes to place a link in his or her own website to www.accesscopyright.ca or any of its pages with the following exception: in order to protect the moral rights associated with this site, permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright. Specifically, permission to link is explicitly withheld from sites featuring pornographic, racist or homophobic content. If you link to or otherwise include www.captaincopyright.ca on your website, please let us know."

Ok, so how about this: Access Copyright is a fascist organization.

PS: My favorite bit from that page: "You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windows™ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website." That's just plain weird. [Tags: coyright digital_rights access_copyright ]

CraigsList and GoogleMaps mashed together

Ian Reardon is taking Craigslist RSS feeds and populating a GoogleMap of Boston with apartment listings.

Nice. [Tags: craigslist mashup google_maps web2.0 ian_reardon]

Whining about the Globe

The Boston Globe is a great paper, I love it, I subscribe, I read it everyday, ok? But the little things unreasonably annoy me. Aaarrrgggghhh! For example:

EVery Saturday, the Globe's op-ed page runs a box of notable and fun quotes from the week, usually with a jest or two from the TV funnymen. This week, one of the seven quotes is Bill Clinton saying "I had a lot of happy times there," talking about his private White House office in an audiotape tour of his museum. Ooooh, "happy times"...Bill Clinton....snicker snicker. This is as funny as Steven Carrell saying "That's what she said" on The Office, except on the TV show it's supposed to be embarrassingly not funny.

The funnyman quote is a Jay "The Opposite of Funny" Leno joke about the Capitol being locked down because of what sounded like gun shots. It turned out it was just a pneumatic tool being used to repair an elevator. Japed Jay, "You can see how these mistakes are made. See, people in Washington, they're not used to the sound of actual work being done."

Hey-oh!

This was the funniest political joke on TV last week? Congress is lazy? Clinton got blown? How trenchant!

Both of these quotes are lazy and thoughtless. They're comforting, not revealing or provocative like the best political humor. In a small small way, they help abrade democratic discourse.

(Note to self: Next time have the morning coffee before blogging.)

[Tags: media whines boston_globe jay_leno humor]

How to be dumb

Scott Rosenberg berates the WSJ for mischaracterizing his own report on Al Gore's talk at the D conference. Apparently Gore talked for five minutes about the history of the media, which was five minutes too much for the WSJ. Yup, we've got no time for history! Hey, f*cking up the planet is a fulltime job! [Tags: scott_rosenberg al_gore media history wsj]

Susan Crawford explains Net neutrality

Jeez, the title of this post exhausts the body of this post. [Tags: susan_crawford network_neutrality]

Two lessons

The Swedish Criminal Police yesterday shut down PiratesBay, a popular site where people posted torrents, many of which were copyrighted material. From this we can learn two lessons:

1. Even though PiratesBay hosted no content of its own, providing the metadata that lets people download illegal content apparently is as illegal as providing the data itself.

2. If there are doubts about the legality of your site, don't include the word "pirate" in it. [Tags: torrents copyright piratesbay digital_rights]

Microformats gets a push, or is it a pull?

Microformats are quick-and-dirty standards for expressing common data types. The standard example is a microformat for reviews which lets a blogger encode the expected data — name of the reviewed thing, number of stars, commentary, etc. — in a standard way so another app can harvest it and, perhaps, aggregate all the reviews of restaurants in Watertown. Microformats are developed quickly, using what's out there as a starting point, aiming at usable but probably incomplete standards, as opposed to setting up an industry committee to argue for 12 years about what Platonic ideal of the standard.

So, today Technorati [Disclosure: I'm on the board of advisors and I'm friends with a bunch of Technoratians] announced that Technorati is going to provide searching that understands the data in microformats. For example, if you search for "chinese" within reviews, you get back reviews of Chinese restaurants but not blogs that talk about Chinese Checkers. (I assume that at some point Technorati's microformats search — currently a research beta — will let us do fielded searches within microformat domains, e.g., have a box where we can enter dates when searching for events.)

Technorati also announced Pingerati, a service that aggregates and distributes microformat pings to anyone who wants them. So, if you have a calendar app that supports microformats, you can set it to ping Pingerati whenever you update it. Anyone who wants to build an app that uses updated calendar information can subscribe to it. (Unlike existing ping services, Pingerati is designed to work for pages that aren't blogs as well as for blogs.) Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, says that Pingerati is free both to pingers and to those who want to receive the pings.

This is all good news because we need more metadata. Metadata lets us surf the information tsunami. Microformats are highly useful, but they won't be adopted unless there are apps that make use of them. Today's announcements make it easier for others to make something out of microformat data.

Hats off to Tantek Çelik for the enormous amount of work he's put into this, and to Technorati for enabling Tantek to do this. [Tags: microformats standards metadata technorati tantek_celik pingorati search]

Girlcotting the Dixie Chicks (or: The asymmetry of free speech)

I'm glad to see the Dixie Chicks' new CD at #1, even though I liked their previous one better, because it bodes well for free speech: I think it's wrong to boycott singers because of their political views but fine to girlcott them for those very same views. (Yes, I just made up "girlcott": To buy from a vendor to reward her for her actions or beliefs. And, yes, I know "boycott" comes from Charles C. Boycott, so "girlcott" makes no sense at all.)

In March, 2003, I blogged that I was buying my first DC CD because it was being kept off the air because of an anti-Bush remark Natalie Maines made at a concert. Isn't that as bad as boycotting the CD? Aren't both actions a type of free speech?

Yes, both are free speech (in some extended sense of the term). You are totally within your rights to never buy another DC CD, to microwave your DC collection, to tell your local radio station you'll change the channel permanently if it plays a song by any band with a D and a C in its name, and to say on talk radio that Maines is a traitor who ought to have her head shaved and be driven down the streets of Baghdad tied to the front of a Hummer. Whatever. There's no question in my mind that all this is free speech.

Boycotting and girlcotting both exercise the right to free speech, but one is bad for that right and the other is not. Boycotting an artist because of views expressed outside of her work chills free speech. That seems to me to be the same as not shopping at your local convenience store because the owner said something at town meeting about, say, the local schools, with which you vehemently disagree. If half the town boycotted the store because of that, the owner would be driven out of business. This would discourage citizens from stating their views...an exercise of free speech that's bad for free speech.

But suppose the owner were girlcotted because of something she said about the school system. This might have the effect of encouraging citizens to support popular causes in public. This would not be good for free speech since it provides an economic incentive to support what's already popular. But, presumably the populace has less reason to girlcott for the expression of popular views than for unpopular views. Thus, girlcotting should tend to encourage a diversity of views. At the least it can mitigate the chilling effect of a boycott.

Sure, girlcotting could be gamed and manipulated. But, girlcotting — especially to mitigate the effects of a boycott — is overall good for free speech and good for democracy. I think. [Tags: dixie_chicks free_speech boycott girlcott music politics]

"Girlcott" has been used before, but to mean a protest by girls.

Nolan on Dozier

Nice piece by Chris Nolan about a chance encounter with Kimberly Dozier, the CBS correspondent currently in critical condition after being injured in Iraq. [Tags: chris_nolan kimberly_dozier iraq media]