If Godwin's Law had teeth

Peter W. Galbraith has an excellent column in the Boston Globe today explaining the deep irony of Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to associate those opposing his Iraq war with those who appeased Hitler.

Ronald Reagan sent Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein in during the war Iraq started with Iran:

... the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might actually lose. Reagan chose Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984. Inconveniently, Iraq had begun to use chemical weapons against Iran in November 1983, the first sustained use of poison gas since a 1925 treaty banning that.

Rumsfeld never mentioned this blatant violation of international law to Hussein, instead focusing on shared hostility toward Iran and an oil pipeline through Jordan.

...

[after the war]...President George H.W. Bush's administration actually doubled US financial credits for Iraq. A week before Hussein invaded Kuwait, the administration vociferously opposed legislation that would have conditioned US assistance to Iraq on a commitment not to use chemical weapons and to stop the genocide against the Kurds. At the time, Dick Cheney, now vice president, was secretary of defense and a statutory member of the National Security Council that reviewed Iraq policy. By all accounts, he supported the administration's appeasement policy.

In 2003, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld all cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons 15 years before as a rationale for war. But at the time Hussein was actually doing the gassing — including of his own people — they considered his use of chemical weapons a second-tier issue.

Galbraith, by the way, interviewed survivors of Iraq's slaughter of Kurds in 1988, gathering evidence to support Claiborne Pell's bill that would have ended US financial support for Iraq. The leader of the Reagan administration's opposition? Colin Powell.

Rumsfeld has looked Hussein in the eye when our government was supporting him. Rumsfeld calling other appeasers is yet more evidence that the flaws we see in others are the flaws we see in ourselves.

And I don't want to let the appeaser charge stick in any way. I was not against the Iraq war because I wanted to appease terrorists. I want to fight terrorists. I just oddly insist that we fight them where they are and not where they aren't.

[Tags: rumsfeld iraq appeasement peter_galbraith politics terrorism]

Gov. Warner in Second Life

Mark Warner, an unannounced candidate for the presidency, is going to be interviewed in Second Life on Thursday at 3:30pm (eastern time, I think).

I wonder what his avatar will look like... [Tags: politics mark_ warner secondlife]

Bookmooch

John Buckman of Magnatune has started a new service called Bookmooch. You list books you're willing to give away. If someone wants it, you send it (at your expense) and get a credit which you can then use to mooch a book from someone else. The service is free.

Sounds pretty cool, even if it does encourage the "soft piracy" of giving books away without further compensating the author :)

[For the sarcasm-impaired: The smiley face is there to indicate that I don't really consider it piracy. I'm going to be sad — and angry — when DRM leaves it up to the publisher to decide how you dispose of content you've bought and now are done with.] [Tags: bookmooch digital_rights piracy copyright ]

Culver City offers "free" wifi with just one price: Your First Amendment rights

John Mitchell has an excellent explanation of Culver City's announced terms for offering free wifi access to "the Internet." It's free, but they get to decide which sites you can go to. Further, by pressing the "yes" button, you explicitly agree to waive your First Amendment rights.

From a legal standpoint, it is the same as if the Culver City public library were offering you free access to newspapers, but was first clipping out the articles it didn't like and making you agree not to sue for censorship if you wanted to read what was left.

President Bush was perspicacious when during the 2006 debates he referred to "the internets.". [Tags: wifi digital_rights culver_city john_mitchell]

Another personal library manager

Gurulib.com is a free service that lets you build a list of the items in your personal library by scanning in the barcodes of your books, CDs, etc. You can review them, sort them, and track who's borrowed them. You can also ask Gurulib to inform you when a book has dropped to a price you want to pay. It uses genres rather than tags; tags would be a nice addition.

LibraryThing.com, which is free for the first 200 books, seems to be more advanced in its features and has a bigger community using it. It doesn't let you scan in barcodes, but it's quite slick in its ability to find the title you meant to type. Liz Lawley's PULP is an enterprise server that lets you do the scanning thing: point your camera phone at a barcode and the item gets added to your library. Liz has some big plans for future PULP developments. (I went to her excellent session at Foo Camp.) There are others. This genre of service is getting popular.

GuruLib has a demo library you can play with. [Tags: gurulib libraries librarything liz_lawley tags]

The Feng Shui of Crowds

Andy Carvin is asking people to help him decide how to lay out his and Susanne's new apartment by downloading a copy of the apartment plan and uploading an edited version of it.

All I know is that he ought to hang Bradsucks' guitar — decorated via a similar process — in a prominent place [Tags: open_source_design bradsucks andy_carvin]

How I'm spending the rest of my summer vacation

My most excellent editor, Robin Dennis, has sent me a marked up version of the first draft of my book. It must weigh the weight of the paper plus two boxes of pencils.

She likes it and we're both happy, but I expect to be blogging a little more lightly over the next few weeks as I write the next draft of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Final Draft. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous blogging]

The dirtiest spot in your house

What's the one spot people with infectious diseases go to several times a day, spreading their germs carefully over a shared surface?

It's your family bottle of hand sanitizer. It's got to have the house's richest concentration of germs.

Of course, as my children point out, the sanitizing gel kills the germs that you've picked up from the bottle. So long as you don't miss a spot on your hands. And so long as the stuff actually works.

They ought to make the hand sanitizer bottle out of hand sanitizer. Another million dollar idea I give to you for nothing!

(Yeah, we could each get our own bottle, but, frankly, a little bacterial risk is a good thing.) [Tags: sanitation health]

The dysfunctional attention economy

Jeneane is banging on the rebirth of interest attention:

...anyone concerned with what you're paying attention to is out to make money off of you. Trying to paint attention monitoring or tracking or trust or what have you as anything other than that is dishonest. You and I are not that important. No one, I mean no one, besides a suspicious mate cares what you pay attention to online unless they're looking to divorce some bread from your wallet.

Well, or just checking to see whether you need to be shipped off to Guantanamo.

I like what Jeneane says. When your model of consciousness (note: not the brain) divorces attention from the ways we care, you get marketing campaigns that focus on the lizard portion of our brains. Rather than tricking us into liking their products, the campaigns try to trick us into thinking we're interested in something, anything. It's annoying and it's demeaning.

Marketers are the last people we should trust with our attention. [Tags: jeneane_sessum marketing attention]

StopBadWare lists AOL 9.0

StopBadWare.org, an organization sponsored in part by the Berkman Center, has put AOL 9.0 onto its list of malefactors because

it installs additional software without telling the user, it forces the user to take certain actions, it adds various components to Internet Explorer and the taskbar without disclosure, it may automatically update without the user's consent, and it fails to uninstall completely.

That's a big, gutsy step. But don't those same criteria mean that Windows XP should be on the list? [Tags: stopbadware aol ]

[foocamp06] Foo is over-ish

The tents are coming down. People are seeking out the one person they really wanted to talk with but did not run into — Foo has grown to 325 people or so. A comically long stream of pizza boxes are streaming in and being emptied one octal bite at a time.

It was a great Foo. Probably the best, at least for me. It is as an astounding set of people with a wide range of interests (within the tech field, of course) and a wonderful group ethos.

There's a time for calm discussion of hard issues. Right now is the time for thanks. So, thank you for the gift, Tim, and thank you to the gracious and fun O'Reilly crew for running the event not only so well but running it just enough. [Tags: foocamp06 oreilly]

[foocamp06] Everything is miscellaneous, chapter 8

Since I first talked publicly about Everything Is Miscellaneous (a book I've been writing for the past few years) at Foo Camp, and last year I had a session to kick around my proposed outline, at this Foo I read a chapter from the penultimate draft. (On Monday I get my editor's comments and write what is presumably the final draft. Well, besides copy editing. And changing my mind. And being obsolesced.) Chapter 8 is on the virtue of messiness and includes a section on the Semantic Web, since I figured it'd be better to be eviscerated in a small room than in full public.

It seemed to go ok. Some excellent suggestions from the listeners, including for subtitles... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous foocamp06 semweb semantic_web]

[foocamp2006] Thinglinks

Early this morning — so early, that you had to ask people if they were on their way up or down the path to Lethe — I had a chance to catch up with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, who blogs about design tech, and is the founder of Thinglink.org (I've written about Thinglink before.) It's a fascinating idea.

Web pages have unique URLS, but how can people who make physical unique stuff refer to their things uniquely? Go to Thinglink (it's open source) and get a 6-character random code, which is expressed as THING:123ABC. Simple idea. Some big consequences could accrue.

For example, Ulla says that in April, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki issued a Thinglink ID for each item in its exhibit of work by graduating masters students. This starts a history of the object so its appearances on the Web can be tracked. And it means that conversations about those objects can occur anywhere on the Web, not just on the exhibit's site. The ability to distribute conversation, confident that they can be pulled together on demand, changes the power balance. All hail unique ID's! (<hobbyhorse>For things! Things, dammit! Selves are not things. Selves become things by being uniquely and transparently identified.Selves are diminished — nay, betrayed — by becoming things. </hobbyhorse>)

And who does all this aggregating? Does Thinglink.org become the center of the world of things, a despotic tyrrant authorizing and tracking all its subjects? Nah. You obviously haven't met Ulla :) ThingLink maintains a database of information supplied by the person who creates the ID, but the aggregation is done by search engines. Of course, that means you have to stick the Thinglink ID into your post about the lovely, handmade Ukranian sweater you just saw, or into the description of the photo of the sweater you lust for. But, if you do that, your post (or page or photo or video or hit Indie MP3 "I Want to Love You as Much as My Ukranian Sweater") now becomes part of the worldwide swirl of creativity inspired by the thing. IDs aggregate value because they aggregate meaning.

The standard Thinglink ID consists of three letters followed by three numbers, enabling 17M numbers. But it is extensible, including 3-letter "partner code" prefixes.It's short so it's human readable, and (to my mind) more important, human type-able. If it catches on,Thinglink is going to need a bigger space in which to play. [Tags: foocamp06 thinglink ids Ulla-Maaria_Mutanen ]

Ask.com reads feeds

As Ask.com continues to explore ways to do make its searches yet more relevant and more thought-provoking — provocativeness is a possible fourth horseman riding next to precision, recall and relevancy — it's now leading its search results with the latest three entries from the appropriate RSS feed. So, if you search for "boingboing," the list is topped by the latest three posts on boingboing.com.

Currently, the feature only works for the most popular blogs, and it spottily finds the feeds for search terms other than the blog's name (e.g., the "cory doctorow" results page lists is topped by Cory's Wikipedia article, not the BoingBoing feed), but I assume it'll only get better over time. And why not add non-blog feeds, such as WashingtonPost.com's?

It's a nice way to take pull feeds into a spot where people were not looking for them. [Tags: ask search rss everything_is_miscellaneous]

Interview with moi, part 2

The second part of Mitch Joel's TwistImage Six Pixels of Separation podcast with me about Cluetrainy stuff (with a little Everthing Is Miscellaneous thrown in) is up. (Part one is here.) [Tags: marketing podcast cluetrain]

The proof we've been looking for

From a Philadelphia newspaper:

[foocamp06] All technology is neutral

[As always, all of this is me rapidly paraphrasing, paying attention most to what happens to interest me, and putting everything worse than the speakers did.]

Chris Csikszentmihalyi says science doesn't work the way it thinks it does. For one thing, only 3-5% of experiments are re-proven. Often that's because they're so sensitive to instruments and materials. Also, much of the knowledge is tacit. Instead, scientific conflicts are usually settled by looking at the lab it came from, etc.

So, his lab wants to know what types of research isn't getting done.

Three dualisms: 1. The Prayer Gauge Debate. In the 19th Century there were attempts to measure the efficacy of prayer. Science went up against a popular paradigm. Chris contrasts this with lab press releases getting done if they promise a cure for cancer. I.e., scientists learn to mis-represent their projects in order to get funded.

2. Mertonian Norms. Merton said that scientists work for commonality, universalism, and organized skepticism. Vs. 80% of MIT funding comes from the US government. To the scientists involved, the knowledge they develop is not politicized. But Chris' Indian friends see it as inevitably and very much politicized.

3. Tool neutrality. But saying it's neutral is like saying that from far away, everything is small. Vs. Technology is out of control. If it's out of control, it is an agent, and thus isn't neutral. [Hmm. This contrast isn't symmetrical.]

Chris' conclusion: We know very little about how technology works, and we tend to very sloppy in how we think about it.

He gives a couple of examples of non-neutral tech: A Lebanese grad student is consistently searched multiple times when coming across the US border, so she built a suit that records the pat-downs.

And a student created a personal audio device that integrates ambient sounds, so that someone speaking to you is brought in as someone singing beautifully.

Me: If someone says what they're building is neutral, you can ask them, "Then why are you building it?"

Chris: Given where the funding for tech is coming from, given how hard it is, how can we build stuff that isn't just neutral? Bruno Latour's example: The thingies that automatically pull the door closed behind you. You get one after the sign you put up that says "Please close the door" fails to work. The door now shifts from normally being open to being shut.

Kaliya Hamlin: The interesting thing is to shift where the money is coming from.

Quinn Norton: Socially responsible investing has the reputation of being money-losing, but it's not.

Tom Coates: I'm reminded of research that showed that initially took sperm as the active principle and eggs as lazy. And looking at only one sexuality scale rather than multiples is silly. Examining these premises is useful. Not everything is right.

Chris: The idea of bedrock is troubling. Diverse interpretations work.

Tom: But some paradigms advance us. E.g., the info model of the brain lets us do more than the old pneumatic one.

Chris tries to steer the discussion from this topic because, he thinks, it can progress without having to resolve the issue. Chris and Tom agree that all are politicized.

Zack Exley: For the past 150 years ago we've been stuck in this abstract argument.The solution is to do something. Make something. Run for Congress. More smart people in Congress.

Kaliyah: It's a structural problem.

Someone: VCs are investing heavily in non-military projects aimed at making the world better.

[Conversation gets too thick to take notes on sensibly. And, as you may have noticed, the above doesn't capture the conversation up to this point very well. Sorry.]

Chris: Right now, engineers generally look at the efficiency of solutions. My thirty year goal is to expand the considerations. E.g., suppose the democratic quotient or the egalitarian quotient were involved? We don't have a lot of language for talking about this.

Zack: Why would a corporation do this?

Chris: They can do this in part because of the myth of the neutrality of technology.

Me: But "tech is neutral" is only a rationalization. If you could get the corporate mission to be enhance shareholder value AND make the world better, you wouldn't have to worry about the rationalization.

Chris: But 18 year old engineers-to-be are taught that they don't need to consider the effect of their tech on the world because they've been taught that tech is neutral.

Kaliya: You should read Engineering by Design...

[It continues...]

[Tags: foocamp06 technology politics]

[foocamp06] First life in Second Life

Julian Bleeker is interested in how first life and second life (with SecondLife.com as a good example) overlap.

E.g., he designed a game in which players got a word square (jumbled letters that contain words) that they had to track physically in a field, wired with GPS. Some decided instead to "draw" by walking in a path that created a picture.

Nikolaj Nyholm talks about how Imity.com uses Second Life to prototype user interactions.

Matt Bidulph has been doing Second Life mashups. You can use http, he says, to pipe out info from SecondLife, including what people are saying. Cory Ondrejka, Second Life CTO, says that there's been an explosion of interest and development since they put in http requests. (Someday, he says, they'll make every object a Web server.) He says that there are 100 classes a week inside Second Life in how to use the API and scripting language.He looks forward to the day when there is a Second Life renderer inside a Web browser.

Phillip Rosedale, Second Life founder, says that they're a small development house. They're focused on opening Second Life up and getting it to run fast.

Nikolaj says that it'll be at least five years before we can programmatically and ubiquitously locate someone in terms of latitude.longitude based on their phone positions, but we can already (see Imity) see who is around a particular phone number. GPS will take that long to get put into cellphones because of battery life...

[Tags: foocampe06 second_life ]

[foocamp06] Future of news

Mike Davidson of Newsvine.com opens by saying this is a time to talk about how to improve the editorial process. How to decide which stories are important and interesting without human intervention? E.g., Techmeme.com looks at what A-Listers and B-Listers are linking to, while Digg lets everyone vote.Newsvine measures how long you spend looking at a story.

Jay Adelson of Digg.com says he'd like to see the mainstream media reflect more of what people actually are interested in. Steven Levy of Newsweek worries that this would result in even more coverage of runaway brides, etc. Digg says that people tend not to digg porn, etc., because it's associated with their profile. Dan Gillmor wonders how you add reputation to popularity.

Someone asks about journalism on demand. Dan says that some projects are going on now, including Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net. Fundable.org also does something like this.

Me: I want to get recommendations based on what my friends are reading and, as Dan points out, what friends of my friends are reading. Jay points to some people's desire to be anonymous. Dan touts pseudonymity. Karl Fogel says that that permits covert corporate and government sponsorship. Dan asks how we out bad actors. Suggestions: eBay-like recommendation system. Newsvine has a probationary period. Slashdot karma.

Newsvine tried eBay-like ratings — report bad articles — but found that the best writers were about 80% because some people didn't like what they said. The bland writers had 100%.

Me: The simple way to start is to let me build a list of people I actually know and whose judgment I want to influence what's recommended to me. Then I don't have to worry that the person is in fact the CIA or Wal-Mart.

Gabe Riviera of Techmeme is using the implicit social network based on who refers to whom.

Does Diig track how many people diig a page before they'e clicked on the article.Jay doesn't quite answer.

If we only listen to people we trust, how do we get challenged?

Dan recommends newstrust.net, an effort to measure MSM.

Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says.

Graeme Merrall augments reporters' stories with metadata.

Dan says there's a difference between stories and data. Steven Levy says that without training journalists in how to write a story, the data won't ever become a story.

Already, he says, journalism is becoming a matter of filling in forms and then letting computers build the story. E.g., at one small paper, there's a visiting band form that the journalists fill in.

Dan points out that Adrian did an app that plotted police/crime info. [I missed the url.]

John Gruber points out that columnists are not so easily replaceable.

Dan rises to defend reporters. Reporting is hard than we're making out.

Mike Davidson wonders if 5-10 years we'll be able to say that we want to read a story about the new Apple, written in the style of John Gruber of Steven Levy, etc. He's skeptical.

Lily Chen says that it depends a lot on what people care about. She cares about what happens on her street but no one is writing about. An automated system might be able to be of value there.

Karl Fogel says that people in the US feel isolated from worldwide news sources in part because there's no translation. In the open source world, documentation has been translated within days, he says.

Jay wonders if info will continue to go behind the pay wall after a few days. General opinion in the room (actually, in the tent): Nope.

Rabble says that more journalists work as PR people than journalists. Dan says that we need more transparency. Mike of Newsvine says companies have offered to pay them to put their legitimate sources on their site. BestBuy has paid someone to write an article about, say, hot products, that contains a single quote from BestBuy. Newspapers run the article knowing that it's in effect a paid placement. It's labeled "ARA" but that's the only sign.

Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it's a report on a mayor's speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.

Graeme points to Visionbytes.com for media search. AOL says that their Drambuie project does something similar. [Tags: journalism digg dan_gilmore newsvine techmeme washingtonpost citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

[foocamp06] The hot phrase of the conference, so far

"Mechanical Turk" [Tags: foocamp06]

Web -1.0

Web -1.0 is the successor to Web 2.0 unless we're vigilant and refuse to allow our permission-free Web to be turned into pay-for-play, always-ID'ed, ask-before-you-post, 100%-terrorist-free, professionals-only tubes. [Tags: digital_rights ]

[foocamp06] Posing for Google Earth

The Google Earth camera plane is going to be flying over the O'Reilly campus at noon today, shooting at a resolution of two inches (i.e., 1 pixel = 2 inches). As someone said last night when this was announced, "Brush your teeth."

So, there's discussion of what to do for the plane when it passes. Here are a few ideas:

1. Reenact a scene from Hieronymus Bosch, although we may not have enough time to make the pig demon heads.(This is a real chance to get in touch with the bottom up grassroots, so to speak.)

2. Create a street scene lying down so the image will look like it was shot from street level, rather than top down.

3. Create a high res photo using two-inch squares of gray tones. [Tags: foocamp06 google_earth]

[foocamp06] Welcome to Foo, you lucky few

FOO (Friends of O'Reilly) Camp is perhaps my favorite conference because it is more like a camp than a conference. Tim O'Reilly invites a couple of hundred people (it's getting bigger as it gets older) for an unstructured 2.25 days. If you want to lead a session, you write it onto the paper-based wiki. The sessions are almost universally highly informal, and the structured ones tend to be well worth the structure. Plus, perhaps because there are something like a dozen simultaneous sessions, skipping one to hang out and talk with the incredible people here doesn't seem like a lost opportunity because you were never going to see everything you should anyway.

Last night we began with the traditional introductions: One by one, everyone in a large room — a tent this year — stands up, says her name, affiliation, and three words. The intros ranged from the listing of technical areas to three-word world overviews. Although my perception is inevitably skewed, it seemed to me that this year there were more social activist technologists and more women.

So, here's why I love FOO: Last night, after a looong drive up from Oakland, which the presence of Ron Hornbaker (Bookcrossing, Propsmart) as a passenger made seem short, I immediately went to the back lot to pitch my tent. By the time I made it onto the main backyard, I had had conversations with amazing people about digital rights in the UK, why evaluating to a curve suppresses productivity, open source politics, and the state of PR's adapting to networked markets. All of these are for me listening topics, especially given the caliber of the people I got to listen to and ask questions of.

And there's the rub. FOO is by invitation only. I feel privileged in both senses to be here. More than just feelings are at stake. Social networking inevitably happens at FOO. If FOO doesn't make an effort to be diverse, the old boys will just naturally become better friends because they spent 2.25 days camping, eating and peeing together. O'Reilly has been making an effort to be more diverse. Enough? Nah. But what would be enough? As with any institution, they are stuck with a starting point that doesn't fairly reflect the population's talents. It's not an easy problem. Taking it seriously, making steady progress, and always feeling that there's more to do seems to me to be the requirement. Also, this year, campers were asked to list people they would like to be invited to next year's FOO. Good idea.

There's value to an invitation-only party, but it's not the only sort of party we need. That's why I'm so happy that the original FOO Camp spurred the invention of unbarred BAR camps that are structured like FOO but are open to anyone. There's a place for both.

But I don't trust my judgment because I so love being at FOO. Getting to hang out with this community — makers — is deeply satisfying to me. Deeply.

So, I'm feeling very happy to be here, and only a little guilty. [Tags: foocamp06 foo oreilly conferenza]

Oh yeah, now I remember why Windows sucks!

I just spent most of a morning trying to figure out why the Blackberry software installer installs the Palm desktop manager instead of the Blackberry desktop manager. After extirpating anything related to palm on my drives and in the registry, including anything containing the words "fist" or "frond" just to be sure, I finally moved the zip file from D: to C:, figuring (correctly, I'm pretty sure), that the zip file was executing a different file that happened to be named "setup.exe." I don't know why the wrong one wasn't overwritten by the right one, or maybe the unzipper was too stupid to get the paths right. But installing from C — because it's C or because it's not D? — seems to have done the trick.

Now can I have those four hours back? Thank you. [Tags: windows windows_sucks blackberry]

Don't ask, don't care

365Gay.com points out that as Bush calls Marines back to active duty — that's got to be tough news to get — the number of troops discharged for being gay is increasing. Apparently, two a day are now being kicked out, for a total of 11,000 since the policy went into effect in 1993. "According to the GAO more than 800 of those had skills deemed ‘critical' by the Department of Defense, including linguistic training, medical skills and expertise in combat engineering," says 365gay. [Tags: gays iraq]

FTC wading into Net Neutrality - But is it neutral?

Thomas Vander Wal posts the bad news about the FTC entering into the Net neutrality debate. It looks like the FTC's method is not itself neutral. [Tags: net_neutrality thomas_vander_wal ftc]

Google the Telco

I think Dvorak gets this one right: Suppose Google discovers that providing free wifi in its hometown actually makes money. Google then has the know-how and the motivation to replicate it over and over and over...

Of course, my outlook is heavily tinged with hope. Google is far more aligned with my view of the Web's role and importance than are any of the incumbent telcos. [Tags: google wifi telecommunications dvorak]

Garrison Keillor on listening to the voices of those murdered on 9/11

He contrasts the voices of those fellow souls and of the politicians who have benefited. If you're not a paid member of Salon, you can choose to watch a commercial first. It's worth it. [Tags: garrison_keillor 911 wtc rudy_guiliani]

Fear of export

In the new issue of my newsletter, I have a small review of RoboForm, a password manager for Windows that I've gotten quite attached to. It's full featured and works without getting in the way. I like it a lot. But...

Among its features, it will generate obscure passwords for you, useful for the lazy ones among us (i.e., all but the 1% of us who are Data Saints) who use the same passwords everywhere. (Software like RoboForm thus brings us the "single sign-on" benefit that is one of the selling points of identity management platforms, but that's a different hobby horse.) I haven't been using the auto-password-generator, however, because RoboForm has no export capability. If I use it for a few years, I could have hundreds of finger-twistin' passwords. If I want to switch to a different password manager, I'd have to type them in manually, an annoying, error-prone process.

(Mea Culpa: In my newsletter, I take RoboForm to task for not even having a way of printing out the passwords. I was wrong. David Teare, the creator of 1Password, a Mac password manager that imports from RoboForm, wrote to let me know that there is a way to print out RoboForm passwords. Then 1Password scrapes the html print file. David says 1Password is adding an export capability. PS: I'd sent the RoboForm PR person a message asking about this, but I only gave them two days to get back to me.)

I don't mean to pick on RoboForm, for it is exceptionally friendly in its day-to-day use. Microsoft Word, which says it will support the Open Document Format but still doesn't, is a more important target. Every app should make it easy — not just possible, but easy — for a user to break up with it. It's our time and information. If there isn't a standard format for the interchange of information for that particular application area, then a documented, comma-delimited file would be a big step forward. There's also this new standard called "XML" I believe that seems to be catching on with the youngsters. But for Lord's sake, let us have our data.

We should not have been allowed to advance to Web 2.0 until every app gave us that basic Web 0.0 way of moving data around.

We won't love you unless you let us leave you. [Tags: roboform 1password odf]

Admiring weeds

Meredith Sue Willils, the writer and my sister-in-law, has a poem admiring weeds even as she's uprooting them. (Sue's blog has no visible permalinks, so you may have to search for "Admiration for Weeds.")

Social network sites research

danah is compiling a list of people researching social network sites....

Unregulated traffic is working well, thank you

From Susan Crawford's blog:

From the OECD, a useful paper about interconnection online. It turns out (surprise!) that inter-networking is working fine without intervention. There are zillion networks out there, and as long as the local telecommunications environment is sufficiently open (all the way to opening up incumbent facilities to competitors), these networks are finding ways to connect on their own:

The greatest cost barriers to any country connecting to global networks are not traffic exchange relationships, in competitive environments, but monopolists charging high prices in the absence of such competition.

Also -- where there's facilities-based competition, broadband prices can plummet and services to rural areas can be profitable. Global Broadband Battles makes the same point: Reform to telecommunications regulation (opening up facilities to competitors) is the key to stimulating growth in access.

She thanks Milton Mueller for the pointer to the paper, so I thank him to the second degree...

Tags:net_neutrality susan_crawford oecd

Want some background music?

Sonific lets you provide background music for your page, choosing from the site's copyright-cleared selection. It's free, but even so, I am so far out of the demographic that I 'd rather have Sonific-earmuffs that auto-mute any site that installs it. Don't get me wrong: Sonific may catch on, and for those who like that sort of thing, it may be just what the dj ordered. The fact that it's not for me is probably a good sign for Sonific - we can only assume that Sonific's target market isn't crotchety old men.

Podcast interview of moi, about Cluetrainy stuff

Mitch Joel has posted the first half of a 45-min interview on marketing 'n' stuff as part of his Six Pixels of Separation series. This is somehow related to a keynote I'm doing at a Canadian Marketing Association conference. [Tags: marketing cluetrain mitch_joel]

Consumer Internet Bill of Rights

Susan Crawford has a terrific analysis of Sen. Ted Stevens' Consumer Internet Bill of Rights, which, as she points out, is wrong from its very first word. Yo, Ted, you know what I'm exactly not doing with the Internet right now? Consuming it. I'm creating a little tiny bit more of it.

Susan's analysis, however, is more balanced and thorough, and does not use the word "Yo" even once.

She concludes:

The IBR doesn't shift the current situation. Network access providers have all the power and discretion they want — and, indeed, this bill if enacted would codify their right to packet-discriminate.

...

...the only ex ante rule that will make unfettered internet access a reality is mandated structural separation. We'd need to turn transmission into a utility in order to change the environment.

Two reasons Snakes on a Plane is cool

[Note: I know the following is dangerously close to self-parody. But I do think the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon is interesting.]

1. Remember how we all made Mahir, the Kiss man, famous? Some people spread the link out of a mean sense of superiority. (Mahir used his moment of celebrity to try to engage people across cultures, so now who's the foolish one, eh?) But we also spread it because we could. We — all of us, each of us, none of us famous — could make an unknown human famous. It changed our relationship to celebrity, the continued existence of Paris Hilton not to the contrary.

With Snakes on a Plane, we're flexing our muscles in a new way. We're not insisting that JarJar be killed in the sequel, although we did write the movie's most quotable line. But that's cool only because it means with SoaP we're messing with the audience's relationship to the movie, and not just - as with Rocky Horror - during the time when the movie unspools in the theater. Rather, with SoaP the audience has taken over the meaning of the movie. This is very different from being asked to design Indiana Jones' new outfit or write witticisms for the next James Bond movie. We, without being asked, have insisted on what this movie means to us.

What does it mean to us? Well, we're refusing to let the movie be marketed to us as B movies — think Anaconda — are, as if we're idiots who really think such movies are anything more than a retelling of the same plot over and over and over. With SoaP we're saying that we know exactly what sort of movie it is, and we're capable of enjoying it for the very qualities that make it a B movie. Don't think we're really surprised when a snake bites the guy on the nuts, as I assume happens, even if we jump because of the clever editing. We all knew someone would get bitten in the crotch, and we've always been conspirators in the success of B movies. Now we're making that clear by reveling in our power, just as we did with Mahir.

I don't think this is a turning point in how movies are made. The SoaP phenomenon has gotten much of its juice from the fact that this is the first time. Hollywood I'm sure is already trying to figure out how to repeat the success. But that's like Hollywood plotting to find the next Mahir. Nah, Hollywood will continue, and we'll find the next project we want to commandeer because, after all...[cue portentious music] aren't we all the snakes on the plane?

2. Samuel L. Jackson. [Tags: snakes_on_a_plane SoaP movies pretentious_writing]

On reading the reviews of Snakes on a Plane

They spake so plain,
of the stakes to gain.
Rakes of pain?
Flakes of murrain?
Complain of a migraine?
Inane to the brain?
Or parfait by the Seine?
A rain of champagne?
Playin' with sugar cane?
Wayans' amazin'?
Stay in a Days Inn?
Charlemagne of Acquitaine?

The main pain?
Sustain three motherf***ing quatrains.

[Tags: soap snakes_on_a_plane]

Blackboard's patent - the wiki

Seb Schmoller points out that the article in Wikipedia about the history of virtual learning environments was created on July 29, and just a couple of weeks and hundreds of edits later, it's pretty durn good. But this is not idle knowledge. It comes in the face of the patent granted to Blackboard. The article tacitly establishes prior art.

Well, not entirely tacitly. A notice at the top of the article links to a wiki that contests the Blackboard patent claim by claim. [Tags: blackboard patent vle education wikipedia seb_schmoller]

Chilean interview with me

El Mercurio (Chile) has published an interview with me about blogging and marketing.

As far as I can tell — my high school Spanish doesn't get me all that far — it seems fine, and I enjoyed talking with Daniela Santelices, the author. Two corrections, though: 1. The conference/seminar I was going to in Santiago in a week has just been canceled. Que lástima! 2. I think the article says I'm a columnist for the NY Times, when in fact many years ago they ran an op-ed of mine in their Education section. So, I'm happy to take the upgrade, but...

I don't mean to carp, and I do appreciate the chance to express myself in a part of the world I've never visited, but I also want to set the record straight. [Tags: blogs marketing cluetrain]

Overclocked conversations

I'm not very happy with what I wrote yesterday about anonymity. I should have taken more time with it, but the conversation was moving so quickly that I felt I had to jump in.

There must be a mathematical way to express the Law of Conversational Overclocking: As the acceleration of conversation increases past the maximum speed of thought, the quality of conversation deteriorates.

In fact, isn't there a sweet spot, which varies by topic, medium, number of participants, and personality? Conversations improve as they approach a certain velocity, and then deteriorate rapidly, until they break the Unsound Barrier (where the laws of logic go through a singularity), at which point the conversation just is no more?

Anonymity as the default, and why digital ID should be a solution, not a platform

Eric Norlin has posted using my piece on pseudonymity as a springboard. Unfortunately, comments on his site are not showing up. Then, Kim Cameron, digital ID architect at Microsoft, reprinted Eric's piece, but I'm unable to leave a comment at his site either. So, I was going to post my comment here. But, since then, the debate has expanded (my contribution seems to have been the phrase "anonymity is the default"): Ben Laurie argues that anonymity should be the substrate of identity systems. (Kim replies.) David Kearns has posted on the topic, arguing that privacy, not anonymity, is the issue. He follows up here. Tom Maddox replies. And Eric has posted again. This time I think his argument is weaker because he defines anonymity in a way that I think probably no one else does — he does not count a cash transaction as anonymous — but this is in service of raising the important question of what we should learn from our real world experience.

So, in lieu of leaving comments on other people's sites, here's an attempt to be clearer about what I mean by saying that anonymity should be the default.

The Internet is a social medium. In fact, it is a social world, a new public space. We are in the process of inventing the types of selves and societies that inhabit this public space. Because these are selves, the nuances and subtleties are as great as humans can manage. Nothing is simple.

We do have some experience with this, however. We have a real world. While obviously what we do — and who we are — on the Net keeps surprising us, we would be fools not to learn from the real world. So, here's something I think the real world teaches us. The term "anonymity" has a bad connotation because it's used primarily where there's an expectation of identification. We don't say that someone entered a movie theater anonymously unless we're implying that the person had reason to hide her identity, even though, in truth, anyone who pays cash for a theater ticket is entering it anonymously. So, because we use the term "anonymous" mainly where identification is expected, this may lead us to think that being identified is the usual state — the default state — in the real world. In fact, the rarity with which we use the term actually indicates that the opposite is the case: Anonymity is the default in the real world.

That of course doesn't mean that we're always anonymous. There are zones where ID becomes the default by law or policy. And, in a small-ish town or within a work community, we may expect to know who everyone is. But, even so, the people in the small town are not entitled (by law or custom) to demand to see a drivers license of a visiting aunt walking down the street. You need a special justification (in the real world) for demanding ID, but you don't need special justification for not demanding ID.

Of course that doesn't mean that anonymity should be the default online, just as e-commerce sites shouldn't replicate the real world experience of waiting on check-out lines. But, it's worth looking at the real world in this case because it can help undo anonymity's bad reputation, so that we can make a better judgment about what we want online.

Anonymity (including pseudonymity) does much good online. It also allows bad things to happen, but so does free speech. Before we tinker with the defaults, we ought to at least recognize what we may be giving up in the realms of (1) the political, (2) the social, and (3) the personal.

1. Anonymity allows people to say and do things that those in power don't like. It enables dissidents to speak and whistleblowers to blow their whistles.

2. Anonymity allows people to say and learn about things from which social conventions otherwise would bar them. It helps a confused teen explore gender issues.

3. Anonymity (and especially pseudonymity) enables a type of playing with our selves (yes, I know what I just said) that may turn out to be transformative of culture and society.

Anonymity also allows some awful things to happen more easily, but we can't fairly decide what we want to do about it unless we also acknowledge its benefits. Just as with free speech.

As David Kearns points out, some of these issues have to do with privacy. Since I'm interested in norms, I don't want to stipulate definitions of "privacy" and "anonymity," which is probably the only way to make their relationship crisply clear. The fact is that the two terms, as we use them in the real world, are murky alone and in relation. Roughly, when we talk about anonymity, we generally mean not knowing who I am, whereas when we talk about privacy, we generally mean not knowing things about me. (Logically, privacy includes anonymity since who I am is something to know about me, but in practice we use the terms separately.) In many instances, a strong right to privacy confers the benefits of anonymity. But, the real not-knowing of anonymity may be required in some regimes for people to feel free to speak. And it may have a subtle, liberating effect on the selves we're building in the new connected public.

Worse — at least if you insist on clarity — both terms are complex and gradated. Privacy is obviously something we can parcel out in dribs and drabs; that's what the new digital identity management systems enable. Anonymity sounds more binary, but because "who we are" is complex, so are the ways in which we can hold back information about who we are. An anonymous donor has probably identified herself to the organization that has agreed to withhold her name. An anonymous author may disclose that she has twenty years experience in the trade she's writing about. An anonymous stranger who runs after you with the wallet you dropped makes no effort to hide her face, even if she refuses to give her name. And the range of ways in which we are pseudonymous is enormous.

We don't have to sort this out entirely. Privacy, anonymity, publicness, resonsibility, shame, freedom, self, community...these and other core terms are properly in a royal stew of meaning.

Before we have all this clear, we're going to have to make some decisions. My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear.

I have confidence that the people designing these systems are going to create the right software defaults. The people I know firsthand in this are privacy fanatics and insistent that individuals be in control of their data. This is a huge and welcome shift from where digital ID was headed just a few years ago. We all ought to sigh in relief that these folks are on the job.

But, once these systems are in place, vendors of every sort will of course require strong ID from us. If I want to buy from, say, Amazon, they are likely to require me to register with some ID system and authenticate myself to them...far more strongly and securely than I do when I pay with a credit card in my local bookstore. Of course, I don't have to shop at Amazon. But why won't B&N make the same demand? And Powells? And then will come the blogs that demand I join an ID system in order to leave a comment. How long before I say, "Oh, to hell with it," and give in? And then I've flipped my default. Rather than being relatively anonymous, I will assume I'm relatively identified.

Does that matter? I think it does, for the political, social and person reasons mentioned above. Don't make me also argue against being on one's best behavior and against being accountable for everything one does! I'm willing to do it! I will pull this car over and do it! Just try me!

The basic problem is, in my opinion, that the digital ID crew is approaching this as a platform issue. Most places on the Web have solved the identity problem sufficiently for them to operate. Some ask for the three digits on the back of your credit card. Some only sign you up if you confirm an email. Some only let you on if you can convince an operator you know the name of your first pet and the senior year season record of your high school's football team. Sites come up with solutions as needed.

Good. Local solutions to local problems are less likely to change norms and defaults. But the push is on for an identity management platform. It's one solution — federated, to be sure — that solves all identity problems at once. If you want to change a social default, build a platform. That's not why they're building it, but that will (I'm afraid) be the effect. It's not enough that anonymity be possible or permitted by the platform. The default isn't about what's permitted but about what's the norm. If the default changes to being naked at the beach, saying, "Well, you can cover up if you want to," doesn't hide the fact that wearing a bathing suit now feels way different. Yes, there's something wrong - and distracting - about the particulars of this analogy. But I think the overall point is right: We're talking about defaults, not affordances.

There are serious problems caused by weaknesses in current identity solutions. Identity theft is nothing to sneer at, for example. But are we sure we want to institute a curfew instead of installing better locks?*

[Tags: privacy digital_identity anonymity pseudonymity]

*The curfews-vs.-locks trope has started to sound familar to me. If I swiped it, it was unintentional...

Wikipedia's credibility

Katherine Mangu-Ward has an interesting piece in Reason about the value of Wikipedia's use of warning labels atop articles. "This little tag, I'm convinced, is the secret to Wikipedia's success. And I'm not alone," she writes.

I could just recommend the piece to you and leave it there. For example, she captures the Wikipedians' self-aware sense of humor. (Wikipedia is comedy; Britannica is tragedy?) But I also want to clarify her use of something I said in my keynote. She didn't get it wrong, the way The Crimson did, but it may leave a false impression. (Well, I thought I'd said that merely appearing in Wikipedia doesn't make an article credible except in some probabilistic sense, but I was mumbling (audio here) and I'm not sure the phrase even makes sense.) So, just to be clear, here's an article from the July 23 issue of my newsletter (it's free!) on this very topic:

Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found and fixed. Yet, Wikipedia is in some ways as reliable as the Britannica, and in some ways it is more reliable. Where does it get its authority?

There are a few reasons we'll accept a Wikipedia article as credible.

First, we apply the same rules of thumb as we do when listening to someone for the first time: Does she sound like she knows what she's talking about? Does she seem fair? Does she seem to have some perspective? Does she blatantly contradict herself?

And, we are generally more likely to believe a major article than one on an obscure topic because it's more likely to have been worked on by many people. Plus, we may already know something about the topic. If the article on the JFK assassination says he was poisoned by Rasputin, we'll be disputin' that article.

The article gains credibility if we see it has a long edit history. It becomes yet more credible if the discussion pages are long and rich. (As someone pointed out to me a few months ago — who were you, dammit? — those pages are going to become remarkable artifacts as future historians try to understand our attitudes and beliefs. Imagine we had discussion pages for the 1950's Wikipedia page on segregation.)

There's one more sign of credibility of a Wikipedia page: If it contains a warning about the reliability of the page, we'll trust it more. This is only superficially contradictory. Wikipedia has a page that lists the available notices. Here are some of the warnings available in the Disputes category.

The fact that Wikipedia encourages us to use these notices give us confidence that Wikipedia is putting our interests over its own.

So, why is it that you don't see such frank notices in traditional sources such as newspapers and encyclopedias? Is it because their articles don't ever suffer from any of these human weaknesses? Oh, sure, newspapers issue corrections after the fact, and "This is non-neutral opinion" is implicit on the Op-Ed page. But why isn't there any finer grain framing of the reliability and nature of what's presented to us in their pages? Can we come to any conclusion except that traditional authorities are more interested in maintaining authority than in helping us reach the truth?

Which in the long run will be devastating to their credibility.

danah boyd has a terrific post on her problems getting the entry about her at Wikipedia corrected, pointing out the extent to which Wikipedia relies on the media. As other Wikipedians have pointed out, the person danah was dealing with there does not speak for all Wikipedians. In fact, no one speaks for all Wikipedians. But do check the discussion page at Wikipedia. [Tags: wikipedia katherine_mangu_ward knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous]

My kids' novel

I just published my novel for haflings (or "young adults" if you prefer), called My 100 Million Dollar Secret. It's about a boy who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery, but (for reasons explained) can't let his parents know and refuses to lie to them. In another sense, it's about the boy's growing sense of the moral obligations that come with having so much dang money. It's also supposed to be a little funny.

I published it through Lulu.com, the on-demand self-publishing outfit. You can get a nicely designed paperback (thank you, Stellio!) for $13.90 plus shipping, or you can read it online there for $4.00. Or you can read it online for free at my site for the book. Or you can download a Word or PDF version for free. There's also a Google group for anyone who wants to talk about it. (The book is licensed under Creative Commons, although I must have pressed the wrong button at Lulu because there it says it's got a plain old copyright. I intend the CC rules to be in effect.)

Thanks to the people who read it and commented on it before I posted it! [Tags: my100million novel kids_books fiction lulu]

Citizen journalism on Congressional earmarks

A coalition is asking citizens to research the 1,800+ "earmarks" in the appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. "Earmarks" are special grants aimed at particular groups. They're a species of pork, and they've tripled over the past ten years.

The diverse coalition, which includes the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters.com, Human Events Online (Pat Buchanan's outfit), and Examiner.com, will maintain a single database that they will expose in their own ways. For example, you can see how Sunlight has Google-mapped some of them. More info in Zephyr's post and here.