November 10, 2007
Dave Snowden: From fragments to sense
Terrific post by Stu Henshall about what sounds like a fantastic talk by Dave Snowden (whose blog is here) at KMWorld. Dave combines the broad and deep with the incisive and the practical. Yikes! (Don't miss the four posts from Dave that Stu points to as "must reads.")
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November 04, 2007
What's unspoken between us
I'm giving the opening talk at Defrag tomorrow, and for some reason I insist on talking about the implicit. I keep coming back to this topic, and I still don't get it right. Here are the notes for my talk; they accompany a deck, which might explain their sketchiness. You may notice bits I've talked about before, but much of this is new...and at least this audience isn't going to have to watch my "Everything Is Miscellaneous" talk again.
Here goes:
At Defrag we’re talking about how we can put the pieces back together. The pieces aren’t broken because the original order is there. But now we can ALSO arrange them the way we want.
I want to talk about the role of the implicit, because as we put pieces together, the way we do it is more in service of what isn’t said -- it’s more mysterious than we sometimes think, and we should be humble about our ability to piece ourselves together.
I’ve decided to call it the unspoken because the implicit is about what we don’t see or don’t know, whereas the unspoken says that what isn’t there has to do with language and meaning.
This talk is divided into five moments of the unsaid
#1
[I'll read the following poem:]
Blue Hydrangea
Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,
these leaves are dry, dull and rough
behind this billow of blooms whose blue
is not their own but reflected from far away
in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,
as if it wished them to disappear again
the way, in old blue writing paper,
yellow shows, then violet and gray;
a washed-out color as in children's clothes
which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:
how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity.
But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed
within one cluster, and we can see
a touching blue rejoice before the green.
Rainer Maria Rilke
William H. Gass, trans.
Look at how much isn’t said in that line. We wash clothes, and they become more our own as they lose their color. That’s something we know implicitly. We know that clothes need washing.
The next line makes explicit that Rilke is thinking of clothing folded and put away for a child who has grown. Rilke is giving us increasing degrees of explicitness. Poet has to get this right.
But, computers are explicit. At the hex level, the poem is unambiguous and explicit
Even more explicit at the bit level. Anything left unsaid is simply undone when it comes to bits.
Computers began as engines of the explicit.
In the 1950s, they were the symbol of reducing life to data, and thus were symbols of conformity - we had to conform ourselves to their needs.
There was truth to the old Hollywood view. We all know that computers have reduced us. We look like this, but to the database we look like this,
We have allowed ourselves to be informationalized - thoroughly reconceived in terms of information
Information has even somehow been added to the basic mix of how we understand ourselves, as if we had a flesh and blood organ that processes information.
But, the Web is different from fifties computers. The Web links one page to another, but does so through language...the language of the anchor text as well as the words around it that contextualize it.
Hyperlinks are the opposite of information. They enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy… all the things databases of info are not. Most of all, they are social...
...They are done for someone by someone. Linking is a type of writing. We link for some anticipated set of readers.
So, the Web works against the regime of informationalization.
Rashi said [I can't find the reference] about dogs that contact with humans ensouls them. That’s what we’re doing with computers, in a way.
Which is so different from where we thought computers were going in the Fifties. We thought in fact that computers as engines of informationalization when they became human, as with HAL in “2001,” they’d be demonic precisely because they grew up alone, in a world of mere information.
#2
I can’t tell you everything about my children. If I could, something would be wrong with our relationship.
If everything about a character can be expressed by saying she’s the dumb blond or the wisecracking sidekick, the character has failed. So, I can’t tell you everything about my children. But here’s what our relationship looks like to Facebook, when my son friended me. [The form with the categories of relationships]
This is a poor beginning. But it’s just the beginning.
We quickly ensoul Facebook by what’s said, and by what isn’t said, just as with all human relationships.
Judith Donath talks about this in terms of signaling...
...which we could also think of as gesturing. The value often isn’t in what’s said, but in what isn’t said ... the gesture, unintended or intended (Tommie Smith, 1968). It is hard to exhaust the meaning of such a gesture. It is hard to say what it gestures to.
#3
In an informationalized age, we think we are always giving off information. We used to see a street ...
… as a flow and eddies of publicness and privacy -- unfathomably rich with the implicit. That’s why we can sit at a sidewalk cafe and watch the river.
But now we think it’s all information, and all is information is alike. The surveillance cameras can’t tell the interesting bits from the uninteresting. It’s all explicit. That’s why we’re ok with 5000,000 surveillance cameras in London. The private has gone from what is kept off the record to, now that everything is on the record, what we’re allowed to pay attention to on the record. We may trust our government to see the right statistical correlations, but we can see beyond the statistics. We know there's more there. But why?
#4
We understand things through their potential. We simply don’t understand what an acorn is if we don’t see that it’s a potential oak tree, even though statistically, most acorns will rot in the ground.
Compare that to ["If you can dream it, you can be it," which claims all is possible. There’s got to be a better way to give our children hope than to lie to them.
Compare this to Rilke's lines about the child, in which we grieve the loss of potential, even when the potential is actualized, as when children grow up.
That’s not to say we’re good at understanding potential itself. For example, both sides in the abortion debate are prone to get this wrong. The pro-choice people have been known to refer to an embryo as a mere lump of flesh, as a growth. The anti-choice folks confuse the potential of the fetus with its actuality, thinking of abortion as the murder of a person. We’re not very good at understanding potential. Both are wrong. The fetus is a potential person, although that doesn’t help you resolve the debate, because we don’t know what rights are owed to lumps of flesh that can grow into into personhood.
We can informationalize potential and make statistical guesses, which may be quite accurate.
We can even teach a computer about potential. Doug Lenat’s CYC is trying to teach a computer all that we know without having to speak it -- that clothes have to be washed, and that washed clothes sometimes lose their color. It’s quite difficult to utter everything you know. CYC uses teams of philosophy PhD’s, for well over a decade. Yet even if CYC passes the Turing test about children’s clothing, we know something is missing. What?
Potential is lumpy. The world shows itself to us in those lumps. What turns the statistical homogeneity of possibility into the curds of potential?
#5
Rilke shows us something about old blue writing paper, and leaves most of it unsaid: That there is connection to hydrangea and to childhood. That the decomposition of time can reveal what was there but hidden. That the natural world and the world of art are not separate. But there is a world of possible connections Rilke could make. He chooses to make some of them apparent. He lets the world show in terms of what matters. Mattering makes possibility lumpy. The fact that we care about the world creates the lumps of potential. That’s the difference between us and CYC. It’s not simply that we care and CYC doesn’t. It’s that our caring creates a shared unspoken that is the source of meaning and value. We have divided the world into lumps because it matters, because we care.
It is ultimately language that is the unspoken between us. Language is driven by what matters to us. We have words, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation.... That’s the shared lumpiness of the the unsaid. And now we have links. Links that have presence and persistence.
Our brains discriminate edges, but we we also are fascinated by the transcendence of edges. The value is in the complex, the loose-edged, the potential, the unspoken, because that is what we share and how the world matter to us.
Defrag -- our generational project, not just this conference -- isn’t about reassembling pieces. It’s not about clarity and simplicity. It’s about how we are finding ways to let the world matter to us together. For that we need to enable, cherish, and protect the unspoken between us.
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October 13, 2007
Veerstichting explained
I'm just back from the Veerstichting symposium in Leiden, the Netherlands. I know I've made several references to it i (1 2) without explaining what it is. Now that I've been there, I have some idea.
It's an annual two-day conference, by the Dutch and for the Dutch, that's been around for about 25 years. About 600 people attend, half of them students. They emphasize the presence of students. For example, at one of the dinners, you're seated carefully at the long tables in a student-nonstudent sequence. And each speaker is assigned a student host who stays with you throughout the two days.
The program itself consists of a series of thirty-minute presentations (20 mins of talk, ten of Q and A) by an eclectic set of speakers. This year, they included a former high official of the UN who talked about the nature of Indian identity, the coach of the winning Dutch women's hockey team, a guy who writes about why management sucks, a leading biologist explaining the evolutionary basis of herd behavior, Naomi Klein on "shock therapy economics," the head of the Rwandan courts punishing those who participated in genocide, and the star of a popular sex-and-drugs interview show on TV. The attendees seemed to favor senior business folks, government officials, and the occasional Queen of the Netherlands. (The Queen brushed by me on her way to talk with one of the speakers. I was this close to the back of her head!)
Unlike most American conferences, Veerstichting incorporates cultural events. For example, to kick off the afternoon session, there was a ten-minute modern dance routine, and there was a longer dance about freedom or something — all I know for sure is that the dancer pulled the head off of a large stuffed sheep — where Americans might have had an after-dinner speaker. Also, there's much more drinking than at American events, not even counting the party at the student union where I lost my voice and 45% of my senses in a large packed room where the beer flowed like good, cheap beer.
The venue itself is gorgeous. It was held in a cathedral that now is a public space. And Leiden itself is a snow-globe version of Amsterdam. My student host Ben Zevenberger, who is studying IP and Net law, took me on a walking tour. The architecture is highly reminiscent of Amsterdam, but lowered a few stories, while the streets are (or seem) wider. Bicycles rule the streets, and cars are the interlopers. What a beautiful place.
And here's one more way it's beautiful. At a speakers dinner, I sat next to a senior business guy who was also one of the event's sponsors. He told me that after Katrina hit, he spoke with the manager of his company's facility in New Orleans. It had been destroyed. "But don't worry," the manager said, "We've already stopped the payroll, since obviously no one's coming in." The Dutch executive was appalled. "Pay them twice their normal salaries. They need our help!" The Dutch sense of social obligation — the "we're in this together" attitude — is remarkable, but really only what it should be.
The event itself is a bit like PopTech or TED in its eclecticism. Add to that the focus on students, the beauty of the surroundings, and the fact that you get to spend time among the Dutch, and you have yourself a unique event.
I asked Ben if the Dutch were ok with having English-speakers call their country "Holland" instead of "The Netherlands." It's fine, he said, adding that the Dutch call it "Holland" (although I thought Holland was a region of the Netherlands). Since "nether" has unfortunate connotations in English (we can just stick with the "nether world" if you want), I was happy to have permission to refer to the country as "Holland."
And while we're on the topic, if it's ok to call the country "Holland," can we call the Dutch the "Hollish"?
PS: Here's some info on the various terms.
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October 11, 2007
Veerstichting conference
I'm at the Veerstichting conference in charming, delightful, beautiful Leiden..
I had to surrender my laptop to the AV squad — I would have been the only one taking notes on one anyway — so I could only scribble a few notes on a piece of paper, and even then I only heard the first two speakers all the way through.
Jan Willem Duyvendak is the author of the book on human herds and identity. Since the theme of the conference is the power of the herd, he was a natural beginning. He talked about the Dutch believe that they are a diverse society when in fact there is much commonality among them. "We are a herd of individualists," he said. He spoke in the context of the current Dutch debate over immigration and national identity.
Next, Shashi Tharoor, an author and once high enough at the UN to be consider for the secretary general post, gave a beautiful and delightful talk about the Indian national identity. After listing some of that country's amazing diversity (23 official languages, for example), he said "The singular thing about India is you can only talk about it in the plural." Indian national identity, he says, works in practice but could not work in theory. It is a nationalism of the idea that people can disagree, so long as they agree on the ground rules.
Domitila Mukantaganzwa, the Executive Secretary of National Service of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, went through in some detail the process of trying almost 900,000 people for crimes of genocide. The magnitude of the legal process implicitly showed the extent of the suffering. She was asked why the South African peace and reconciliation process forgave those who acknowledged their crimes, while the Rwandans are punishing those convicted. She said the severity of the crimes were different. And the Rwandans, she said, need to develop a culture of accountability. The survivors need to see the guilty punished. They also need, she says, to have the guilty tell them where they committed their crimes so parents can find and bury their children with dignity. This is a story beyond comment.
Finally, after rewriting and rewriting the talk I'd prepared on the challenge of the implicit in forming groups (summarized here), I at the last moment decided not to switch. So I gave the one on the implicit. I have no idea how it went over.
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October 10, 2007
My maybe-talk at Veerstichting
I've been working hard on a new presentation, to be given tomorrow at the Veerstichting conference in Leiden, in the Netherlands. After tonight's speakers dinner, I'm thinking maybe the last half (including the Wikipedia portions) of my Everything is Miscellaneous talk would be more suitable. I don't what I'll decide.
Here's the gist of the new talk. I'm going to be sketchy, because I have to go to sleep very soon, but mainly because there's something missing at the talk's core. The title is something like "The Challenge of the Implicit." It's a 20-minute talk.
The Web is best understood as a social realm. But groups (vs. mere groupings) become real when people know more about one another than they can say. For example, I can't tell you much of what I know about my kids. And when you can express a character in just a phrase, the character's been badly written. What makes a group a group is not the lines among the people, but what is unsaid and can't ever be said fully
But computers are monsters of the explicit. That's why in the 1950s they symbolized the mechanizing of relationships. From the beginning, information itself was invented to manage, and thus reduce, complex relationships. Now this poorly defined word (few use it in Shannon's sense) has become an assumed part of how we know our world.We think we're constantly emitting info. E.g., a street scene used to be a river with eddies of public and private. Now it's all info. This has enabled a switch in how we think of privacy, from that which we exclude from the record, to what the authorities are not allowed to pay attention to in the record that now includes everything.
The Web is a disruption in this informationalization. It is built of links, which use language to contextualize relatioships. Links are the opposite of databased information: They enrich rather than reduce, are decentralized, personal, and fundamentally social in that they are written by one person for others to use.
Yet the Web is (in a sense) lousy at the social. It knows about links but not about people or groups. That's why social networking sites are rising so quickly. They internalize the Web, providing the connective features we're used to on the Net (email, IM, etc.).
While groups depend on the implicit, social networking sites start by asking for explicit info about our network and interests. But that's ok because they so quickly transcend those sticks and twine. Real, messy social relations grow. Good!
But: (1) Making things explicit can be highly disruptive. Computers — and software designers — are not always good at this, especially since we don't have good norms yet, and perhaps never will. (2) Much of what's of value in the implicit was created without intending to. There are thus issues about how much we are entitled to make not just explicit but public. (3) The implicit is by its nature messy and connective. It always drags more into the light than it intended. It's thus hard to keep the above issues separate and containable. (4) We have an obligation and an opportunity to increase and preserve the unspoken. Explicitly.
The end.
I'm thinking that this talk is not ready to be presented. Too bad. I've worked hard on it. I guess I'll decide tomorrow morning. Sigh.
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October 04, 2007
Skipping Ideas
I was supposed to be doing the closing keynote at the Ideas conference in NYC tomorrow -- which looks like an excellent conference -- but I'm in Day Two of a miserable sore throat, ear ache, head ache beat down. I had been hoping it was going to be a one day illness, but I woke up way worse than I felt yesterday.
So I've regretfully told the conference I'm not going to make it. I just can't visualize dragging myself down to the train station and making the trip. I feel like, well, crap.
I hate doing this. And it's probably not a genuine health issue...it's not like if I travel, I'll die. It's just discomfort, and maybe a slightly longer recuperation although I'm not convinced that that's the case. So maybe I should just suck it up and go to the train station. But, the thought of 3.5 hours of head rattling, even in the relative comfort of a train, fills me with anxiety.
So, I guess I'm not going. I'm sure the conference will be splendid without my closing comments. Think of it as my gift of more hallway time.
:(
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September 29, 2007
Picnic O7 presentation and (sort of) debate
Here's a video of the full session I was at at Picnic '07. It includes Walt Mossberg's introduction, my 40 minute keynote (very similar to the presentation that I did at Google, although with a short section on the importance and difficulty of the implicit added, and some references in anticipation of the debate to follow), and then the half hour or so of my debate with Andrew Keen, moderated by Walt M.
I haven't watched the video beyond the first few minutes -- the production quality is high -- but my sense of the debate was that Andrew was on an oddly anti-intellectual track, attacking me as a "professional philosopher," which I'm not (I was an assistant professor of philosophy 22 years ago), and even if I were, why would that be a criticism, especially coming from a guy who is out arguing for the importance of credentialed authorities? Not helpful to discussing the actual topic. Frustrating. My feeling coming out of the discussion over all was indeed frustration. I didn't think we were able to pursue points sufficiently.
BTW, somewhere in my presentation you can see me very carefully get left and right confused. Also, I'm going to plug again my more coherent attempt to explain and evaluate Keen's argument: Andrew Keen's Best Case.
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September 17, 2007
[scs2007] first sessions
I'm at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Seminar. It's a fantastic group of attendees. Liz Lawley does the intro, followed by Lili Cheng. We hear a little about Social Genius.
We go around the room saying who we are and what we're interested in. There are about 60 of us here, I think.
Now Matt Biddulph of Dopplr.com is talking about how to make presence fuzzy. Dopplr lets you see which of your friends are going to be in a city. But why not be able to control the size of the range? So there's a slider.
Tom Coates (who is hilarious on the back channel) is working on a project code-named Fire Eagle at Yahoo's Brickhouse. He talks about presence as making you visible and comprehensible not just to other people but to software that could do yet more with it. You can tell Fire Eagle your location via SMS, other apps, etc. E.g., you could map all the Twitter tweets. You could use your phone to look for groups. You could automatically geotag your blogs posts or flickr photos. Tom now talks about protecting against abuse of this info. In addition to the opt outs, you can create "special places" that are off the map, so to speak.
Gilad Lotan talks about presence and objects. He likes to embed conective technology into objects. E.g., he built "imPulse" tha transfers heartbeats through a wall. The next version was wireless. When two of these pods are in the same room, they talk to each other. Likewise, he did a touch project for the Kotel. Ubi.ach (say it aloud) "takes email away from the screen." It's a doll that blinks when you get new email. A street exhibit in Jerusalem shows some of the missiles fired at Israel embedded in ordinary scenes. Another of Gilad's projects creates Tibetan prayer wheels controlled by images from news feeds. Overall: Four points on presence: Connection through intimacy, range of immediacy, culture and context, and importance of the tangible.
danah boyd talks about social networking site as "networked publics" (in the Habermasian sense). They are spaces within which collections of people exist, through mediating tools. Hannah Arendt said that the presence of others assures of the reality of the world around us. Mobile phones create social spaces for teens — an always-on intimate community. [sorry, this is coming out far more disjointed than the actual presentation.] When you write, you write for an imagined audience, a public that your writing creates. Socnets do this for groups of friends/acquaintances. For teens, at socnets you display that you're engaged in a relationship before you actually are; they're ways of marking relationships. The intended audience is the social network. danah shows two photos of teenagers kissing by the juxtaposition ("juxtapokissin'"?) of the photos; this is because it's so hard for teenagers to find real world public spaces. She points to the traces of relationships in the real world in which we can see time and the aging of the relationships.
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July 27, 2007
Ethan on live blogging
Ethanz, who is in the pantheon of live bloggers, has a detailed post explaining how he does it. I think he intends to pass along the tips and tricks that will encourage others to live-blog, but it actually seems so daunting that it may have the opposite effect. And among the tools in the live bloggers kit bag that Ethan does not mention are: his rare combination of analytic and sympathetic skills, his breadth of knowledge, his awesome writing skill, and his patience.
I like live-blogging. (I do it far worse than Ethan does; you're always better off reading Ethan's posts than mine.) But I find it very tiring. I fairly predictably poop out after lunch.
Ethan also writes a beautiful appreciation of our friend Henok Mehari, who has just finished up his internship at the Berkman Center. All I can add to what Ethan has said is: Amen. Henok's story is amazing, and, most hopeful of all is that he is only really at the beginning of it. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman henok_mehari berkman liveblogging blogging]
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June 22, 2007
[supernova] Nicholas Carr and Chris Meyer
[supernova] Nicholas Carr and Chris MeyerNicholas Carr is working on a book on what all these changes mean economically. In the 19th century, factories to produce their own power. Producing it more economically could be an important competitive advantage. Then independent power suppliers supplied it far more economically. In 1910, only 40% of electricity was generated by independent utilities, and most of that went to lighting. Just 20 years later, 80% was coming from utilities. This unleashed network innovation. But the real change came when sockets were everywhere. Now there was huge innovation in the appliances that plug into them, from assembly lines to televisions to computers.
Now we can have rich computing services served over the network, services that could not be matched at the local level. When we have computer sockets the way we have power sockets, all sorts of things will change.
The challenge is to begin to break free from the Web 2.0 world and the narrow innovation we see there.
"Organization: The Fourth Factor of Production" is Chris Meyer 's talk's title. What isn't going to change, he asks. Technology drives organizational innovation. But traditionally the response has been to create departments to manage change.In 1937, Ronald Coase wrote "The Nature of the Firm.". What wil lbe the next answer in the information economy? Traversal of the boundaries. Web 2.0 collaborative tools. Chris recommends Neal Stephenson's vision in The Diamond Age as a social vision for business...
In the Q&A, Nick says that the electrical network only supplied electricity, whereas the future computing network will supply services as a commodity. Chris points out that industrialization happened within one legal system, while this change is happening internationally.
Chris predicts that they'll be a bifurcation, with some big centralized corporations, and then a swarm outside.
Q: (brad templeton) The real difference isn't bandwidth but control...
A: (nick) Rich applications over the Net empowers the user, even if they don't own and control it.
(Chris) You should only bother controlling things that are choice. But in Nick's world, bandwidth is not scarce.
Q: (Shannon Clark) Your pronouns of yours and ours are inappropriate...
A: (John Hagel) What happens to competitive strategy in this world you're sketching?
Q: (Nick) It depends on the industry.
A (chris) Strategic advantage? Who needs it. It's for firms in the old sense. [Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 nicholars_carr chris_meyer ]
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June 21, 2007
[supernova] Denise Caruso on anti-social software and Clay Shirky's lovefest
Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? "Have a conversation." Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don't always do this because they fear it.
And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.
There are "potential dealbreakers" for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.
Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it's been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over "solidity of edifice, not solidity of process."
Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. "We get our support from a community," Clay said, but to them it was like he'd said "We get our Thursdays from a banana." So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn't see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn't work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. "It's doing fine," but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.
Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they're doing and help one another. "No contracts are written, no money changes hands." "We don't often talk about love" at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.
There's lots of commercial opportunity. We're not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.
Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace...we will see much more of that.
Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.
We can now do big things with love.
[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters...and the fact that those two things are the same is what's most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]
[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]
[The next day] Nick Douglas - who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat - video interviewed me right after Clay's talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.
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June 01, 2007
[is2k7] John Palfrey's keynote
John Palfrey of the Berkman opens the conference by looking at the digital age from the point of view of students,
Students: "It's not about being digital. It's about students who are born digital." This is a profound difference, JP says. He points to four traits of students,always on and always attached.
1. Digital Identity. The natives assume they have 'em.
2. Natives arre multi-taskers "but in ways heretofore unseen." The Socratic method changes when every student has a laptop in front of her. Everyone has multiple IM sessions going. "It's not necessarily a good thing" but it's the fac. .
3. Natives assume media comes in digital form, and thus is malleable. And it's searchable. "Research now means a Google search."
4. Natives are creators. "This is a huge shift from previous generations." From consumers to creators.
These changes are not all good, JP says. Henry Jenkins has identified the "participation gap" (an effect of the digital divide). There are ethics challenges and transparency problems ("who created what").
Teachers:
1. Digital identities: Should faculty members have Facebook accounts? Is your teacher your friend?
2. Emergent tools: "How do we capture this extaordinary move from consumers to creators?" Should teachers start using wikis, e.g.?
University: What about it ought to be reborn?
1. Digital ID: What does it mean for Harvard to have a digital ID? now that both students and info are born digital, how does a university understand its identity?
2. Digital info: JP points to Dan Gillmor's Center for Digital Media as a site trying to figure out what things like accuracy and fairness mean. He also points to PLoS.
3. Open Access: One Laptop Per Child,Access to Knowledge , OpenNet Initiative and many others are responding to this need. The "Open to Harvard ID Holders Only" badge is up in front of Harvard's digital information, and it doesn't need to be, says JP.
Now JP raises "hard questions."
What is the relationship between the university and say, Reed Elsevier, Google, RIAA, MPAA, Second Life? Should the U be striking exclusive deals with Google? Should the U deliver the RIAA's cease and desist letters?
"What is the best way to invest in libraries in a digital age?"
"How do we fund and sustain the generation of digital knowledge?" Should we be looking at funders, or should we be adopting a business model like Google's or Times Select's?
"How does this generation of new library scientists learn?"
"What is the impact of an outdated copyright system?" Should the U be taking a leading role in improving the system? [Tags: is2k7 john_palfrey]
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[is2k7] Yesterday, and today's opening
I'm at The Berkman Center's Internet and Society Conference ("Knowledge beyond Authority"). Yesterday was an an invitation-only day for about 100 people. Today is a public conference:
Stream: http://www.law.harvard.edu/media/2007/06/01/berkman.rm
I found portions of yesterday's meetings a little frustrating. It was a fantastic set of people, from all over Harvard, other universities, non-profits, open access folks, and representatives of the content industries (journal publishers, entertainment industry). There were many great discussions, but with some I think I'm just out of step with the times. I thought we spent too much time trying to find "common ground" with the content industries. Especially the Hollywood folks seemed to think common ground means a tit for a tat: We turn in file sharers and they let us have more access to their copyrighted content for educational purposes. I hate that deal. Whatever you think of file sharing, it should not be tied to the ability of the university to advance knowledge, research and education. We might as well be talking about giving away the stadium's naming rights in return for more academic freedom.
That sounds good, but in fact it's obstructionist. In fact, at one point I was so exercised about this that I behaved badly. And not in the cute or righteous way. More in the rude asshole way. I feel terrible about that, and have apologized to the person I was rude to. I really don't like the self-righteous me. And it gets in the way of thought.
Charlie Nesson , the conference creator, has inspired me with the idea that the university can be the leading defender of the Internet and of the needed expansion intellectual rights. I'm not ready to be realistic. And that's a problem.
Mary Wong is opening the conference (after Charles Ogletree 's welcome ... subbing for Charlie Nesson who is in the hospital having something fixed (he'll be fine)). She says the discussions yesterday focused not only on the challenges around universities using licensed material, but also around the licensing and commercialization of material generated by the university. She says there was a lot of discussion of the vagueness of Fair Use. Is there anything we can do to clarify it? And if we did, would that new understanding, intended as a floor, get taken as the ceiling, thus actually limiting Fair Use in practice?
[Tags: berkman harvard a2k copyright copyleft digital_rights education is2k7]
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April 05, 2007
No blogging today
Yes, it's a self-contradictory headline. But to heck with logical formalities. I'm still flu-ish, and I'l lbe on a train most of the day because my doctor told me not to fly. I'm in DC where I got to keynote the NTEN conference...over a thousand techies working for non-profits, long may they wave. (Thanks to Katrin Verclas for the invitation, and for all the good work she does.)
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March 24, 2007
Politics Online Conf blogged
Jessica Duda blogs the Politics Online Conference. Good overview. [Tags: politics politics_online_conference jessica_duda]
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March 12, 2007
[ctpaa] Cable panel on Net neutrality
I'm at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting to give a lunchtime talk to the marketing folks.
It's in the Ritz-Carlton in DC, which tells you something about the industry. This is a well-dressed crowd. Maybe one-third are women. I'm the only one in the audience iwth an open laptop. (The Ritz provides wifi everywhere in the hotel for $10/day.)
I come in late to the morning panel. On it are Mark Robichaux (ed., Broadcasting & Cable Magazine), Mark Coblitz (SVP of Comcast), Laureen Ong (Pres, National Geographic Channel), Joseph Sapan (Pres, Rainbow Media), Michael Wilner (CEO, Insight Comms). Unfortunately, I don't know who is who, except for the woman, and Robichaux, who is moderating. [As always, my live blogging is deeply flawed and more unreliable the closer to quotes and details it gets. Also, in the broad themes and characterizations. Also spelling.]
Blogs
In response to a question about negative blogs, one of the panelists says that some of their operators actually have blogs. "We embrace it." Another writes them off as a few people who like to complain. "Everyone in this room should read blogs every day about their companies," says another. "If we're not listening as much as we're speaking to our constituents, we're not doing our job." [Then how about symmetric bandwidth up and down, hmmm?] Mark Robichaux, the moderator, says "Sometimes bloggers are canaries in the coal mine."
Laureen Ong of National Geographic says that bloggers and others online answer questions for them in a useful way.
A la carte tv
How about a la carte TV, asks Robichaux? Josh Sapan (Rainbow Media) praises the diversity of cable offerings, all the way from BET to National Geographic. "It's a great diversity of voice." [Hah!] Mark Coblitz agrees that's lots of diversity. Each person may only watch seven channels, he says, but the seven channels vary from person to person. Michael (?) says we need to argue against a la carte, just as we have to argue against Net neutrality.
Net neutrality
"What's Net neutrality?"
"That's easy: People should be able to go anywhere they want to, attach any device, and know what the terms of their service are." [He's implicitly citing the FCC's Four Principles, which isn't what most people mean by Net neutrality. And I left one out because I couldn't keep up.] "Isn't that that the Internet is all about?," says another. "Anyone get to do anything they want," he continues, I think sarcastically. The first says "This is all about sharing resouces so everyone gets the maximum out of them." The task, he says, is to communicate the technical reasons why Net neutrality is bad. "People said in the year 2000 that we need to save the Internet, but we don't want the Net of 2000. I want the Internet that's coming," the one that lets people do the new things they want to do." [The one that shows Time-Warner movies and requires a company to pay for competitively fast service? Or the one where anyone can create and innovate in any way she wants, on equal footing?]
They complain that they don't have the anti-net neutrality sound bite. "We talked about Net neutering, but that doesn't work too well. That's our own internal, because that's what it does." [Cool! "Net neutrality" works! We're so used to complaining that the anti-NN folks beat us at marketing that it's great to hear the same sort of whining coming from them.]
"The Internet is beginning to show the strains of its technology," says another. "We offer 10 meg down and one meg up, which is a lot." [Only compared to the pathetic speeds in the US, and only down, not up.] The geeks who measure it don't always get that." "The infrastructure can't handle what everyone's idea of what the Internet is unless someone starts to build it out." People won't be able to make the investment to enable, say, Netflix, to use the Internet effectively so that it works all the time and people have a good experience almost all the time.
Robichaux: "So the government would be handcuffing you."
"Exactly. And it's not just the last mile. It's all along the way."
Another: "Back in the lat 90s, there was a lot of fiber put in the ground. And guess what? We're using it up." [Most of the fiber is unused. And see Bruce Kushnick on the $200B of tax money the incumbents took to run fiber to our houses, but then forgot to.] "Net neutrality says everone should be able to go where they want and be able to pay. We don't diagree with the four principles. But as soon as you put them down in writing, they're open to interpretation. And that interpretation changes everything."
"You know who's making the money and making the NN argument? Little companies like Google." He cites someone who said that NN would kill innovation. "If you want Net neutrality, it should be Internet neutrality for all the elements." E.g., Google is too dominant, eBay owns its means of payment. [This is equivalent to saying that if you want free speech, you really ought to enforce all points of view in your dinner time conversation.]
Competition
Mark Robichaux: Satellite?
Ong: Brand counts. Viewers know that the facts on our channel are triple-checked.
Sapan: It's made us better via competitive pressure. E.g., IFC hosts small films, and we let you watch it on-demand simultaneously when it's released to the theaters
"Congress says the problem with out industry is that we don't have competitors. But we wake up every day thinking about how we compete in the marketplace. Every business we're in is extremely competitive on the distriution side." [Still, most of us don't have much of a choice.]
"We're all losing eyeballs to the Internet, and I'd go so far as saying you can lose your phone before you lose your video, and you can lose your video before you lose your online connection. It trumps everything. The younger generation is turning TVs off. They're on the Internet. They're watching the same content thanks to some of our friends [sarcastic] making it available." [Wow.]
User-generated content
Robichaux: "What's the best idea for using the Internet as a tool for your company?"
Ong: We have a tech savvy audience so the Internet is something we use to promote back to the channel, to put programming out that they can't see on the linear channel, and we recognize that it's making us rethink our business because no one is going to watch a full-length documentary on the Internet. [Maybe not, at least this month. But we'll move it onto our iPod our TV, if we're able.]
Sapan: The area we're messing with right now is mixing user generated content with video on demand and linear television. Not much has been done with that.
Robichaux: why is ugc important?
Sapan: The history of TV is you make something, copyright it, put it on TV and the max number of people watch it. Now each of those is violated: There is no owner, there is no copyright. There's all these people spending all this time looking at user generated content. From a purely mercantile point of view, if there's a lot of time spent on it, that one way or another will be translated into money. What intriques is how to connect what people are making with video on demand. In the case of indie films, we're asking people to submit their short films. We curate them. We would like to place those films on the servers of cable companies in the geographic areas from which they come, so there could be "the best of" films in that area, and the "the best of the best of" that would make it onto the channel. [Current.tv? Why do we need the cable companies to do this for us?] This is good because it gives them the fastest Internet connection to the video, video on demand, and a linear channel. We pursuing this on IFC and We TV.
Coblitz (Comcast): We've woven Internet into just about everything we do.
Q&A
Robichaux: Take-aways: Be honest. Keep it simple. It's about relationships. For example, when you're talking to a Congressperson... [And here I thought he was talking about talking with customers!]
Questions from the floor.
Q: What are you doing about Internet safety?
A: (comcast) We provide parental controls to people who want them. Our 12 yr old said, "Dad, block anywhere you don't want me to go...but then don't look where I go."
A: (Insight) It's up to the parents, but most parents don't use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??]
A: (Rainbow) The computers aren't in the kids' bedrooms.
[Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]
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March 08, 2007
Vegas
Q: What is the opposite of Venice?
A: The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
This is a hotel so large that I got agoraphobia when I walked in to it.
I arrived late last night to keynote the New Communications Forum this morning, and headed straight for the gambling area. Cocktail waitresses stroll the casino hangar in outfits that seem to have been designed forty years ago by horny thirteen year old boys.
Lose I did. I started on the quarter video poker, but the betting algorithm is too mechanical — hold onto the Jacks and higher, discard the rest — so I switched to a slot machine to eliminate any pretense of skill and get the whole thing over with. Six minutes later, I'd lost my entire bankroll. There's ten dollars I'll never see again.
I haven't yet seen the Venetian's mock canal (mockanal? nah, that doesn't come out right), which I'm looking forward to because of how smug it will make me feel.
The truth is that I sort of like Vegas because it is what it is and nothing more, although I'm not crazy about what it is. And, yes, I do know how lucky I am that I get to go places. Truly.
Now, on to the conference, which promises to be interesting, although I can only stay for the morning. [Tags: travel vegas gambling venice new_communications_forum]
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March 06, 2007
[f2c] Susan Crawford
Susan Crawford gives a talk about our inability to communicate outside this room
Imagine there's an easy-to-assemble toll booth. We drive into the gray world of the Land of Low Expectations. We're getting what the current providers give us.We can then go to the Land of Glittering Generalities that attempt to maintain the incumbents in power.
How do we get reason back? "Communications regulation should be about optimizing human communication." We have to persuade people that economic growth comes from new ideas, that the Internet is the greatest source of new ideas we've ever seen and that the telecom policy has to put the Internet at its core. We should claim that the Internet is different. "People are very uncomfortable when we say that, but we have to say it."
To help reason, we should be showing pictures. E.g., a chart of the market plummeting recently, and a chart of the weakness of the US economy. "If the rate economic growth in the US over the next 45 yrs were to increase by 0.5% per year, it could resolve all of the budget difficulties associated with the aging of the Baby Boom generation" with plenty left over. So, how do we continue growth in the US? "We need more meta-ideas about the generation of new ideas."
Aha! The internet - a source of new ideas." It's group-forming attributes and the chance to fail quickly are vital, too.
Policy outcomes: Universal service. Divestiture, separating services from content [i.e., the people who supply bit transport should not provide content.]
We need to professionalize, with better comparative data to show the effect of the Net on economy, the effect of Net neutrality, etc. And we need serious leadership.
We're running out of time. The future of the Internet hangs in the balance.
[SC for FCC!]
[Tags: fcc susan_crawford net_neutrality f2c ]
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[f2c] Alternative to Yochai
Peter Swire at Ohio State U and former privacy advisor to the Clinton Admin explains why he thinks Yochai Benkler gets it wrong. Benkler overstates the shift from market to non-market, and Peter will explain "why an economics-based alternative is pragmatically useful."
Your laptop is an information factory. Consumers own the means of production, which sounds pretty economic, he says. He says he's a big fan of Yochai, but not with the major thesis that says it is "social rather than proprietary and market relations that create all the big effects — freedom, equity, etc." (p. 92). But the shift to non-market is not proven, and there are pragmatic reasons to employ an economics-based approach.
Is non-market overstated? It's defined too broadly in the book, says Peter. And Yochai is observing the early adopters, but as the niche grows it may well go commercial. The amateurs give way to marketized professionals. The Internet itself has shifted from non-commercial to highly commercial.
He says that the production costs have gone well down, so we'll get more production. There should be a market response, not that we'll go to a non-market environment.
Why adopt economics as a second way of explaining what's going on? It's not clear that Yochai is right that the big change in tech will result in a shift to a nonmarket economy. That's not what happened with the industrial revolution. It's simpler (Occam's Razor) to apply the usual economic view that a reduction in costs will lead to an expansion of production and a bigger market, says Peter.
Yochai responds: It's important not to confuse markets with economics. My claim is exactly that people own the means of production. But the point that the supply curve shifts outward is not inconsistent with what I'm saying. It means the supply of zero-priced goods increases. You're using the term "market" as a metaphor and a seucrity blankie. You need to include the pricing mechanism. My claim is that the price mechanism is of smaller importance in directing action. If you want to affect action you have to accept that there is a unique system that is outside of the price system. And that's what I call nonmarket. To claim that I'm not using economics in this book is surprising.
Second (Yochai says), I thought to say that when you change the costs of the physical capital necessary to act in economically significant ways you get changed behaviorial patterns is not technological exceptionalism. It's like saying the same thing about the steam engine. Costs matter, the combination of physical human etc. capital all matter. One cost component has declined to a point that a whole set of behaviors that were peripheral to the economy are becoming central.
It's not that the market disappears. Rather, the addition of nonmarket actions adds a degree of freedom that can solve some of the problems of the purely market-based system (Yochai says).
Peter: The amateurs are likely to get professionalized.
Yochai: Could be. But what will the policies be?
Yochai says there's a wiki at benkler.org to talk about this type of thing...
[Excellent.] [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler peter_swire economics ]
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[f2c] Commissioner Adelstein
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein begins by playing harmonica with Howard Levy. Really. [As always, the following paraphrases, abbrevites, omits, and gets wrong.]
[I'm sitting next to Susan Crawford who is blogging away. Hers will be the post to read on this.]
Then he touts the E-Rate program. But "we lack a coordinated vision for success...We need to provide for all of our neighbors. This has to be a greater national priority than it is now." A national strategy should have benchmarks. Update the current FCC definition of "high speed" as 200kb [which is laughable — dialup is 56k]. Have standards for expressing what rates customers are getting. We need meaningful competition. "We can't let the broadband market settle into a comfortable duopoly..." We should worry about consolidation. The Congress should use tax incentives to bring access to under-served areas, and more [can't keep up]. We should invest in basic R&D. Be creative and flexible. We need to preserve the creative freedom of the Net. "You're all reinventing democracy, how we share music..." We need to preserve the Net's openness. The AT&T merger brought about an agreement about Net Neutrality that isn't the end of the story but at least refutes the notion that NN can't be defined.
Q:(frankston) The FCC and the Net are incompatible. The Net is what we can get by connecting our home networks from the edge. The FCC defines it in terms of services instead of in terms of bits.
A: We took a step with the AT&T merger....
Q: No, you treat it as a service. We don't need the phone companies to run the Internet.
A: We need an infrastructure. There's a balance here. We need to be realistic.
Q: (isenberg) The chat was wondering how much power you have.
A: I'm one of five commissioners.
Q: (brough) What about cognitive radio opening up spectrum?
A: I was going to talk about that but cut it for time. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Software-defined radio is one of the most exciting developments I've seen and maybe the most revolutionary in spectrum use. We need to find ways to enable them to reach their full fruition. Our engineers are examining the ways they can work. It's a way of doing more with less because, as someone said, G-d isn't making any more spectrum. Of course, we have to be concerned about harmful interference, but in general I'm very high on it.
Q: (JH Snider) Please elaborate on what you said about the carrot-stick approach. The FCC has been 99.99% carrot. In the past few years, the FCC has given away $50B in spectrum allocation. Look at what you did with the MMDS band. You gave it away to Sprint and they haven't built anything. Eight years later they may actually build it out. Where's the stick?
A: It's so much easier to give away carrots. Politicians like to do that. It's happened time and again in spectrum policy.
Q: (Elisha McDonald): Is the definition of Net Neutrality workable? How is it enforceable?
A: It's a baseline and opens up the possibility of having a rational discussion without sloganeering. The Chairman testified that he will enforce it, and he's told me that too. [Joe Plotnick from the chat: "They haven't enforced ANY PRIOR merger conditions, as Kushnick has thoroughly documented."] [Tags: fcc net_neutrality spectrum ]
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[f2c] Journalism panel
jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com is leading a panel. On it are: The Dan (Gillmor), Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner, Bill Allison of The Sunlight Foundation.
Dan begins by saying that some types of stories, particularly ones that can be broken into small pieces, lend themselves to distributed journalism. He points to a story done by Talking Points Memo and to the possibility of opening up the WSJ's current series on options back-dating. [From the chat, Jerry Michalski points to a Chicago crime map mashup. Steve Crandall points to a map of Iraqi casualties by US geography.]
Bill talks about citizen investigations of House corruption.
Mark says he's "Dan Gillmor's bastard child." He read We the Media and was struck by Dan saying "My readers know more than I do." At the Washington Examiner, he suggested making readers part of the staff. They set up the Washington Examiner Community Action
Jonathan asks whether distributed journalism undermines the notion that journalism is a craft. Does it undermine professionalism? Does it have a negative impact, in addition to the positive impacts?
Mark says that that's the big question. "I call them collaborative networks rather than distributed." "Distributed" has a whiff that it's distributed from on high, he says. Bill says that it results in better journalism. Dan says that if more institutions used these techniques, it would make them more credible. Dan says he thinks it'll be good for journalism, although it may not be good for the traditional institutions of journalism.
Q: (Steve Crocker): This is exciting. What's the reaction going to be?
A: (Jonathan) The sea change will be tremendous at the corporate level, if these changes evolve as we hope.
A: (Dan). Privacy is likely to be the lever by which government shuts down access to data.
Q: Journalism has received the most friendly of challenges, compared to what we've said about other gatekeepers such as the telcos. at DailyKos, there's some media bashing, but more often people will point to stories, or complain that journalists haven't lived up to journalistic standards.
Q: (Yochai Benkler) What you're experiencing is not unusual. College teachers worry about their kids reading Wikipedia. Many companies have been worried about using open source software. All sorts of authorities are worried. The mainstream media itself contributes to the undermining of science by treating everything as 50-50. There's pushback now on this.
[Tags: f2c media msm journa journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]
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March 05, 2007
[ef2c] OpenMoko - OpenSource phone
The aim is not to create a mobile phone that mimics a PC. The OpenMoko phone is a "totally open system." Engineers can rewrite the rules and have access to all the building blocks. But he can't sell it in the US because the cellular carriers "whitelist" phone IDs, so they only support the ones they want.
An audience member says that Part 68 means the FCC says that any device not detrimental to the public has to be allowed to connect.
There's much discussion among many learned people using acronyms I never heard of. [Tags: f2c openmoko telephony open_source ]
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[f2c] panel
At Freedom to Connect , James Salter is talking about the need to get the US connected right. He builds fiber networks. We're at 19 in the world in bandwidth and falling. Fiber can carry 100 terrabytes a second. [Did I hear that right?] YouTube uses more bandwidth than the entire iunterent did 5 years ago. A utility in the southeast is wiring every house with fiber, for $1250 per home, complete.
Who's doing fiber? Verizon, selectively. They've done a million or more homes, but it's going mainly to the rich and the white. Gov't ought to be an enabler of fiber.
John Waclawsky of Motorola says we've evolved from plain ol' telephony that was simple and reliable to having many options. Connectivity is becoming ubiquitous. And complex. But it will get simpler. We will have a smart edge and a facilitating core, as opposed to a smart edge and a dumb core.
Sanjit Biswas of Meraki has what David Isenberg thinks is the "holy grail" of wifi mesh networking. It's a $50 mesh router. It's a spinout of MIT's Roofnet. They want to create networks deployed by communities without involving a telco (except for one person's access). They've been in beta for 6 months. Meraki's market is the "next billion" Internet users. They have 15,000 people connected. It costs users $1-$2 month. Meraki is trying to engage local entrepreneus to create these networks. Today he announces they're building a "huge experiment" in San Francisco, building a network of 1,000 repeaters with free DSL bandwidth - maybe 30 lines would serve the area. [I spoke with Sanjit afterwards and asked him why he won't get sued by the telcos. He said that it's an uncertain area, there are some IPs who are ok with it, they're working mainly in low income areas where a law suit would look really bad, and that he's focused more on areas outside of the US.] [Tags: wifi fiber mesh meraki san_francisco ]
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[f2c] Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a "theme-setting" talk.
He points to the wide distribution of computer power and "insight, intuition and experience" across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see "commons-based prodiuction," i.e., produciton without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. "The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides."
It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See "Sharing Nicely.") He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process ("Martian clickworkers"). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: "We're beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phnenomenon." There's a "load balancing of motivations over time" — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.
"Building such platforms is hard." "Coase's Penguin" says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he's been working on seeing how this works. He's looking at experimental literaure on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. "There are more design levers than I initially thought." Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.
So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were llimited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we're seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange...a parallel form of production. We go from recording industry to p2p, Microsoft to open source, Grollier to wikipedia, telecoms to Skype. And there are new "opportunity spaces," from well behaved appliances to production tools. He points to the BBC citizen journalism effort, among other examples. [Yochai moves very quickly. . This is the double fudge Death by Chocolate form of knowledge overload.]
But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there's a battle on. Yochai shifts to politics. "The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves." And they can do more in loose assoiciation with others. When it comes to democracy, our epxerience "is purely with a mass mediated public sphere." We're beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.
The Internet democratizes. It's boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: "The Daily Me" fragmentation hasn't happened, and it doesn't polarize the way claimed. For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.
There's a strong "see for yourself" ethic. We come to understand that everything we read is a provisional judgment, rather than training ourselves to seek authority as we did in the mass distribution system.
The Human Development Index depends on who and how produces information, Commons-based and peer production are beginning to help: open source, open academic publishing , free hs science texts in South Africa, BiOS and BioForge out of Australia.
The threat is being played out over institutional ecology. "Rules can make some actions easier or harder." Incumbernts are trying to make distributed production harder, more expensive, subject to permission. And there's a push back to be free and productive. Broadband duopoly vs. muni broadband. "Trusted computing systems" vs. general purpose devices. Software patents vs. free and open source. DMCA vs. sharing and open innovation. There's been a tightening up of all the "toggles," e.g., copyright. "Law has been systematically optimized for control-based business models..."
"But we're beginning to practice new ways of being free and equal human beings." This is subject to a persistent battle.
Now there's a panel: Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, KC Clafy and Gigi Sohn.
Elliot Maxwell talks about Yochai's ideas applied to pharmaceuticals. Among other things, he points to the PLoS library of failed clinical trials.
KC Claffy (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis). Things we cannot measure on the Internet: The topology from one point to another at any layer. Propagation of routing. Router won't give us its entire state (it's second best routes.) One way delay from two places on the Internet without customized instruments. Can't get an hour of packets from the core. Accurate flow counts. Accurate bandwidth. How much spam, phishing. A commons infrastructure would allow all this. (See this presentation.)
GG Sohn from Public Knowledge first praises The Wealth of Networks. Then she says that her one complaint is that Yochai gives the government too much of a break.
Mark Cooper wants to chart a course between Yochai's optimism and Lessig's pessimism. Yochai points to the use of collaborative production in the material economy. But, in his politics he shrugs off the attacks under the claim that in the long run the superior mode of production will prevail. "I think he's clueless about politics." But, "we can build an alternative politics on Yochai's epistemological and moral base." We need more than the blogosphere. We have not yet shown we can transform the public sphere. The public sphere needs institutions that transform the routine activities of daily life. [Yes, but how we do this except by having good ideas an implementing them? E.g., come up with another Creative Commons.]
Q: (isenberg) Yochai, would you like to address whether loose goosey has a chance against righty tighty?
A: There's a common thread between Gigi and Mark. In the long term we care about social practices rather than policies, laws and institutions, because those are subsystems we occupy and life practices are the outcome. Law matters, but the critical question is: Do we need an affirmative set of rules that will enable things, or is blocking bad law and rules enough? I used to work on reforming laws and was pessimistic, and now I've flipped. "I do think that what we're seeing in the Net roots, in the blogosphere, in the global access to knowledge is that political organization is also shifting away rom the standing institutional model, toward more ad hoc networks that mix different kinds of players nad get updated over time...and that disconnect and reconnect, rather than relying on stable institutions...I see the future of political engagement being much flatter, ad hoc..." [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler economics peer_production ]
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[f2c] Gov. Douglas on covering Vermont
Tom Evslin is interviewing Jim Douglas, 1the governor of Vermont. He is turning Vermont into an e-state. Anywhere you open a laptop, you will be online. [Note: As always, I'm paraphrasing, missing stuff, getting things wrong...Also, no time to re-read before posting., Ulp.]
Gov. Douglas says he's doing this for reasons of public safety, and to help the economy. It's also important for travel and tourism. He says Americans recognize the importance of innovation, but elected political leaders have been "fairly slow to respond." He asks: "How do we apply technology in ways that enable innovation?" They're up to 87% broadband availability. The last 10% will be the hardest, but it's vital, he says. "We can't let anyone go unserved" as Vermont uses the Net for local services. The state will partner with private providers and invest in infrastructure (e.g., fiber optic). The last mile will be provided by private providers. [Bob Frankston in the on-screen chat objects that the state should worry about coverage more than about broadband, and that the private partnerships are mistake.]
Q: What kind of things have you thought of so your providers can stay up to date?
A: That's vital. I'm not a techie. Let's ask Tom Evslin, who's on the tech advisory board...
A: (tom) The goal is 3M by 2010. The goal for 2013 is 20M symmetric [download and upload...yay!]
Q: What's the role of spectrum in your broadband vision? Why aren't the rural governors asking for spectrum reform? 95% of spectrum in VT is unused.
Q: who besides VT is working this way?
A: No one. [Chris Meyer, sitting next to me, points to the RI-WINS program for border-to-border coverage in Rhode Island.]
Q: Verizon has proposed selling its VT infrastructure to FairPoint, a tiny company.
A: We haven't decided whether we'll support this transaction.
Q: I'm with the American Library Ass'n. Libraries are the #1 provider of Net access in VT. What role did libraries play in your planning?
A: Libraries are important. We hope they'll play an even bigger role. E.g., access the Oxford library.
Q: There are challenges connectings kids to the Internet in a school setting, largely because the adults are uncomfortable with it and worry that it's out of control.
A: Parents should be parents. [paraphrase]
Q: How about if the municipality owns the backbone, with private financing. E.g., Burlington
A: There are lots of models that work.
Q: The key question is: Who's going to own this? Will some business interest be able to put in a toll booth, and also decide when the tech gets upgraded in a given corridor? Gov'ts don't biuld roads; they put out bids to build roads. How will the state decide when it's time to upgrade?
A: I'm cautious fiscally.
[Micah Sifry, who is in the house, posts to the chat the Gov's financial profile...] [Tags: f2c vermont wifi broadband net_neutrality ]
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[f2c] Intro
David Isenberg opens the F2C conference with a ringing invocation to friends, wifi roamin' and countrymen. (Actually, the incredible Howard Levy opened the conference with a harmonica solo. I've heard HL before. He does things with harmonicas that physics doesn't like.)
It's streaming here... [Tags: f2c net_neutrality david_isenberg ]
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February 25, 2007
My failed BeyondBroadcast talk
I did the "wrapup" at BeyondBroadcast, and tried to talk about the thought I keep coming back to but am never able to articulate. At least it was brief - under 10 minutes, I think. Here's the outline of what I said:
1. What's the thread between participatory culture and participatory democracy? Why think one has to do with the other? How can participatory culture be "transformative," as Henry Jenkins suggested in his terrific opening talk. (Digression: The mainstream media are focused on including "user-generated content" on their sites as their response to participatory culture, but that's not transformative.)
2. Well, what is democracy. There are bunches of definitions: Majority vote, society of equals, government that gets its authority from the people. But most important, it's ours. The government isn't theirs, the way it was the king's.
3. So, what does "ours" mean? Again, there are bunches of definitions: What the law gives you control over, on our side, of our nature or essence. But, when it comes to culture, look at the difference between your study of a foreign culture and your participation in yours. Culture is ours because it makes us who we are; we are indistinguishable from it.
4. But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It's ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we're inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it's not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours. 5. So, how does this new ours affect democracy? (And it's more likely to affect democracy before it affects politics since those folks have a death grip on power.) How does this ours get turned into an us that operates politically? I dunno. I.e., this talks makes no progress on the question it raises :( [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 culture politics democracy media everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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February 24, 2007
[bb] Participatory vs. commercial culture
Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, is moderating a panel on the relation of participatory and commercial cultures. He begins by saying that the inersection is older than the Web 2.0, "or, as I like to call it, The Web."
Panelists: Kenny Miller, creative vp for MTV media; Elizabeth Osder, sr. dir. of product dev at Yahoo media; and Arin Crumley, one of the creators film Four-Eyed Monsters .
Kenny talks about "navigational dominance. [What a phrase!] "We navigate our world by means of brands," he says. Each of the MTV properties has its own demographics (ComedyCentral, Nickelodeon, etc.). Each is a brand with navigational dominance. But now there are lots of ways to getting to info. "How do you enter that world in a respectful way?" It's no longer a one-way conversation, he says. There's more chunking. It's a fundamental shift. MTV is getting more of the audience's voice back on the air. "American Idol is awesome and we think about that." It's a binary world and we're divided into teams; people might like another option, but people don't know what it is. Attention is a zero-sum game.
Elizabeth (who was the first girl to play Little League softball officially) says that Yahoo makes connections among people. She points to the single sign-in identity system with 400M registered users. Yahoo bought Flickr, Delicious.com and MyBlogLog, she points out. "Every day citizen journalism and photo journalism is happening" there. Now at Yahoo she's trying to figure out how to disrupt Yahoo news. Seven years ago Yahoo started a Digg-like facility for news.
Arin talks about the reception of his movie. They did festivals for 9 months and 3,000 people saw it. The same number saw the first portion of it in the first 36 hours they put it on line.
Jesse asks questions.
Q: Arin, how is the process affecting your film-making?
A: The MySpace page surfaces ideas and questions that would never show up in the Q&A at a conference showing. Real conversation. We can see what the audience got from the movie and can adjust. Also, we can share the backstory, etc.
Q: Elizabeth and Kenny, how have users used your tools in ways you didn't expect?
A: Kenny: We put up a message board. We made a game. They took moderation off a board.
A: Elizabeth: Flickr taught us that users want to take your stuff and stick it on their site.
Q: What do you have to offer that we can't get elsewhere?
A: Kenny: You can't compete with everyone. The world is open and flat. We only ask if the audience is liking what we're doing and is it growing. [Shouldn't use the "audience" word in this crowd.]
A: Eliz.: We're part of an ecosystem. The job on our news sites is to point people to the best info on and off the site.A: (arin) A lot of what's been done seems contrived. The Web is becoming a means of expression. "We're just peers." We're sharing what we do with other peers. And we have tutorials about how to create videos and post them.
Q: (audience) How do commercial sites connect the needs of advertisers with needs of participatory participants?
A: Eliz.: We understand our audience. And we share revenues with bloggers.
A: Kenny: That's the big question.
[Tags: beyondbroadcast07 media yahoo mtv]
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[bb] John Palfrey
John Palfrey says we don't know how the Internet might affect democracy, but there lots of possibilities. He lays them out. [I'm typing quickly trying to capture the outline. As always, I'm missing stuff and getting it wrong.]
First, it might affect participatory democracy by providing open information enviornments, making new networks, enabling tools for individual activists, a productivity tool for campaigners, and attracting new participants. On the other hand, it might provide too much information, it can fragment us ("The Daily Me"), the participation can be watered down, it limits participation to those with access, some states are instituting censorship (cf. the ONI project), and maybe we should be jumping to "postdemocratic" order. So, maybe we'll see refinements; the context matters a lot and it depends "a ton on what baseline you choose." That is, if you're only asking if participatory culture makes demcoracy better, that's an easy bar. But maybe we should be aiming higher.
Second, acadmics says that the real story is about economic democracy and the emergence of a stronger middle class, and Doc Searls' "Vendor Relationship Management."
Third, academics also talk about semiotic democracy, e.g., control of cultural goods, with meaning created by many, not by the few. More YouTube and Second Life, less Disney. But (he asks), will people participate? Will we just create the old structures online? And won't new intermediaries emerge to decide what we see?
John lists takeaways:
The Web is about creativity, innovation, and greater power at the edges.
This is a global phenomenon.
Big media companies generally have no idea how to deal with participatory democracy.
The legal and political battle over the future of the Internet is where a lot of this will play out. The outcome is not assured.
This conference is about where theory meets practice.
Q: First, participatory culture and democracy are non-partisan. Second, someone has to tell us what's true or else we're liable to end up with fascism, racism, anti-semitism, etc.
A: Something to talk about this afternoon. [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 john_palfrey media democracy politics berkman]
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[bb] Henry Jenkins
MIT's Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture ) opens the Beyond Broadcast conference. Henry asks what the line is that connects participatory culture and participatory democracy.
Henry begins with the always-delightful chain that led a parody site's photos of "Ernie is Evil " (the Muppet) to be included in genuine, pro-Bin Laden posters. Henry points out that our current images of democracy recycle previous images, such as Mr. Smith in Washington, Rockwell paintings, etc. He shows captures of an avatars' protest march in a game space in China, an anti-Bush music video, Flickr images of the London bombing, American Idol voting (and "Vote for the Worst" as an anti-corporate Idol site), and the Moonite lite-brite (which he says is becoming a symbol for the young for a regime that's "frightened of its own shadow," is unaware of pop culture, and unable to respond to threats). Are these the new images of politics, Henry asks. The left, he says, uses the same images as the media does when talking about media reform. We talk about conformity, being narcotized, being turned into idiots and fools...as if we are victims of media. "The media reform movement is self-defeating the moment it holds mass media in contempt." He is going to propose a way of conceiving media reform.
He cites Stephen Duncombe' s vision [but my computer stopped working so I have no notes :( ]
What should politics look like? Henry points to a purple map of the US that shows states as a mix of red and blue depending on the proportion of Reps and Dems. This is not a partisan issue, he says. First, he says, we need free speech. We need to fight how copyright is being used by government and business as a "pincer move" squeezing participatory clture. We also have to "guarantee that everyone has access to participate," he says. We need to look at non-political sites where we come together, e.g., we could have used Survivor as an opportunity to talk about race, or 24 to have a dialogue about torture. We should mobilize fans without condeming the fantasies they embrace. We need to look critically at astroturf but also see it as a sign that participatory clture matters. He ends by looking at AskANinja's rant on the Net neutrality movement.
Q: My high school blocks all social networking.
A: Our schools are turning off sutdents' best access to information. It's a mass deskilling...
[Great talk. I'm left wondering more particularly about how the democratizing of media affects democracy, i.e., the very point of the conference.]
[Tags: beyondbroadcast07 henry_jenkins media democracy politics ]
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February 20, 2007
[conf] Web rules
I'm at the lunchtime presentation at a conference the name of which I'm not sure of — too many conferences, perhaps? — where a woman is in the middle of a presentation about research based on 350 observational sessions about how we're using media. I came in late and ate my sandwich during most of it, but the gist is that we're still watching more TV, but the Web and Radio are about equal in how many of us use them and how many hours we spend with each. Plus Webby folks spend money, apparently. (Dave Sifry is in the audience and hade the speaker drill down into more statistical detail, but it involved understanding numbers work, and I never got much past the concept of some numbers being "bigger" than other numbers.) "Online drives offline usage, and offline drives online usage."
There seem to be about 100 people here, and they are definitely media related — I see Maria Thomas of NPR.org, and I'm next to a guy from WQED.
The conference is the Integrated Media Association 's. The woman giving the talk was Pam Horan of the Online Publishers Org. [Tags: marketing]
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February 08, 2007
Videoblogging the Fast Search conference
I've spent the day doing video interviews with speakers and attendees at the Fast Search user conference. We did about 15, so I'm too tired to get the urls of all of them, but you can page through the blog and find 'em, if you want. Some great people talking about search, social software, knowledge management, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Two Dot Oh 2.0 ...Some names you'll recognize some companies you'll recognize, and some really interesting people you may not know. (Disclosure: Fast is paying me to do this. But the interviews are not about Fast.) [Tags: video search km social_software ]
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February 06, 2007
[berkman] Steve Schultze on Beyond Broadcast
Steve Schultze, from MIT Comparative Media Studies , is giving a Tuesday luncheon talk at the Berkman about the Beyond Broadcasting conference, which has as its theme this year "From participatory culture to participatory democracy."
Chris Lydon in a video clip asks, "Is the Internet the new public?" Steve plays a clip of Rebecca Mackinnon talking about Chinese repression of speech that leads to political action. Nevertheless, she says, the Web is enabling new forms of social discourse. Before the Web, she says, you couldn't be famous in China without getting past an official gatekeeper. Steve tells of a Chinese woman, Xiang Xiang , who uploaded an MP3 that's been downloaded a billion times—a song about a pig. There may be political echoes to the song, apparently.
The hypothesis of the conference: "Skills that emerge in the course of participating in pop culture can become powerful forces when translated into tools of citizen engagement."
The first half of the conference will be us listening to speakers. The second half will be working groups. Steven asks us what the working groups should be. (There's a wiki here.) [Tags: media conferences beyond_broadcast everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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January 30, 2007
[onmedia] More more more shorts
Mochila says it's doing for all content what iTunes has done for music: Enabling people to buy the content they need when they need it. It has a marketplace to let you monetize your "high quality" content. You can set rules for embargoes and usage [=DRM]. From the annoying promotional video he shows, it seems to be aimed at big time publishers, e.g., Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Enterpreneur. "Mochila has solved a huge problem in the media market: Licensing doesn't scale...We make licensing safe and scalable."
ThisNext helps you do social shopping. There are 60M SKUs. People want to help each other decide what to buy. At ThisNext users can talk about the products they care about. "McKinsey reports 27% of all personal conversations in USA include discussions of products." Only 15% of us trust advertisers. "Social shopping is the future of online marketing and brand merchandising." ThisNext tries to attract the "influencers." You can see who's making the recommendation and can connect one-to-one. [Did I ever tell you about the time a couple of friends and I started a company called WordOfMouth.com to enable local communities recommend local services? Someday someone will get online word of mouth right.]
[Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing media drm everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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[onmedia] More more shorts
ClickForensics has launched a network of advertisers to detect fraudulent clicks on ads, either by a competitor trying to burn up the budget or move up in listings, or by contentent publishers looking to make more money for the clicks. It's done through bots, spyware, click farms, pay-to-read... They say over 20% of the clicks coming from content sites (?) are fraudulent.
Michelle Wu of Social Television (mediaZone) — omigod, I think it's a woman! — talks about "social tv," which is professional TV with social interactivity. She's shows an over-produced promotional video, with the faux-important voice of Robin Leech. Then she pitches. It lets users talk together—chat—while watching professional packaged, long-form TV. It does p2p peering, saving "over 99% bandwidth costs." It serves ads to users based on their demographics and behavior. [I'm just not convinced that these various platforms we've seen today do much more than starting up a chat room while watching TV; that's what we do for political events we couldn't otherwise stand to watch.The P2P delivery is interesting, but I'm guessing someone else will solve this problem in a way that catches on, at which point SocialTV doesn't seem to be much more than a chatroom with ads. Unless I'm missing the point. Again.]
Dave Networks builds "video social communities around brands." E.g., the Stargate site is a money-making community site.The content developed there can be syndicated. "We've created a monetization model for syndication."
Real Time Content promises a "disruptive approach" that they call Adaptive Media. "Real Time Content, doesn't just play media, it adapts it to the audience." Every viewer sees his own TV program. [Well, ad.] It even adapts to the viewer's mood. In his example, Honda FR-V has four user profiles, although you could have thousands. He creates a thirty second ad in real time for a "young married couple" profile. Then he does one for a socer mom. The first is in Scotland with soothing music and the second features a mom packing kid's equipment, with spacey music and a voice-over. "We're empowering the consumer to control the ad." The ad creator creates the template using a Flash inteface that has metadata for content fragments for mood, demo, etc. [Great. Now we can wait for the blog post titled "My Adaptive Media ads think I'm gay."]
Jay Hallberg of SpiceWorks does "Ad-supported IT management for SMBs." If you subscribe, it inventories your network automatically and sets watches on things you want to watch, such as low disk space or low toner. As they do that, they show you ads. [Hmm. Could I be sick of seeing ads? Nah. How could I ever tire of that??] [SpiceWorks may do more than that, but I didn't hear.] [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing advertising metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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[onmedia] The IM generation
I came in at the end of a discussion of marketing to the "IM Generation." The part I caught was good — you can't lie, you can't tell them what's cool, you have to be transparent. "There's a lot of top-down marketing that will be roadkill in this environment." One says that we're only at the beginning of the development of grassroots videos as an art form.
The panelists are Tom McInerney (Guba ), Steven Starr (Revver), Justin Townsend (IGA Worldwide ) and Jeremy Verba (Piczo). Sorry I missed most of it. [Tags: onmedia07 media ads marketing alwayson ]
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[onmedia] More more shorts
[Reminder: I'm live-blogging. Sketchy, imprecise, sometimes inaccurate, incomplete, snap judgments, errors of transcription...you name it.]
ClipSync is a real-time social medium. It will "revolutionize entertainment on the Web." The founder previously founded Webex, which does simultaneous, synchronized experience. When experiences are simultaneous, you get social inter-reaction. Del.icio.us et al. are serial experiences. Clipsync lets you watch stuff—such as YouTubes—together. [Cool. The idea of enabling people to watch TV together over the Net has been around for a while, including a good version put forward by a friend of mine a few years ago, but I like ClipSync's doing this for grassroots content. We'll see if it catches on.]
MotionBox.com says that everything is becoming a video camera. [Well, not video cameras. They already are video cameras. Perhaps I'm quibbling :)] Currently there's a greater than 10,000:1 ratio of video posters to viewers. Motionbox makes it easy to edit your videos. Cool feature: A slider that lets you pan through the thumbnail of a clip. (Try it here.) The editing interface looks easy to use. It's Web based, so no software to load. MotionBox also has a player that makes it easy to scan through a video you've found. And, a user/viewer can drag select any segment of it and tag it. [Yay tags!] [There are a number of players in this space. Will MotionBox succeed? It looks slick and usable, but I dunno.] [Click here to see why not everything tagged "sex" is really about sex.]
PayPerPost is the "first user-generated advdetising program." "We connect our advertisers with the largest network of high quality bloggers...The PayPerPost Marketplace lets advertisers connect with bloggers." In the Market, the advertiser advertises what productsit wants bloggers to blog about for pay. Bloggers look through the available ads and choose the ones they want. He shows an appalling video in which little kids are goaded into smashing a camera because it's not an HP. but he seems to think we'll like it. Interesting. I'm live-blogging so I don't have time to be right, but please permit me a preemptive "Yech."
Vidavee "enables and organizes the video ecosystem." Vidavee has built an ad-placement technology "that places ads more intelligently and in a more consumer-friendly way." It lets your site popup an ad during, say, the most viewed portion of a video based on real-time analytics.
Now the panel of experts gets up. Unfortunately, the first one says "Advertising and content, what's the difference? Ads and content are all mixed up in the traditional media, so why not on the Web?" [A: Because the Web is ours and we're trying to build something better.] The other two panelists state some bad feelings about PayPerView. [Tags: onmedia07 advertising marketing video ]
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[onmedia] Short subjects
AlwaysOn OnMedia has a series of short pitches by new companies. I came in on Vringo.com, which plays a clip of your choice when you ring someone. The Vringo guy shows a clip of the people dancing to "Shout" in "The Wedding Crashers" and of the "Whaaaaaatzup?" Bud commercial. It thus seems to be an attempt to make cellphones even more annoying.
Voodoo Vox "is pioneering a breakthrough advertising channel: In-call advertising." [Uh-oh] They have a clickthrough rate of 14%. "Monetizing phone calls for a diverse network of high call volume industries": Radio/TV stations, directory asistance, call centers, VOIP telcos, etc. Their site says they create "interactive audio ads dynamically inserted into appropriate spots in various types of telephone calls." [What exactly is an appropriate spot in a call to insert an ad? I'd say it's 5 seconds after I've hung up.] Their ads auto-target particular demographics. He concludes: "If you have a phone call, I can monetize today." (Surprisingly, the firm is in North Adams, Mass., home of Ethan Zuckermans 'round the world.)
Now a panel reviews the presentations. [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson media marketing advertising ]
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[onmedia] At AlwaysOn OnMedia
AlwaysOn OnMedia is a well-run affair with great coffee, fresh fruit, and men wearing actual suits. We're sitting in a large room in the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel so hoity-toity that its lobby consists of a person who greets you and shows you to the elevators. I feel a bit like an anthropologist here, although I do recognize some friendly faces I'm looking forward to re-connecting with.
The conference is about monetizing communications. I like money and I like it when Net companies make lots of it. It's not my native idiom, but I have a phrase book that covers the most important areas ("Good morning/afternoon/evening. I am looking for an angel," and "May I monetize that for you?").
You can watch the webstream here, which is a nice service. (I'm on a panel at the end about PR on the Web. ) [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson media ]
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January 16, 2007
[sunberk] Why are the tools for open democracy coming from the Left?
The Sunlight-Berkman confab on providing more access to more information about politics and government was terrific. The thirty attendees are (by and large) working fulltime with their sleeves rolled up to provide citizens with better information about how our government and political system work. Some of the information is presented in slick graphics and some is pretty raw, but all of it can be used by any citizen to peg opinions to facts, and to find illuminating patterns and relationships. This is unalloyed good for our democracy.
So, here's my question: Most of the attendees are progressives, although some are non-partisan. But even the people behind the non-partisan services tend to be left-leaning. Yet what these folks are devoting their time to building are tools that help all citizens no matter how they lean—seeing patterns of private infliuence on public events, exposing corruption. Why is it that these tools for a better democracy are coming from the left? Or are there similar tools developed by the right that I don't know about? [Tags: berkmansunlight sunlightberkman sunlight berkman politics]
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January 15, 2007
[sunberk] Cool democracy tools
After lunch, we went around in small groups to stations where folks each had 7 minutes to demo their sites. Some very cool stuff is going on, including (and, damn, I lost my notes so I apologize for what I'm forgetting):
Metavid takes C-SPAN feeds of public domain video of our government in action, strips out the copyrighted stuff, and makes it all searchable by indexing the close captioning provided by our government. Once you've found the clip you want, they give you the code to embed it in your site. Way cool.
Front Porch Forum is a Vermont-based service that uses email listservs and the Web to let geographical neighbors talk to one another. It's a terrific and simple idea that happens to have been executed so well that in one case, 90% of homes have signed on. They've found that the optimum size for a virtualized neighborhood is about 300 real homes.
Congresspedia is an open Wikipedia-style wiki with entries for every congressperson, every bill and every rule.
Can you guess what FedSpending has lots of data about? You're right! It's a project by OMB Watch, and is funded (as several of these projects are) by the Sunlight Foundation.
The Capitol News Connection feeds 230+ public radio stations with stories pertinent to their localities.
MorePerfect is a wiki where people can use the wisdom of the political crowds to craft language for bills, proposals, referenda, etc. Rather than aiming at "neutrality," the way Wikipedia does, it aims at contributors being "constructive." So, if you disagree with a bill, you're asked not to reverse its meaning and insert stupid comments. Instead, create your own bill. They even have posted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as wikis, asking people to improve them.
The Gentilly Project has volunteers in New Orleans color coding houses on maps according to their state of repair. Part of the story is what they've learned about getting volunteers to do the work efficiently, which includes having a deadline, breaking a big project down into little steps, and being sure all the sub-projects are transparent to one another. The other part of the story are the results, which reveal that we have to make lots more progress, and that the progress is not as unevenly distributed as one might think.
The Campaigns Wikia is an ambitious attempt to gather information about significant campaigns around the world, using the Wikipedia format.
Lots and lots going on, building an infrastructure of facts and relationships that is direclty valuable, but, perhaps even more important, will be the source for mashups and visualizations we haven't yet thought of. [Tags: sunlightberkman berkmansunlight berkman politics everything_is_miscellaneous]
On second thought, just read Ethanz's descriptions of the projects. Way better than mine.
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[sunberk] Dan Gillmor blogging the conference
Dan Gillmor has posted a useful and link-rich report on the opening of the Sunlight-Berkman conference.
I second Dan's enthusiasm about the quality of the people here. These are folks who are inventing new ways of accomplishing the traditional goals of democracy. [Tags: berkmansunlight conference politics ]
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December 15, 2006
[leweb] Politics across the cultural divide
Le Web 3, which I thought was an outstanding event and a very good conference—great for networking and community, with excellent speakers trapped in a traditional conference framework—is now enmeshed in a controversy that confounds me.
If two of the three leading presidential candidates came to a US tech conference to talk for twenty minutes each about their Internet policies, it'd be considered a coup. At Le Web, however, some attendees feel cheated and betrayed.
In part, perhaps it's because Le Web was a genuinely international conference. I happen to enjoy politics, so I was happy to hear from the French politicians (even one who I thought treated us like pommes de terre de couch). Others obviously don't share my interests, so perhaps it felt to them as if two soccer stars bumped other speakers to promote their books. (But the candidates were talking about Internet policies, so the analogy isn't exact.)
Some apparently resent the intrusion of the traditional media. They came in with the candidates, elbowed people aside, and left with the candidates. On the other hand, one of the candidates, and Loic, pushed back on them. Le slap across the media's face.
Then there's a personal layer. Loic Lemeur (Disclosure: I count Loic as a friend. Plus Le Web paid my plane and hotel expenses) has blogged in favor of one of the candidates. He was quite gracious to the other candidate, but some have accused Loic of inviting the candidates in order to advance his own career, and perhaps to advance his company's interests. If you see no other value in having the candidates attend, then I suppose personal motivations become the best available explanation. And how could any of us not be tempted by the opportunity to be noticed by possible future presidents? But since the candidates' appearances at the conference seemed to me so obviously a positive, I don't need to resort to Loic's inner motives.
None of this has been helped by the post-event conversation, much of it quite angry, and further fueled by an ill-tempered, late-night response from Loic, for which he quickly apologized. Frankly, the swirling path of anger is too exhausting and unpleasant for me to follow.
Finally, there's the possiblity that there's simply a cultural divide here, and I'm just not getting something. Perhaps there's a subtext or a history. My own understanding—it may well be deficient but for now it's all I have—leaves me feeling bad that a first-class event is being torn down for what I thought was a net (and Net) positive. [Tags: leweb3 loic_lemeur politics france]
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December 12, 2006
[leweb] Sarkozy - Conservative candidate lectures us
The conservative candidate for the presidency and Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, comes to address the conference. He talks quickly and I'm taking notes on the simultaneous translation, and not keeping up.
He begins by saying the Internet is important. He focuses on the need for France to catch up in Internet as a business opportunity and culture. The government should make the France a leader in Inteornet. It should have boosted things. The miracle is that we nevertheless have people like you, Loic, were able to invest in Internet despite the lag. The lag is also cultural because we did not build the tools for the Internet. We had a difficult debate on IP rights. I was very much in favor of protecting IP because there's no creativity without protection. But law enforcement isn't the only possibility. There are win-win solutions that I wish we had spent time devising. The Internet must be one of the four or five priorities of our R&D efforts. France recently set up several global centers of excellent in IT, but France is not investing in the Internet. We are last but one in the effect of the Internet in boosting our economy in Europe. We need e-government, Internet in education, in medicine. I want to invest in free sites for the public. We're thinking of digitizing our archive. What is private must be respected but what is public must be genuinely public. I want broadband coverage. We should learn from what works in the US.("That doesn't mean there's only one culture," he quickly adds.)
I plan to restore investor confidence in our country. More accountable, more transparent. Greater confidence in employees. I want France to stop being the country that enriches Switzerland, Belgium the UK, putting to the edge those who want to make money. My message is simple: We need your capital, your intelligence in France. I want us to have a major higher education reform. Our young should be in the level playing field. Universities should be viewed as tax-exempt areas. Encourage young people to take patents. Tax breaks for young people creating companies.
Huge possibilities. Internet breaks down distances. It's sort of university campus on a global level. Generates intelligence. Brings people closer together and can be an instrument of emancipation. I'm thinking of China. I'm thinking of poor countries. Anyone can disseminate their movies in place of Hollywood. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can post his goods. A new area of freedom of expression opens.
It's a means of cultural diversity. It cannot be a single culture or economy. It must derive its creativity from the multiplication of small companies that innovate. Some become monopolies that inhibit innovation, and we must not that happens.
The dissemination of anti-Semitic information is not ascceptable. Not everything is permitted. I'm not afraid of the word "internet regulation."
Internet makes school and education even more necessary because of the flow of knowledge that needs interpretation and assessment.
Let us make the new Internet continent the continent of new liberties, that includes rather than excludes. Let us make the Internet continent of the transmission of knowledge, and not the transmission of lies. The continent of sharing of cultures, not of the leveling of values. [Wow. Does he know he's contradicting himself sentence after sentence?]
You have in your hands the liberty and progress of the world. Realize you must think of what others might do who do not share your values and ethics. The liberty the Internet serves must be that of universal rights. Internet with rules. Huge responsibility on your shoulders. The new citizen of the world is aware of his responsibility and his liberty is bound by values.
He leaves without any questions. And Esme Vos, who I am sitting next to, says Sarkozy speaks perfect English.
I feel like i've been lectured by a guy who has no actual understanding of the Internet. I don't know about French politics, but personally, I sort of hated him. (This is not a well-grounded opinion.) [Tags: leweb3 france politics sarkozy]
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[leweb] Marko Ahtisaari
Marko Ahtisaari, formerly of Nokia (and a remarkable person), talks about Blyk, which is building a "pan-European free mobile operator funded by advertising." Free cell service for teenagers!
He says there are two billion mobile subscribers. He says your children won't believe there was a time when to make a phone call, you had to change next to a wall.He points out that had been a collective object ("the family phone") became a personal object. Because of its social function, it pulls other functions into it: It becomes a watch, an alarm clock...
He points to five obstacles:
1. Reach - reaching the next two billion will drive changes in the infrastructure.
2. We are not doing a good job of tuning out communication.
3. They need to be hackable.
4. The future will be around social functionalities, e.g. gifts (Palm beaming), photostreams (Flickr), signaling (Jaiku), real identity (LinkedIn)
5. Freedom - making communications free or at least transparent pricing.
Q: What type of ads will you be serving?
A: We aren't saying yet, but they will not be interruptive. [Tags: blyk movile telecommunications marko_ahtisaari leweb ]
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[leweb] danah boyd
What's up with youth? Why don't they settle down, get a job, and stay the hell of my lawn, you darn kids!! Aaarrghhh.
danah boyd says: "For the average teenager in the US, if you're not on MySpace you don't exist," she says, just as in Europe if you don't have a mobile phone, you don't have a social life.
Friendster was the precursor of MySpace she says. It was populated by freaks, geeks and queers who rebelled against Friendster's hostility to them. They'd make fake profiles, which Friendster tried to kill off. MySpace went after the people being kicked off by Friendster, including musicians. Music is cultural glue for young people, danah says. A symbiotic relationship grew between bands and fans. The fans invited their friends. They started engaging with their friends. MySpace made the "mistake" of allowing html in the forms, so kids hacked the pages, creating highly personal spaces that people feel they own. A culture grew among those trying to figure out how to hack MySpace profiles.
MySpace profiles were based on Friendster's, based around dating. But because you can list your friends and comment, it becomes a public conversation space. This causes a shift in what it means to be a friend. They're writing not only themselves into being, but writing their entire community into being.
Top 8 lets you choose who your best friends are, in public. "Any decision you make about this are wrong." Nowhere in our public lives do we list who our friends are.
What's happening at MySpace is very similar to what happens in the rw. Kids are trying to figure out status. But, online social networks have "persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences." Kids sent the norms based upon the invisible audience they assume is there. She points to Stokely Carmichael having to decide how to speak on TV, the way he spoke in DC to politicos or in the south to congregations. There is no right choice, she says.
Kids on MySpace are constantly being pummeled by marketers, she says. Marketers want to be friended by teens. To teenagers, email is nothing but spam. "That's what MySpace is turning into." It's a huge struggle. "I don't know if MySpace is sustainable."
The future is obviously mobile, she says. But how? What will it look like? We've assumed Net neutrality: Anyone can build something and put it out there. But not on mobiles. So, how do we take that next step?
[Great talk. Everyone knows danah's brilliant, but she's also a brilliant presenter.] [Tags: danah_boyd myspace leweb3 social_networks]
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[leweb] Shimon Peres
At Le Web 3 (formerly Le Blog), Shimon Peres has just held a Q&A session. (I missed his presentation itself because, having not eaten for 36 hours, I opted for breakfast.) Instant standing ovation. I was surprised that an Israeli was so warmly greeted, which shows what I know.
Le Web has turned out to be a seminal conference. 1,000 people from 36 countries. Lots of networking. Very high energy. (And almost all male speakers.)
I speak this afternoon, presumably on "Blogging Our Way to Democracy." I completely rewrote it this morning and will rewrite it again this afternoon. And then, after I talk at 5pm, I will rewrite it in my head over and over. [Tags: leweb3 shimon_peres israel ]
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December 11, 2006
Report from Iceland
I'm at the Reykjavik airport, waiting for the flight to Paris for Le Web (formerly Le Blog, and before that Le Usenet and, originally, Le Cuneiform). It's 1:30am (or "6:30am" as they say in Icelandic). I love Iceland, and not just for its physical beauty and for putting letters together in impossible combinations simply for my amusement. No, I love Iceland because there's free wifi in the airport.
Tired? Moi? Not a bit! Why, if I were tired, would I be willing to generalize about a country based on 50 minutes in its major airport?
Later: In Paris. At the conference. It's packed. Lots of great people here. I'm too tired to blog. Or talk. Or sit upright... [Tags: leweb3 reykjavik iceland]
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December 09, 2006
[unc] Social software symposium wiki
The U of North Carolina social software symposium has a wiki with session notes and more... [Tags: unc social_software ]
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December 08, 2006
[unc] Social Tagging panel
Alla Zollers notes that we can tell a lot about a community by looking at its tags. E.g., delicious.com is clearly IT heavy. "Relevance is socially constructed," she says. I.e., what is relevant changes over time depending on who interacts with it and how they interact it. "Communities form around tags." [As always, I'm just taking live notes and missing lots.]
Lilly Nguyen thinks of tagging as peer production of knowledge. People think about taggging in terms of production but not use. We have sociological tools that explain some of these but they don't seek up with Library Information Science. Use of tags is not just about findability and refindability.
I say that I agree that finding and refinding doesn't cover it. I sometimes tag because I feel like I'm contributing to a tag stream that's creating knowledge, along with all the human motivations we have for doing things (reputation building, validation, etc.).
Barbara Wildemuth asks why people would use (not create) tags other than finding and refinding. Lilly says she uses tags to discover, to browse, which is different than finding.
Lilly says she worries about tagging overloading us. Someone says we'll fix it eventually. Lilly says, "So fix it!"
Thomas says that he feeds delicious.com for social reasons—he knows people pay attention to it—but he searches through Yahoo MyWeb because it has features that work better.
Cliff Lampe wonders where the line is between finding systems and recommendation systems. (Thomas likes Ma.gnolia.com.)
Gary Marchionini points out that people tag also because the act of tagging helps memory, just as taking notes does.
Thomas points out that people tag with terms they've most recently interacted with.
Jackson Fox says that we transition terms over time. E.g., after tagging pages as "web design" for a while, he started instead tagging some "graphic design." So, when he goes to find info about color theory in ten years, if he doesn't remember he used to call them all "web design," he'll miss them. The tools don't handle this well, he says.
Now Jackson gives his official talk. He says content is very personal. When content creators tagged their own material at lulu.com (where he works) and found out that others could see those tags, they were livid. Then they calmed down and saw they could connect their content with others. Is it a folksonomy if the taggers are the content creators? How do you avoid spamming?
Thomas: Creator's tagging doesn't fit within folksonomy, but it can be a type of seeding.
I say that if a site made the author's tags visible next to the readers' tags, it'd stimulate anti-author tags.
Jung Sun Oh says in her talk that we don't know whether people tag based on their own mental models or based on the terms in the source they're tagging.
Terrell Russell says he'd like to help people figure out what they know by seeing one another's tags. If you make the tags and concepts visible and put them in the middle the room at all times, you'll begin to converge. Thomas says Cameron Marlowe at Yahoo has built something like this. He says that in one instance, people were removing tags about themselves. Nicole Ellison says that in some organizations, you don't want to be tagged a particular way because it might drive people toward you. Zeynep Tufecki says that people care a lot about their identity; she's reminded of research about identity in prisons and other places where you don't have control over that. Jackson says that on the other hand, you can build social capital that way. Amanda Lenhart points to the identity brouhaha at FaceBook as an example of the dangers. Cliffe Lampe suggests pairing it with a reputation system. There's discussion of whether such a system would result in only positive assessments. Lilly worries about mistakes staying with your forever; Terrell says he's working on tag decay. Fred Stutzman says this is a social attribution system, but tagging boils things down too much so it'll be harder to discover what we don't know about a person. Terrell says that he's aiming at skills areas. Laura Sheble says it might be helpful to have a way to respond. Also, it'll be interesting to look at the edge cases, she says. [Tags: unc taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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December 03, 2006
[rootscamp] Four reasons why RootsCampDC was a really, really good event
1. Interesting discussions all over the place.
2. People working for progressive change for the sake of others, aware of the possibilities of the Internet not only for making them more effective, but for invigorating our democracy.
3. A community that has not come together quite this way before.
4. The possibility of real change in the real world for real people. [Tags: rootscamp rootscampdc politics]
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[rootscamp] Why Democratic women challengers disproportionately failed
Few women Democratic challengers won. This session is trying to figure out why. There are about 25 people in the session, more women than men. Marc Laitin of Wired for Change will present data he's gathered. Then the group will put forward cases and hypotheses so that Marc can adjust his statistical model. The aim is to figure out why women did so badly, because, as Jackie Bray says, the solution can't be to run more men.
Marc's data show there was definitely a skew against women challengers. But is this what always goes on? There's some historical analysis that shows, surprisingly, that being a female has not worked against candidates. If so, then something was going on this year. This year women raised more money than man. But women did even worse in close elections.
The discussion is often arcane (to me) about political factors I've never heard of. Some I do understand: Was security the dominant issue in these issues? Did the National Repulican Congressional Committee target these races? Was the advertising especially negative? Were conservative Democratic women recruited? Were women with particular types of credentials recruited? How many had held office before? What do the campaigns say were the causes of their loss? Are there commonalities among the voters? Did women fare worse with independents? Is there any correlatio wit the Republican women who lost? Anything about the primary? Many many more factors are raised...
I ask if statistical analysis is the right way to go given the relatively small sample and the number of possible influences. Marc (who has an admirably warm and serious demeanor) answers that there's plenty of qualitative work to do, and it's undoubtedly being done, but statistical analysis may surface information otherwise hidden.
Jackie ends by saying that the women's loss is a part of the story we need to be telling.
Fascinating. [Tags: rootscamp rootscampdc politics women democrats]
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[rootscamp] RootsCamp and coalitions
I'm at the second day of a Bar-style RootsCamp in DC. (Bar camps are unconferences, initially inspired by FOO camp.) It looks about 200 people are here today at the space made available by the National Education Association. It's generally (entirely?) a progressive group. Young. Well-mixed by geneder, not as well by race. Some political consultants but mainly (I think) organizers...hard-bitten optimists.
The big schedule board up in the hall is pretty much full with topics ranging from experiences using electronic tools to help labor organize to a discussion of why Democratic women candidates did not fare well.
I'm at a session about coalition building. People from America Votes are at the head table. America Votes is a coalition of 32 progressive organizations, including Emily's List, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood and MoveOn.org. Its inaugural year was 2004. But the organizers don't want the session blogged so that the exchange can be frank. (Official notes wil lbe posted.) [Tags: rootscamp rootscampdc politics ]
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September 07, 2006
[massnetcomms] Net neutrality panel
The panel consists of me, Brent Olson (ass't vp, regulatory policy, AT&T) and Link Hoewing (ass't vp, Internet and tech issues, Verizon). Paul Deninger of Jeffries Broadview and TechNet (yay) is the moderator. [I'm typing this while on the panel so my coverage will be worse than spotty. BTW, I'm the only one in the room with a laptop open.] [There was one exchange I found particular clarifying. Click here to jump to it.]
Brent from AT&T says that Net neutrality is an elusive concept but it generally means "how to respond to the changing nature of the Internet." It started out as being about whether providers can block access to sites but now it means allowing providers to enhance their service. He says AT&T is the main DSL provider. "We are a price leader in this market and we're committed to making more broadband available to more people at a lower rate." They're investing in fiber. "But our customers don't just purchase broadband. They purchase broadband Internet access." That means they expect to go where they want, send the emails they want, and use the services they want. "If we didn't do this, our customers wouldn't buy it. So it would be foolish" to block access or degrade experience.
He signs on to the FCC's Four Principles (Martin's revision). [But the principles don't say that all services and sites will be equally accessible.]
He asks us to imagine there's a company that wants to improve the performance of the Internet. E.g., Akamai. They help video unspool smoothly, etc. That's ok, right? But that's what AT&T is talking about offering. "We're talking about entering into commercial arrangements—not unilaterally charging someone but entering into mutually beneficial arrangements." [Distinction without a difference.] As consumers become more sophisticated in their use of the Net, providers ought to be able to offer more sophisticated pricing structures. It wouldn't be good to build a high performance "Ferrari" network and charge everyone higher prices even if they don't want it; nor do we want to build a "Yugo" network that goes slowly. One size does not fit all.
The key going forward, he says, isn't neutrality but flexibility. YouTube and Google succeeded by doing something new. [But discriminatory pricing means that the garage shop won't perform as well as the established companies that are paying for better delivery.] Net neutrality will deny users choice and will hurt innovation. [I missed how it hurts innovation. Sorry.] Net neutrality would "freeze the network architecture in place" just when it needs innovation. [I don't trust the telcos to design the new network architecture. We have distributed processes in place.] "Let everyone in the ecosystem continue to innovate while keeping a watchful eye through FCC oversight."
Brent of Verizon says technology is attractive to members of Congress. He says they understand it now because they have Blackberries and cell phones. [Yup, devices that conect them to the tubes of the Internets.] Net neutrality is within the framework of broadband policy. Brent is more optimistic about broadband deployment in the US than most of are. Wireless subscribers are going up rapidly. People are shifting to broadband rapidly. Wireline access for traditional telephone service is going down. Verizon has been losing several hundred thousand lines every month as people switch to other types of services.
Broadband is very competitive, he says. You can get real competition when there are only two competitors, especially in the early stages of the market. There are more competitors in more areas, "in some places up to four providers."
Verizon is remaking its network by providing fiber to the home. They've now run fiber past 3M homes (i.e., 3M could sign up). By the end of the year, they plan on doubling that. Fiber deployment in the US is happening faster than in other countries, he says.
Verizon recognizes that upstream matters. That's why fiber matters. E.g. the 15Mbps service has been selling well among gamers. (Verizon offers 50Mbps services in some areas.) Yes, he says, Japan has higher average speeds: 12Mbps.
The Senate bill supports the four principles and Verizon agrees with that. They think it will work because the FCC will enforce them and the market will make it work also.
He cites Dave Farber to support his view.
He concludes by saying that Verizon is losing lines into homes so it's highly incented to provide great and open service.
I'm going to say that it boils down to the fact that the providers' interests don't align with the promise of the Internet. Thus, I don't trust them to re-architect the Internet. We have a distributed, design process that does that. If discriminating among types of packets helps without degrading service then, frankly, I don't care. But I don't believe the providers will be able to resist the temptation to prefer their own services because that's their business model: Sell content and services. We need to separate access from content/services.
Paul makes a few comments. Rather than thinking of the Internet as a Studebaker that needs updating (as one of the speakers said), why not think of it as a highway? Brent says that different people want different things. AT&T wants to be able to offer all those things and not do one size fits all because that means everyone pays the same price. Competition protects markets.
Randall of AOL says that the debate needs facts. He doesn't believe the future of Internet innovation requires the carriers charging people tiered access. Those fees will be a spit in Verizon's ocean. His guess is that it drives Verizon nuts that there are VOIP providers who are offering telephony that competes with Verizon's. Paul says, "Isn't it all about VOIP?"
Link says they have a competing VOIP service that runs on other people's networks as well as theirs. Also, their SuperPages offering has to work on everyone's network.
Me: I don't want the highways to be designed by Halliburton, Yugo or Ferrari. We have a process in place—open and distributed—that works.
Link: But the backbone providers have always been in the design process.
Me: But they're selling access to bits, not services and content. That's the right model.
Paul: This debate came about because DSL is data via telephone lines...
Brent: The comms industry is getting complicated. The FCC said it's no longer right to try to fit them into the old shoebox. [Missed some of this. Sorry.]
Q: There's no such thing as Net neutrality in the wireless business. Whitelisting and blacklisting goes on already over cellphones and PDAs. And "on deck access" [I don't know what that is.]
A: Brent: An EVDO card lets you go anywhere on the Internet, except for some capacity constraints.
Jonathan: People don't use those devices the same way, so there isn't the same consumer pressure.
Me: You shouldn't be allowed to call it the "Internet" if you block access.
Randall: I had this discussion with the attorney general (?) of Texas who said because we (AOL) were blocking access to child porn sites, we can't call it the Internet. I said, fine, we'll explain to the market what we're blocking.
Me: Then you weren't offering the Internet. The Internet is a set of protocols that guarantee that all packets can move across all networks without prejudice or preference.
Q: Does David want to go back to ArpaNet days?
A: Me: No, I want all bits to be treated the same. That way the ends (not the middle) can provide services.
A: Randall: The providers shouldn't filter bits. There should be competition among services for this.
Link: All of us recognize that we're in the market to provide connectivity that works as it always had. If users don't want to access services we want to market, they won't. E.g., if we have fiber throughout a neighborhood and people would want to have a priority set for that. Net neutrality wouldn't let people do that. A: (me) If I decide to set up the same service but I'm not Verizon, will you prioritize my bits the same? You can't because you don't even know that my bits are a medical service. So, you're prioritizing your own bits (even if customers want it). That crushes competition.
Q: What business model?
A: Brent: No one really knows
Why can't we harness what we have, responding to consumers.
A: Me: It should be a commodity business. Bits are the ultimate commodities. If the incumbents are ill-suited to do that, they should fail at it.
Link: Unbundling didn't encourage a lot of investment. Now we're getting networks built. The market will likely continue to be competitive.
Paul: Hope for both sides: No matter how the legislation comes out, the FCC in its one intervention maintained neutrality.
[Tags: massnetcomms net_neutrality digital_rights]
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[massnetcomms] Jonathan Frankel from WilmerHale on Net neutrality
Jonathan Frankel, a lawyer with WilmerHale (which seems to be related to Hale and Dorr)wants to let us know what the Net neutrality debate looks like to Congress.He says there isn't much room for learning or for advocates to educate lawmakers. Most of the discussion is hollow on all sides. Platitudes and slogans. There isn't even a consensus in DC about what Net neutrality means, because it's a theoretical debate at this point. There's one instance of a rural provider blocking VOIP but the FCC came down on them like a ton of bricks and he hasn't seen other instances since. Right now, the Internet's "third party" content adds value to the providers' real value stream, TV programs. [I am, as always, paraphrasing.]
Both sides are guilty of using scare tactics to get the Hill's attention. Pro Net Neutrality folks say that some medical Web sites will be slowed or blocked. AOL's experience shows that customers won't be satisfed with wall gardens and any provider that restricts access will lose market share. [Really? How about the one that offers "family-safe" content? Or "school-quality" information?] The quality of service guarantees won't degrade anyone's experience and will make video and VOIP better, he says. The fact that consumers aren't buying the fastest connections available is a practical reminder that for the average user the current level of delivery isn't affecting their experience. [Say what? Give us more bandwidth — symmetrical — at a lower price and see what the market demands as satisfactory performance.]
On the other side, the providers are exaggerating "a little" by saying they need to charge content providers for quality of service to afford to build out access.
He's wary of legislation ahead of facts on the ground. The 1996 telcomm legislation was a "disaster" because it didn't address the real facts about revenues. The Snowe NN amendment is too specific about when discrimination could be allowed. It should wait until there are real facts and an actual record. E.g., in a few years it's possible that "third party content" [that's you and me, sister] might compete with the TV shows the providers sell us.
Sen. Ron Wyden has put a hold on the Stevens bill because it has no NN and the leadership has told Stevens they won't bring it to the floor unless he can guarantee the 60 votes required. Frankel doesn't think anything will happen until after the election. If the Dems gain control of the House, the telcos may soften on NN because they want to get the other part of the Stevens bill passed (the franchising part ).
[Tags: massnetcomms net_neutrality digital_rights ]
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[massnetcomms] Randall Boes of AOL on Net Neutrality
[massnetcomms] Randall Boes of AOL on Net NeutralityI'm at the Massachusetts Network Communications Council's annual meeting. MassNetComms is an industry association with members rom the full chain of network companies, from chip makers to "content providers" to security companies to telcos. (I was invited at the last minute to be the only non-telco on a panel talking about Net neutrality.)
Randall Boe, general council of AOL, in his keynote wants to set the record straight about Net neutrality. [I'm taking notes and paraphrasing. Accuracy is not guaranteed, although I'm doing my best.]
He says that the NN folks were all in favor of regulation when it came to the Time/Warner AOL merger. He says Networks providers have to have the right to control their netowrks because it's private property. That includes controlling the content that goes across the network. When there's limited competition, "you have a little bit of a different shade on that network." "But if you build the network, it's yours." The market will solve the problem for you quickly if you make the wrong choice.
The government almost never gets it right, he says. Everyone has an incentive to keep the government out.
The US is last in the top 15 countries for broadband penetration, he says. The problem is that there isn't enough competition. The lack of competition results in higher prices, abusive pricing by providers, and inefficiencies.
He lists the four network freedoms [initially outlined by Michael Powell of the FCC]. Consumers are entitled to "lawful content of their choice," "entitled to run apps and services of their choice," to "connect devices that don't harm the etwork" and to competition. [It's not a mere nicety that we are not consumers.]
The NN debate has been spurred, he says, by the fact that providers aren't getting enough return on their investment. They claim that this is because, in part, of "millionaire free riders." The network providers say content providers are free riders. Randall isn't sure that's right, but, he says, anoother way of looking at it is that content providers provide the value that drives people to broadband. [Yeah!] "There's synergy there. It's not just parasitic." The network providers, he says, could be considered free riders on YouTube's, Google's and eBay's content.
Consumers want access to everything. If providers start charing Google for faster lanes, then maybe Google will go elsewhere. And we don't want to be charging people for everything. [Yeah!]
He closes by pointing to the fact that users are creating content. How could you pick the winners so you could charge them more? Even if you could, why would you want to? What would the advantage be for consumers, providers or content providers? [A more balanced presentation than I'd expected.]
[Tags: massnetcomms net_neutrality digital_rights ]
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August 27, 2006
[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]
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[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]
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August 26, 2006
[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]
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[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 ]
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[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 ]
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[foocamp06] The hot phrase of the conference, so far
"Mechanical Turk" [Tags: foocamp06]
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[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]
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August 06, 2006
[wikimania] Betsy Devine
Betsy Devine talks about "vandal waves," usually precipitated by mainstream media attention on an article. She looks at how many of the edits are made by registered users and by anonymous users.
She talks about pgkbot, software that blocks inflammatory user names on IRC chats. How can that type of tech be used to block vandal waves, she asks? Not one person who edited Swiftboating on Nov. 29, 2005, not one went on to become a serious contributor (ten or more entries). Typical of a vandal wave: The time between edits by different users shrinks, and there's a surge in the ratio of IPs to registered users.
She distinguishes vandal waves from spin waves. Spin waves are created by people trying to influence the media. These are harder to identify programmatically because they are paid, professional writers trying to disguise their work. (See paidToComment.com.)
She'd like to see Wikipedia's anti-vandal tools made more user friendly. [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipediabetsy_devine]
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[wikimania] Florence Nibart Devouard on diversity
Florence Nibart Devouard is on the Wikimedia Foundation board. She talks about building in diversity.
She begins by giving a history of the foundation. Wikipedia started in January 2001. The Wikimedia Foundation began in the middle of 2003. She gives a detailed and interesting history.
Resolutions, she explains, need at least two members to approve the draft before it get svoted on. All is done in public.
The Foundation's original mission statement says it's about encouraging "the growth and development of open content, wiki-based, and multilingual projects." It is not Wikipedia-specific. She points to other ways of putting it. E.g., "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." (She accompanies this with a photo of Jimmy Wales as a Jedi Knight.)
The board needs to see the big picture, in addition to specific expertise.
Issues: The organization is US-based but the community is international. The projects are run by voluneers. The organization does not own the content. Solutions: Balance appointed vs. elected board members to make sure that there are enough people who get the big picture. Set up an advisory board. And organize meetings all over the world.
There are also educational issues: The number of contacts to the outside world, other than Jimmy. Limited reporting overall. Only one board meeting in 2006. Solutions: Organize real life meetings, seek help from professionals or academics, study other orgs, require an annual survey by each board member, and require reports from committees.
Third issues: Being a team. Don't allow a single personality to dominate the board, as happens now. Not all members participate equally. Solution: Expand the board with active members. Term limits. Hire a CEO. Set up committees. Have a conflict-of-interest policy. Share the workload.
fourth: Avoid win-lose situations. The chapters now are not branches but part of a federated oragnization. They don't have the right to use the logos.
Where to go? Partnering? Does the Foundation lead, create, push, and/or support initiatives?
She ends by pointing to three editors who died recently because we should remain who makes Wikipedia.
[How many organizations are this forthright and transparent?] [Tags: wikimania2006 florence_nibart_devouard wikimedia]
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[wikimania] Mitch Kapor
Wikipedia challenges the assumption that to create good information, someone has to be in charge and it needs certified experts, Mitch says. "The view people have of how the world has to work is just wrong." People think Wikipedia can't work because they assume it's as hard to remove grafitti there as it is in the real world. But, he says, all this is what the attendees here already know. [As always, I am paraphrasing and paying attention to what happens to strike me.]
Now he talks about blogs vs. wikis. "I find blogs, especially political blogs, on the whole to be quite disappointing. To me, they're the talk radio of the Internet." The problem is that they're a series of atomic utterances, one after another. Rather than building on one another, they're like billiard balls. Blogs are about individual expression. They increase partisanship rather than increase thoughtful reflection. [Mitch's got to find himself some new blogs to read.] But, with wikis, people work on the same entry and improve it.
"As a technologist, I had some unlearning to do when I entered the Wikipedia community" because the tools weren't all that good. But, Jimmy Wales taught him that the "secret sauce" isn't technology. It's community. It's the shared values: NPOV, being prepared to be edited, learning to make your opponent's case. To become a Wikipedian is to internalize those values.
In the early years, he says, there were more articles in Wikipedia about Middle Earth than about Africa because the contributors were writing about what they knew about. This is no longer true. He talks about the importance of inclusiveness. But, he says, things could be better. E.g., the UI that shows you what's changed in an article is obscure unless you're pretty deep into it. Wikipedia needs to be easier to edit if it is to be inclusive. It looks ok to those who are already in the tent, but that's a self-selected group. "If we want Wikipedia to succeed in its mission, we must find ways to lower the barriers to participation." He applauds the efforts underway to do this. "I'd make it a major strategic priority for the community."
Mitch recommends An Inconvenient Truth. [Me, too.] Politics as usual is broken. See campaigns.wikia.com to see what Jimmy Wales talked about in his keynote. Democracy as the experiment in enabling people to determine what's best is at risk. "Wikipedia is an existence proof of the power of a decentralized and respectful self-governing community to make an impact." It is an "inspiration for a political movement." The key attributes should include:
Participatory.
Product and process intertwined. The product is a wiki and it uses the wiki to produce itself.
Aspiration to high standard of respectful dialog.
Citizens of equal stature with experts.
To most audiences, this idea would be absurd. Politics generally shuns facts and collaboration. "We need a political movement that does not practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia does not practice Britannica as usual." It's been done before: Gandhi. MLK. Mandela.
But, to succeed, we need an existence proof. We need new tools, especially ones that help us argue better. Argue fairly. That's what the Wikipedia culture is good at. [Good point.]
There are no panaceas. In the real world, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Facts aren't enough. The Iraq article in Wikipedia can't conclude that we should or should not withdraw our troops. This political movement has to have core values. Mitch says he does not have an answer.
Q: If Wikipedia is the metaphor for a political movement, consider that Wikipedia doesn't yet address the needs of the visually impaired. We don't have volunteers to do this. How would we get the equivalent problems addressed in the political realm?
A: There are discussions going on about evolving wikis for the visually impaired. "I'm willing to put my oar in the water on that." For the political movement, it's like Wikipedia in 2001. We just need a few crazy people.
Q: How might Second Life support these movements? [Mitch is on the board.]
A: It'll become a fabulous place for collaboration.
Q: Your key attributes are new for the production of knowledge, but they're old hat in politics. At Wikipedia, there are relatively few active participants...
A: If there were lower barriers to editing, there would be more participants.
[Mitch's intuition about a tool for fair argument leading to a movement works better, I think, if we assume there are only a handful of parties. But suppose we're more fragmented than that? A fair argument forum might end as diverse as the blogosphere. They key would be, I think, providing a fair argument platform — an idea I like — that also enables us to come together in movements that accept a range of diversity. Fair arguments don't always resolve, but we need an ethos that also does not see splintering as the alternative.]
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia politics mitch_kapor]
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August 05, 2006
[wikimania] Arbitration Committee
SimonP, MindSpillage, Raul654, KellyMartin and Jdforrester are on the 15-person Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. (Well, Kelly used to be on it.) It was established because there people who want to make Wikipedia worse, and there needs to be a way to deal with them. In 2003, Jimbo Wales put a message on the mailing list looking for volunteers. The initial volunteers came up with a policy. Jimbo accepted it, and the community liked it.
It becomes a Q&A session...
The committee usually accepts cases when there have been other attempts at resolving it. By the time it gets to arbitration, it's probably gone beyond the point of mediation.
There have been about 200-250 cases so far.
They discuss "brittle users" who have a lot to add as contributors and editors but who are unable to work with others.
The Committee technically only recommends banning. The "sentence" is carried out by the administrators. If the community disagrees with the decision, it may not be carried out.
Someone recently looked at all the banned users and found about 90% never return and 9% came back as problems, and 1% came back as good users. [I think I got those numbers right.]
They rarely disagree on matters of principle — if you delete a page, you should say why, for example — and they usually agree if someone is a problem user. They often disagree about the remedy.
If you don't respond to requests for clarification, etc., you are likely to be banned by an administrator without it ever going to arbitration. A single other administrator can unban you.
"We are not a court. We don't make precedent. And we don't guarantee that we'll be fair."
Sometimes they ban someone from editing their own, or their company's, article.
Other remedies besides banning: Mentoring. Banning from a particular article. Limiting the number of reverts per day. Reading particular pages, e.g., copyright policy. In one case, a contributor was required to provide explanations when he reverts pages, because he was reverting certain contributors' changes on sight — because those contributors' changes were stupid. So, even though he was right, he was put under a restriction. [Process!] In some cases, people have been banned for following policy, but doing so in obnoxious ways.
They don't have a lot of policy disputes, but there are some. E.g., one of the members isn't as convinced that NPOV is right. But cases aren't over policy. It's usually not a fine line decision: "Is the user a pest?"
"Essentially, the overriding rule is common sense. The problem usually is people not knowing what common sense is."
The Committee stays out of content disputes. The issues tend to be ones of disruptive editing. "It's not Wikipedia's job to define reality or truth."
There are some death threats pending against some of the arbitrators. [Yikes!] [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]
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A Nobel for Jimbo Wales?
Ed Yourdon has a long, thoughtful posting about Jimmy Wales' keynote, proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize, not entirely jokingly. (He suggests putting him on a stamp as an alternative.)
I think Wikipedia is important enough that the suggestion is only somewhat absurd.We need one more milestone before we take the idea seriously. Maybe international editions of Wikipedia will get together and try to work out their differences. Hell, if they could even agree on how to draw the maps, Jimmy should get the prize.
[Tags: wikipedia wikimania2006]
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[wikimania] Lightning Talks
Very spotty coverage of five-minute presentations...
OpenWetWare.org "is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering."
Callie B. Carroll (Hylaweb) talks about accessiblity and MediaWiki.
Yurik shows an add on that pops up a page when you hover over the link. It uses Query API, a read-only interface to Wikipedia. It gives back lots of info.
A troll claims that Wikipedia contains all knowledge.
Someone (sorry) talks about AboutUs.org, a wiki about Web sites.
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]
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[wikimania] Wikis and libraries
Mary Chimato who works in a medical library at SUNY Stonybrook gave a terrific presentation on how she introduced a wiki into her millieu. She reassured people that they could make no mistakes that couldn't easily be undone. Sounds totally human. E.g., the staff training sessions — which everyone dreads — were Hawaiian themed parties. As people started using the "sandbox," experimenting with the wiki, others read what they were writing. People discovered interests. People who hadn't ever spoken found each other. Sounds just perfect. (They use twiki.)
Maureen Clements of NPR set up an internal wiki for the organization's 750 employees. It started out for news folks, but as people heard about it, it's gone corporate-wide. It does lots: Helps reporters find experts. Lists (and plays) pronunciations. Tracks previous guests. Briefing books. It's designed also to help hosts who may have questions such as "How many Republican governors were elected in the last election." [I hope she went to the Semantic Web presentation yesterday, where the question they used as an example was "How many female mayors of major cities are there?" In a closed system such as NPR's, a Semantic Web approach makes tons of sense.]
[Great presentations.] [Tags: wikimania2006 libraries wikis wikipedia npr suny-stonybrook]
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August 04, 2006
[wikimedia] Semantic Web
It's a series of speakers. I'm in the back and can't hear names. The first points to WiktionaryZ, a multilingual dictionary, in alpha. The second points out how hard it is to find and reuse info in Wikipedia. E.g., try to find a list of all the large cities with female mayors. For this, the information in the articles would have to be encoded in predictable ways. At ontoworld.org, they have a experiment going where facts are related to one another using a standard set of relationships (= ontology). This works well [but requires a lot of set-up]. E.g., the computer now can understand that Berlin is within the European Union because it knows Berlin is the capital of Germany and Germany is in the EU. [I'm leaving early to go to another session I want to go to. This session is interesting, though...] [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia semantic_web ]
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[wikimedia] Lessig
Larry Lessig begins by citing John Philip Sousa's concern in 1906 that the phonograph would end kids hanging around, singing the old songs together. Larry says he was right. A read-write culture was displaced by a read-only culture. [Paraphrasing, of course.] [The audio of LEssig's talk is here.]
This is not just about cullture, he says. The Republican party started out believing in free labor. Not unpaid, but free to engage its capabilities as it wants. The return of read-write labor is key to Benkler's Wealth of Networks and also to Wikipedia.
Same for politics where broadcast politics displaced read-write politics.E.g., the Dean campaign that encouraged people to explain their thinking in blogs.
The 20th Century was weirdly totalitarian: R/O culture, politics and labor.Massiv, massively powerful, controlled, read-only society. But, fortunately, that century is over. The 21st Century is the revival of the read-write.
There are two very new cultures being produced by the Internet. The first is a new kind of read-only culture that facilitates the buying and consumption of culture. Poster child: Apple I-Tunes. Trying to increasingly perfect the power of the copyright holder.
The second is a second culture in which people consume and create. E.g., Anime music video that reedits anime and sets them to music. Larry shows one. It's a remix. [I worry about the emphasis on remixes. The examples are almost always trivial, even if delightful. Remixes of these sorts aren't the issue. It's the subtler absorption of cultural elements that's the issue.]
Words are the Latin of our time, he says. The vulgar, democratic language is pictures, videos and music. [Which is why Larry focuses on those sorts of remixes.]
The law's attitude to these two cultures is radically different. Copyright law doesn't like the R/W culture. It loves the R/O culture. The law's attitude is that every use makes a copy and thus requires permission. This is made worse by the desire to preserve the business model of the R/O culture. The laws and technology will kill the R/W culture unless there's resistance.
How to resist? Larry's first instinct was to litigate. He (we) lost 7-2 when the Supremes said Congress can do whatever it wants with copyright. Instead, Larry decided, we need to ignite a popular movement. We need to take two steps:
First, practice free culture.
Second, enable free culture. Make it possible everywhere, not just in the hacker's den. Wikipedia is an example. Wikipedia shows that it's possible.
There are lessons about how this extraordinary potential is possible. There is a proprietary instinct, but we've learned that freedom is a bigger, more important value. The Defense Dept. ended the cycle of autistic computing — smart machines that couldn't communicate — by insisting that computers interoperate. Open, free standards facilitates competition and opportunity. We should remember that lesson as we praftice free culture.
But it's not enough to build the infrastructure. We have to make it possible. There's a clear and present danger to this freedom. When they build the locks to protect the R/O Internet, they will lock out the R/W Internet.
At the technical layer: Support free codecs. Support free software that enables free culture.
At the legal layer: Protect free culture. Larry points to Creative Commons as an example. Now there are 140 million link backs to CC licenses.
Larry praises Wikipedia but says he also is here to plea that Wikipedia does what it can to increase free culture. He points to two ways: First, help others spread the practice. He points to the PD-Wiki project (public domain wiki). It will launch first in Canada where a database of all published works is becoming available. From this will come, it's hoped, a better list of what is and is not in the public domain.
Second, Wikipedians should demand a useable platform for freedom. Free culture products aren't usually interoperable. We need a layer that facilitates interoperability of content enabling it to move among equivalent licenses. Equivalent = means the same thing. E.g., FDL = CC-BY-SA. Re-licensing would create an ecology of licenses. A market of licenses. The legal layer would become a commodity layer. No monopoly. No single source of failure if a court deems a particular license unworkable. License authors ought to add a compability clause that says that derivatives can be relicsensed under equivalent licenses. The Software Freedom Law Center could be the organization that is the center of this. Even if this isn't the right platform, Wikipedia could be a strong force for establishing some platform for cultural freedom, says Larry.
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia larry_lessig copyright]
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[wikimedia] Donath and Ma
Judith Donath begins by recommending Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. [As always, I'm at best paraphrasing. I didn't do a good job with either of these presentations.]
In oral cultures, you have to be part of a community to get information. Now, the last bastion of information that required connections is being moved into the public. What had been personal information — "Do I like you?" — is becoming public. And we're building out indentities on line. We need to think about the different types of designs we want for this information.
The nature of authority is changing, she says. At the Britannica, it comes from a complex set of academic credentials. At MySpace commentary, people negotiate issues of personal reputation. at eBay, the reputation system is misleading because it's really about a public display of acceptance of the other.
How do we design to retain the appropriate amount of privacy? How do we make wikis so that our notions of authroship becomes clearer? How do we make them so that we can evaluate the sources? Right now we're working in a model that says that the text itself is the primary source of authority. When do we want to enable the emergence of a final form? [What Judith is saying will be affected by the lowering of the markup hurdle and the distribution of WP with the $100 laptop: How well will a pseudonym system hold up when there are a gazillion pseudonyms?]
In a world where attention is a scarce resource, Andy Warhol was right about everyone being famous for 15 minutes, she says. What motivates reality tv and anonymous creativity, since both are about publication, attention, control?
Q: In a time when there's a superabundance of info, how do people know where to go?
A: There's a lot of social information wayfinding.
She talks a bit about the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity. Pseudonymity enables identities to be built. Pseudonymity lets people "take on the cost" of having an identity [i.e., it costs you something to be a jerk if you have a pseudonymous identity.]
Q: What does this do to the classroom and educational system?
A: We'll have to teach students how to function within collaborative space. There are lots of different roles in collaborations.
Now Cathy P.S. Ma of U of Hong Kong is talking about Wikipedia & Trust.
She quotes Fukuyama on trust, disagreeing. [She talks quickly. Sorry.] Social capital, she says, has three components: Network, norms, and sanctions.
The three norms are: Be bold, assume good faith, and adopt a neutral point of view. The sanctions are rewards (barnstar) and punishments.
Open networks are good, she says, so the ideal social landscape for Wikipedia would be members with multiple memberships, with community nodes linked together. She gives some examples of ways of bonding within Wikipedia, including Wiki Embassy and new babes [??].
She talks about the importance of transparency, with conmprehensible rules and norms and increasing the role of social interaction. And how formally should rules be codified at Wikipedia? Explicit rules are more likely to lead to bad decisions, e.g., "Delete any article with the word 'fuck' in it." But implicit rules are hard to implement. What to do? Whatever is done, consistency would be good, she says.
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia judith_donath cathy_ma anonymity]
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[wikimedia] Jimmy Wales
I'm at Wikimania, the Wikipedian convention/conference. Wikipedians are the core group of somehwere under 1,000 people who put in enormous amounts of time writing and editing. The conference is being held at Harvard Law (thank you, Berkman Center!)
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, starts with the hilarious clip from The Colbert Report where he edits Wikipedia on air because "when enough people agree with something, it's true." [As always, all my quotations are likely to be wrong. Which would make me a terrible Wikipedian. Also, I'm posting without re-reading. Be prepared for some baaaad blogging.]
(The MP3 of Jimmy's talk is here.]
He re-states Wikipedia's mission:
Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
He goes through some of the stats on the growth of articles.
He lists the Seigenthaler controversy first among the year's news. "Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia," he says, deadpan. (It was as terrible thing that was said about Seigenthaler, he says.) He notes that after he was dragged onto CNN "to be yelled at," page views tripled began its rise to triple where it was.
Next he talks about the Nature article that compared about 40 science articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. It showed people that "Wikipedia isn't rubbish," and that traditional references aren't as perfect as people imagine. Jimmy notes that Wikipedia lucked out a bit because it's strong on science. "If the comparison were on articles about poets, we wouldn't have done nearly as well." He acknowledges that many of the humanities articles aren't where they should be. Also, it was lucky because the Nature study ignored style. Some Wikipedia articles are very well written but some are choppy. Also, because Nature was studying articles of similar length, it didn't look at "stubs" (i.e., undeveloped articles." "We aren't as good as Britannica, yet." Jimmy says in the coming years Wikipedia needs a "turn toward quality."
He talks a bit about the Foundation, which is coming along. They've hired Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim CEO. Wikia has been funded by angel investors. They;ve hired engineers to inmprove wikimedia.
Jimmy launched Campaigns Wikia for dialgoue and understanding around political campaigns.
He makes some announcements. First, the One Laptop Per Child project (= $100 laptop) will include Wikipedia "as the first element in their content repository." Second, Wikiversity has been established as a "center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities," for all levels and languages. It includes learning communities.
Coming up in the next year, they'll becreating an advisory board. Also, Wikia is working with Socialtext to a wysiwyg editing environment. (Disclosure) He tihnks it'l lbe big. [Yup. Learning the Wikipedia markup language discourages lots of people from correcting small errors. It'll be fascinating to see if Wikipedia scales when the markup barrier to editing is removed.]
Jimmy says there should be more of a focus on quality. This past year, Wikipedia has refined its policies on biographies. They've also made progress on tagging images and ensuring that Wikipedia only uses fair use images.
He says they're experimenting with a "stable version," with an experiment with the German version. iut enables "semi-protection" instead of the full protection against vandalism when needed. Having a stable version would mean that anyone could edit the article but there'd still be a reliable version.
Finally, he goes back to the list of ten things that will be free he talked about at last year's Wikimania.
Free encyclopedia: Yup, in English and German. Still not doing much for people in developing nations. So, the Foundation should seek funding to hire community coordinators and recruiters for important languages where Wikipedia currently does poorly.
Dictionary: See WiktionaryZ, a multilingual dictionary, should be functional later this year.
Complete curiculum in every language. Wikibooks and Wikiversity Beta. He wants to work with people like Taddy Blecher at Cida City Campus in South Africa.
Q: Please allow vendors to list software and services in the articles about them. (Something like that.)
A: It's a tough question and people should talk about it.
Q: Stable version?
A: The mistake we've made is the one we usually don't make, which is to wait until we've figured it all out before trying it. [Tags: wikimedia2006 wikipedia]
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July 27, 2006
Fear and trembling about my Wikimania presentation
I'm doing the final keynote at Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference. This has me a tad nervous since in my experience Wikipedians tend to be knowledgeable, forthright, and have a low tolerance for the sort of BS that is my stock in trade.
I've posted my in-progress notes about what I plan on saying, although I also expect to modify it based on what's discussed at the conference itself. I'm open to comments, suggestions, snorts of derision and prognostications of doom... [Tags: wikipedia wikimania everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge]
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June 27, 2006
[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.
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June 25, 2006
[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]
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June 24, 2006
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 ]
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June 22, 2006
[supernova] Join in
The Supernova webcast, podcast, and etcCast are all here.
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[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]
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[supernova] Jonathan Schwartz
[supernova] Jonathan SchwartzThe 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]
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June 21, 2006
[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]
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[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]
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June 20, 2006
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]
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June 13, 2006
[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]
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June 09, 2006
[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]
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[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]
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[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]
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[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]
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May 21, 2006
Boston BarCamp
<plug>
I'm plugging Boston BarCamp because it sounds like it will be a fun, informative, community-building unconference. So, if you're a geek - or geek camp-follower like me - consider coming out to Monster Worldwide in Maynard, June 3-4.
(I can only be there part of the time, probably Saturday evening through the Sunday. I think I'll hold a session on Everything Is Miscellaneous.)
</plug> [Tags: barcamp conferences boston]
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May 16, 2006
[syndicate] Richard Edelman
Richard is head of Edelman PR, the third largest PR agency in the world. [Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, reporting to Richard.] Eric Norlin is interviewing him. (Robert Scoble bowed out because his mother is ill. Best wishes, Robert.)
[Josh Hallet has posted the audio of the this session.]
Q: Why are you pitching bloggers without reading them?
A: On behalf of the PR field, I apologize. There's a better way. If not, bloggers will revolt.
Q: What's different about Edelman?
A: We try to be a good example. We don't always succeed.
Q: So, how would you pitch Robert Scoble?
A: You'd probably send him an email saying that you saw something he wrote, that you represent a company, would you like a sample without any strings attached? Would you like to get info about this company in the future? Permission based!
Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?
A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We're saying that if you want to be credible, you can't control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.
Q: If your product doesn't suck, why do companies worry? It's like 7th graders on the playground.
A: Marketers want to know they're getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can't have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We're saying it's a horizontal conversation, peer to peer. It can turn bad for a company but that's good because you can learn something. We you do media training you learn the message triangle: Always come back to the three same messages. Kerry lost the debates because he was media trained while Bush came across as a regular guy. So, the message triangle is gone from Edelman's lexicon. That you can only communicate three messages is baloney. It's a great opportunity for PR if done properly. If it's message triangles and top down and spin, we'll be flushed down the toilet of history.
Q: Are the ad agencies getting this?
A: Somewhere between panic, fear and nerves. The ad agency world has a huge reservoir of people who know how to make 30 second films. They don't have a model for making money in the new world. The best work being done in ads is being done by younger agencies that don't have an installed capability of doing 30 second ads. The ad guys are terified. It's ruining their revenue model. They should be at this conference, but they're not.
Q: Who reads press releases these days?
A: I had a discussion with _____ [missed it] who said the press release needs reinvention. Add tags to the press release: This is the company description, this is the supporting quote. He said he doesn't want our news judgment because PR companies don't have news judgment.
Q: Plus every company is the leading provider of...
A: It's a word that will go away.
Q: So what replaces press releases?
A: We'll give a set of information with tags, so you'll organize it the way you want. [Sounds like a microformat to me.]
Q: How does a PR agency deal with the fact that a 12 yr old in Australia can break news as quickly as John Markoff of the NY Times? (A Scoble question.)
A: You have to be listening to the voices, and not limited to those you've always thought of as your sources of news. Stories can start with those of little "authority" (in Technorati speak). Second, stories frequently start in the blogosphere; the PR agencies don't generally understand that. The Dove Real Beauty campaign started when Gawker noticed. We're working with Technorati on a system that will work across seven languages — PR agencies willl be able to watch seven languages, real time, for your clients.
Q: Are big clients up on all this?
A: It's a challenge. We're working with having our clients show bloggers their products in advance of launch.
Q: What about Wal-Mart? Did you pay bloggers? [This is not actually what the accusation was. The issue was that some bloggers used pro-Wal-Mart information from Edelman without attributing it to Edelman or Wal-Mart.]
A: No, we did not pay bloggers. We look for bloggers who are positively inclined toward Wal-Mart, our client. Then we try to establish a conversation with them. A guy from our DC office sent a message to bloggers identifying himself as a PR agent and asking whether the bloggers would like more information about what Wal-Mart is doing about health care, etc. That got misrepresented by the NY Times. But: We identified ourselves and our client, told them our interests, and asked if they wanted a conversation. We followed every rule of engagement. It's our right and our responsibility to do precisely this.
Jeff: The NYT requested a standard of bloggers that the NYT doesn't hold to. It wants bloggers to identify where their info came from.
Richard: It would have been better if the bloggers had atttributed that the info had come from us for Wal-Mart. We didn't say "You must mention Wal-Mart's name as the source."
Jeff: Bloggers don't know the rules. They need training.
Richard: We will tell bloggers that they should mention the source.
Eric: What will PR look like in 5 years?
A: PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We'll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don't see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger [hey, that's me!] thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don't see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn't want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the bvalls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)
Q: What's the retraining process at Edelman like?
A: It's not easy. We have 30 people blogging. We probably have 15-20% who are regularly in touch with bloggers. That's pathetic. I have to be tougher about it.
Q: (Audience) A blogger got sued by an ad agency, who then dropped the suit. Is it a good idea to sue bloggers.
A: No.
Q: Are you modeling the topology of the blogosphere?
A: There isn't a model yet.
Q: Is PR getting smarter by looking at how groups interact, etc.
A: PR agencies are getting slammed for bad behavior, as they should.
Q: Who among the consumer brands get this best?
A: Unilever gets it.
Q: Who's the best publisher - newspaper, magazine, etc.?
A: Washingtonpost.com is interesting.
Q: Do you advise clients to do executive blogs?
A: If the executive has an interesting voice.
Eric ends it by having a moment of silence for Robert Scoble and his mom. Amen. [Tags: pr richard_edelman syndicate]
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May 15, 2006
Beyond Broadcast bloggery
After being away all weekend, I'm just catching up...before heading off for a day at Syndicate. First off, Ethan did some of his usual worldclass conference blogging of the Beyond Broadcast shindig. Items tagged by participants can be found at del.icio.us. Here are the flickred photos. And here are some more links, taken straight from Amanda Michel at the Berkman Center:
Jessica Duda at Beyond Broadcast overviews panel focusing on new tools for public broadcasters.
Barbara Abrash at Beyond Broadcast reviews The War Tapes.
Andy Carvin gives the stats on college students' Internet use.
Andy Carvin paraphrases Brendan Greeley of Open Source Radio.
[Tags: beyondbroadcast media]
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May 14, 2006
Beyond Broadcast podcast interviews
Jennie Attiyeh's ThoughtCast site has a bunch of interviews with participants at the Beyond Broadcast conference I missed this weekend. (I was at a World Resources Institute offsite to work on communications strategies. Fascinating group of people and they're working on one of the most important issues on earth. I was thrilled to be included, but sorry to miss the BB conference.) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast thoughtcast jennie_attiyeh wri]
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May 12, 2006
Beyond Broadcast
Berkman is holding what promises to be a great conference, called "Beyond Broadcast" today and tomorrow. The webcast is here, Second Life is here, the question submitting tool is here. (I'm really unhappy that I'm on the road and can't attend in any of these forms!) [Tags: berkman beyondbroadcast media]
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May 10, 2006
Bar Camp comes to Boston
Bar Camp, which the organizers insist is pronounced "Bah Camp," is coming to Boston — well, Maynard, actually — June 3-4. Bar Camp is a sleep-over for geeks (and for admirers of geeks such as moi). The time is unstructured and the schedule is made up by the attendees. Dress is business casual. (Just kidding.)
Bar camp was invented as a response to Foo camp. Foo camp is O'Reilly Publishing's "Friends Of O'Reilly" sleep-over that I so much enjoy. Because Foo is by invitation — there's limited space in the O'Reilly back yard — Bar was created to be open to all.
If you're in New England and like the smell of unshowered geeks in the morning, Boston Bar is the place to be.
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April 25, 2006
[milken] Blogs, wikis, mmorpgs, oh my!
John Kruper of Cardean moderates. (I'm live blogging while I'm on the panel.)
Will Richardson, who teaches in the K-12 system, thinks blogs provide a powerful opportunity for students to make connections to other people, ideas..."I cringe when I hear people say blogs are online journals. They're learning places." His 6 and 8 yr old children have blogs and engage with other kids their age.
Liz Lawley says she uses blogs to get info out to her classes. She also sets up a class blog where students can talk about the assignments, comment on each other's activities, post results of research and other projects. They look at one another's posts and comment on them. "It encourages a kind of thoughtful ongoing dialogue that you simply can't do when you only have four hours a week in class." She also invites authors to engage in a dialogue with the class. This teaches them that there are long term consequences to what they say.
George Siemens explains his term "connectivism." The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it's becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can't keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty. Now the system has to be able to adapt quickly. The network persists longer than traditional relationships with teachers.
Adrian Chan says that different social software apps are organized to support different themes: Dating, career networking, etc. He looks at the social practices in the use of the software, including in the educational environment. What matters is how technology is embedded in the process. In the case of edu, many of the students already have practices set up: They already IM, chat, etc. How do these technologies change conversation? Is there a type we can identify as learning? If you integrate technologies, would you lose some of those learning opportunites.
I talk about lessons from Wikipedia ,but I can't blog and talk at the same time.
Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he's concerned that we're training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they're not on the test. "Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum." MMORPGs are one way to do that. They're not just games; they're synthetic worlds. (He says the average age of WOW players is 28.) Because you can imagine liberating things in the game, you imagine liberating things outside the game. E.g., a mgr at Yahoo approaches every task as if setting out on a quest. Doug shows the famous video of the Star War Galaxies emergent party - 100 players learning choreography, etc. He taught a course with a heavy mmorpg component and learned he had to get himself out of the way. They learned from experience. E.g., it's hard to lecture about ethics, but if you can put them into a situation where they have to make a choice...
Q: It's all so basically new. Are people basically good or bad in this environment?
George: Content is useless. The instructor provides guidance, not content, and isn't the center of the experience.
Liz: Content isn't irrelevant. If we're going to turn out people with the credentials employers want, we have to be sure they have the content required. But it's not a matter of pouring content into people.
Q: Companies access MySpace of potential employees. Should your 6 and 8 year olds be worried?
Liz: This is a huge issue. We can't tell our kids not to blog. We have to teach them to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 yrs.
George: We have to teach them how to handle the freedom.
Will: This is a literacy we're not teaching our kids. And enabling kids in MySpace to link to Old Spice is what's really bad.
Me: And we need a culture of forgiveness. Maybe our kids will figure it out.
Q: You're creating a generation of Borgs that play games.
(We didn't really answer this.)
Q: We get it. How do we get there? E.g., not everyone can afford a laptop.
Liz: You have to start with the teachers. The technology has to be part of the day to day environment.
George: The problem is a lack of will, not of resources.
Q: With 50,000 blog posts an hour, the problem is one of discovery. How do we know whom to trust?
Doug: Scale counts. E.g., at Second Life a group looks for copyright infringement. When it gets really big, they can't police it. Community governance arises.
Me: These are issues we can only solve by working through them. The change is too deep.
Q: In Shanghai, you can go into a Net cafe where people are playing mmorpgs that put them into medieval China. And I blog and get hate mail. What about the dystopian aspects?
Doug: It's both/and. People probably said about the first cave paintings: "Oh no, the kids will spend all day on line and won't hunt." People miss the subtleties of what's going on.
Liz: In part it's because you're writing for Huffington Post.
Q: We still have the old leadership style.
Liz: People react by banning laptops. It puts a burden on the professors when they have to actually hold students' attention. We're performers at heart but that's not what professors will need to be.
Will: The control issue is at every level. There's a district in Texas that's banned the word "MySpace" — not the site but the word.George: Same issues for corporate education.
Doug: Scaffolding knowledge is different than experiential knowledge. Some ways are not taught well in an exploratory fashion. [Tags: milken education blogs]
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[milken] Lunchtime panel
Paul Gigot of the WSJ moderates a panel on the future of the world economy.
First to speak: Václav Klaus, the Czech president. He was reluctant to accept the invitation to talk about topics as indefinable as the global economy because it is a distraction from the real problems and from actually doing anything. He focuses on Europe. It is an tightly interconnected world, he says. Some in Europe have proposed establishing a fund to compensate the "victims of globalization," by which they mean Europeans. Instead, they should create a fund for the African victims of European protectionism. The real problems, he says, are in the realm of ideas, e.g., government intervention, paternalistic income redistribution, political correctness, those who think they're better than us and would regulate us...
David Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group (see this), speaks. He begins by trashing the Carter administration, in which he served. [I'd take Carter-style incompetence over Bush's any day.] He says the US used to be the economic driver. Now what happens outside the US is more important to our economy than what happens inside. We have to change if we're going to join a vibrant global economy. We need to encourage investing overseas and let non-US investments here. If we don't change, we'll become second class citizens.
Nobelist Gary Becker (blog). Factors that have driven this amazing global economy: 1. Remarkable productivity growth, particularly in the US. Productivity determines whether people are better off. It will continue unless policies intrude. (Gigot nods vigorously.) 2. Developing economies (China, India) where governments have gotten out of the way.
Risks: Not oil prices or inflation rates. Not low savings. The danger is geo-political and government involvement. The risk is that the governments will try to do things they can't really do, such as provide full employment. Overall, he says, the economies look good.
Gigot: We have a world of liquidity. [Is that like Water World?] It hasn't been this liquid since inflation was high. Should we be worried?
Becker: Relative prices change, but that doesn't mean the price level will rise. Inflation is mainly determined by monetary policy, and central banks are providing stability.
Rubinstein: Fuel prices went up faster during the oil shock of the '70s. We're better at managing the change now.
Gigot: We have a new Fed chairman. How's he doing so far?
Rubinstein: Until there's a crisis, we won't know if he's up to the job.
Becker: I agree. But it doesn't all rest on the individual. The tools are in place...
Klaus: I share the optimism. I wrote my doctoral dissertation 40 yrs ago on "The Problem of Inflation in the Capitalist Countries," so I know something about inflation. (Laughter).
Rubinstein: Central bankers aren't as important as they were 50 yrs ago. Markets drive them. (Klaus rocks his head in considered disagreement.)
Gigot: Mr. President, you're pessimistic about Europe. Eastern Europe has been adopting the flat tax...
Klaus: The longer term statistics show that EU growth rates have been going down decade by decade, from 5% in the 1950s to less than 1% now. As far as the flat tax, I campaigned for it 10 yrs ago but didn't win. It's on the ballot in 5 wks. I'm in favor of it, but I don't think it's a panacea.
Rubinstein: The 15% capital gains tax hasn't been given the credit it deserves. And, everyone is an investor now. [Well, except the huge number of people who are in debt.]
Becker: Flat taxes aren't flat; the poor don't pay anything. What you really want is a low tax rate; it doesn't have to be flat.
Gigot: If Congress doesn't extend the capital gains rate, will the damage be immediate?
Rubinstein: It won't help.
Becker: Barriers will continue to fall.
Klaus: Tariffs will continue to come down, but non-tariff barriers will continue to be erected.
Gigot: The Carlyle Group invests in China. What's up there?
Rubinstein: We've invested in life insurance there; only 8% of the China have life insurance. We're buying the Catepillar of China. Each deal took about 3 yrs. I kept going to what were billed as closing dinners. If you think you're going to make a quick dollar in a year or two, that's not the place for you. You have to make it clear that you're going to help China, and not just help yourself. They don't see Western capital as essential to their economy, although they're glad to have it. [Tags: milken economics]
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[milken] Turning education into a global mill
[milken] Turning education into a global millI'm at a session called "Changing Post-Secondary Education to Meet the Needs of a Global Economy" with Greg Cappelli of Credit Suisse, Edward Guiliano, Pres of the NY Institute of Tech; Ted Sanders, chairman of the Cardean Learning Group; moderated by Ted Mitchell, CEO of New Schools Venture Fund. (As Liz points out, the room is full of people in black suits...including her!)
Overall: The panel said stuff everyone in the room already knows: Americans don't know nuthin' about them furren countries. And China is so cool! Sorry, but I don't know anything about this topic and I still didn't learn anything.
Greg talks about education in China. China's GDP is growing rapidly, he says. Over 10% of total world foreign direct investment goes into China and Hong Kong. Plus, he points out that there are a heck of a lot of Chinese folks. (I missed the actual number.) They're spending a lot on education. The population is enthusiastic because getting a degree vastly increases one's income.
Ted says that the demand of higher eductiona will exceed capacity in many countries as well as in some states in the USA. People studying outside their country will go from 1.2M now to 7+M in 2025. So, the biggest opportunities in higher ed will take place outside the US.
Edward presents a list of dismal statistics about how stupid Americans are about the rest of the world. China is becoming the largest English-speaking nation in the world, and it's doing it through policy. We need to be teaching our kids a second language when they're young. We should be enticing more international students here.
Ted: The educational innovators will not be found at the Harvards and Sanfords. It won't be at the public universities because they won't spend tax dollars. We need to think global but serve local populations. We need consortia.
[First The World is Flat reference at 32 minutes in.]
Ted: "There are 10,000 Chinese students studying in British Columbia because they can't get into the US." [Maybe they landed there and had the good sense not to leave.]
Q: Where will the next generation of faculty come from?
A: (Ted) They won't be Americans. We graduated 50,000 engineers last year while China graduated 300,000 engineers.
Q: What's in place to help people get jobs, etc. People are still using resumes.
A: Nothing in K-12.
[Liz tells me I may have misidentified the speakers. Sorry.] [Tags: milken education]
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[milken] IRC
BTW, we've set up a tiny IRC chat so we can pretend to be taking notes when in fact we're making fun of people: irc.freenode.net #milken. Um, I mean we're using it to share ideas and communicate with one another. (There are only three of us at the conference using it.) [Tags: milken irc]
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[milken] Things I'm thinking of saying on an education panel
I'm on a panel at the Milken conference today. Apparently, it's like the West Coast Davos. All I know is that the conference stipulates that I have to be dressed in business attire. Not even "business casual." Ok, I'll put on my sports coat and tie, but they can't make me wear clean underwear. Oh yeah, stickin' it to The Man!
The panel is called "Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education." I am in awe of my panel mates.
Because it's an actual panel, not a sequence of PowerPoint decks, no one knows where the conversation will turn. But here are some of the things I might end up saying:
What are our students learning from the success of Wikipedia? We hope they're learning that they can't be passive recipients of knowledge. But they're also learning that authority doesn't come only through chains of credentials; that we can get on the same page about what we know; that knowing involves be willing to back away from your beliefs at times; that knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized; that the willingness to admit fallibility is a greater indicator of truth than speaking in a confident tone of voice; that knowledge lives in conversation, not in the heads of experts; that certain people who do not need to be named are just impossible.
Knowing has been primarily a way of seeing the simplicity behind the world's apparent complexity. But now as a culture we're busy complexifying everything we can. E.g., blogs take a simple idea and turn it over and over in their hands, poking at it, trying it this way and that, connecting it to that other thing over there.
I don't know what will happen to the basic structure of education, the course, but topics have exploded. This makes it harder than ever for us to listen to educators tell us what's important for us to know...but we need to listen.
Textbooks are and always have been boring and self-satisfied. The basic problem is structural: They exist between covers. I don't know what to do about this, but someone will figure it out.
The endless decentralized distraction that is the Internet certainly raises questions about our ability to hold our culture together (and if that is even a good thing), but we should at the very least rejoice that we are learning what education has always tried to teach us: The world is endlessly interesting. [Tags: education milken wikipedia]
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April 07, 2006
Liz blogs ITWF 06: Women in computing
Liz Lawley did some excellent live blogging of a conference on women's participation in computing, put on by the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Workforce. Her coverage begins here. [Tags: liz_lawley gender itwf itwf06]
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April 05, 2006
Syndicate early bird
Eric Norlin is offering an early bird discount for people going to the Syndicate show... [Tags: syndicate eric_norlin]
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April 04, 2006
[f2c] Reed Hundt
Reed Hundt is a former FCC Commissioner. He gives a good presentation that I did not take notes on. Here's how it ended:
We ought to invest in building a public thoroughfare of access. That thoroughfare should get faster and faster — symmetric. If it costs $1K per household to get fiber to the home, that's a tenth of the cost the anti-missile shield that doesn't work. The total cost would be about $20B-25B. (This is the amount it would cost to deploy minus what people would be willing to pay.)
The thoroughfare gets us to the public space of the Web. In this public space democracy in the US will be defined. It is in that space that we will learn how to debate issues and form groups. We won't agree, but we'll learn to talk with another.
Q: You're a socialist.
A: Nope. I don't the government to own it. I want it to write a check. Frankly, if Warren Buffet wanted to write it, I'd be happy. My point is how small that check would be.
Q: (Dave Hughes) There was a school library fund of $2B (E-Rate). It wasn't well spent
A: There's never been a perfect government rule. The big story is that a country were able to create $4B spent every year on Internet acccess in classrooms, which is why 75% of all kids 6-20 have learned about the Internet at school. That is almost half again the penetration in that group outside of school.
Q: It's not just telephone companies. Media companies are also part of this equation.
A: If it were up to me, I'd say let's have an auction. Whoever comes forward locally and offers to be the lowest-cost provider of the 100Mb thoroughfare would win.
Q: You're for telecom subsidies. From our perspective, the subsidy process is subject to gaming by large companies. Smaller operators can't play that game. It's a disincentive for innovation.
A: There's pork and there are good public services. The last several Congresses should make us wary. A modest public expenditure could create a very large public property.
[Tags: f2c reed_hundt]
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[f2c] Ray Gifford and Gigi Sohn
David Isenberg interviews Raymond Gifford of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a libertarian or possibly conservative think tank. (Common Cause says its sponsors are the incumbents.)
David asks him if beyond supporting market efficiency, does he see the Net in terms of empowerment of the disempowered, everyone having a voice, etc. How do these democratic ideals come into his thinking?
Ray: You and I both distrust the ability of regulators, especially the FCC, to do anything right. The FCC tends to behave lawlessly, not to constrain monopoly power, it tends to serve the constituencies that plead before it, and it misses the ideal of being an agency full of experts. First we should try the idea that markets will get us more and better democratic institutions than regulators will. What can we do to get more competition, he asks. Let's do spectrum reform. Let's get more broadband pipe. [How long do we have to continue trying the duopoly? Can we set a date for withdrawal? Shouldn't we have an exit strategy?]
Competition doesn't come to all places at the same time. [This seems to be an argument against requiring providers to build out into poor areas as well as rich.]
Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, says she agrees with Ray that government intervention ought to be limited. The government almost always acts to seal the incumbents' power. She is disappointed however that the PFF didn't come out against interventions such as the Broadcast Flag and the copyright totalitarianism. "We part ways at what the regulatory standard should be." She thinks the government ought to establish a non-discrimination standard (= Net neutrality).
David: Surely you don't support the Broadcast Flag, Ray.
Ray: I thought it had no legal standing. [But PFF supported it anyway.]
Gigi: As the president of Slingbox says, nothing is more discouraging to investors than putting on the page of your prospectus that your business requires government approval.
Ray: The state can outlaw burglary tools. [We ought to outlaw getaway cars.] If I'm a content provider with a legitimate concern that my content is going to be pirated, what would you have me do?
Gigi: I think I'm more of a libertarian than you are. We're willing to let content providers restrict access and see what the market does. (Gigi recommends a Cato Institute paper.) [Tags: f2c raymond_gifford gigi_sohn drm digital_rights]
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[f2c] Muni wifi panel
Ron Sege, Jim Baller and Esme Vos and James Salter talk about muni wifi.
Jim says the public now is "getting it" and asking hard questions. Jim puts it in terms of public safety, cultural enrichment, homeland security, economic development...etc. Things are going pretty well, he thinks, although much needs to be done. Fewer states are passing anti-muni-wifi laws, for example. One bad trend: Municipal governments ask for wifi for free.
Esme sees a huge explosion in the number of muni networks being built, by cities and by counties. Given cities' budgetary problems, they try to set up wireless networks for municipal uses as well as for public access. "This is nothing more than the next IT upgrade." In Europe, providers have been forced to open their network to competitors on a non-discriminatory basis; that's the model that lots of cities are trying to replicate. "Cities say they have no money but the next day they can find $70M for a Nascar museum. People should be hard on their municipal officials and ask them what their priorities are. All I want is for people to have as much choice as possible." Inside the bellhead companies are webhead factions, she says. "Largely it's a generational change."
James Salter believes that broadband is the most important economic, educational and social enabler of this century. Fiber is the best way to get it but the incumbents will not deliver it. Municipalities may be the broadband savior. His company (Atlantic Engineering Group) has done 50+ municipal fiber projects. We need private-public competition, just as we have in schools, garbage, health care, etc. He puts up some amazing quotes from the incumbents saying stupid things about bandwidth. He says the average marketshare of the 53 sites he's done is 50-60%. People flock to them because the service is better. "I'm a rightwing Republican and I want to keep the government out of everything but we're out of options."
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[f2c] Ed Felton
Ed Felton of freedom-to-tinker.com reminds us that we make progress by tinkering. DRM is thus a major threat to innovation.
"Trusted computing" won't shut down the Net entirely he says, but it's very bad. In particular, remote attestation means that a remote app can tell exactly what apps you're running and decide not to let you interact with it. Currently http does say which browser you're using, but you can lie about it. Not with remote attestation, which also says what your computer's configuration is. For example, if the Web site doesn't like the VOIP software you have running, it could refuse to talk with you.
The IRC recommends this video for a humorous look at trusted computing. [Tags: f2c ed_felton drm digital_rights]
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Rep. Rick Boucher says House committee to look at antitrust to enforce Net neutrality
I believe that Rep. Rick Boucher said at the Freedom to Connect conference this morning that the House Judiciary Committee will look at initiating antitrust action against telephone companies that violate the principle of Net neutrality (i.e., offering transport while preferring some content to others). I believe this is news.
[Tags: f2c rick_boucher net_neutrality ]
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[f2c] Rep. Rick Boucher
Rep. Rick Boucher is here at Freedom to Connect, the day that the Telecom Subcommittee has opening statements about the "franchise" bill. It would mean that companies wishing to offer cable TV wouldn't have to get a franchise from local communities. He expects the House will pass it in May.
He says the bill creates a national franchise for multichannel video providers that are seeking to enter the cable TV market as competitors. First, this will be the telephone companies. Verizon, he says, is unusual in that it is building fiber to users, which he wishes more companies would do. E.g., for Verizon to offer multichannel video to its subscribers, it would have to get 10,000 local franchises, while it was in fact getting about 15 franchises a year. Boucher supports creating a national one-stop shop for franchising. A company that wants to offer multichannel TV [which I think just means "cable tv"] can simply file a federal application, so long as they agree to support certain rules: 1. They pay a 6% franchise fee to the local government, which is 1% more than the typical cable franchise fee; 2. They'll have to carry the same public access and educational channels; 3. They have to abide by the same right of way rules as apply to cable; 4. They have some consumer protection requirements that will be laid out by the FTC. Cable companies will get a national franchise when their local contract runs out so long as there is a wired competitor (not satellite because it's already national) in that community. The provider may not "red line," choosing to serve only the rich part of town. But it doesn't say that within a certain number of years the new provider would have to serve the entire cable franchise area; this portion of the bill is contentious.
Boucher also strongly supports opening the door for local communities to offer wifi. We're 20th in broadband penetration. We're paying more and getting less. Some states have barred muni wifi. The new law will make it illegal for states to bar this. Boucher is also excited about what mesh networks could do because it is a "far more efficient and lower cost way" of putting wireless into play, especially in poorer neighborhoods.
But, Boucher is not a fan of Network neutrality. He says the FCC didn't enforce Powell's Four Principles because it wasn't clear that it had the statutory authority to turn them into rules. "These principles are fine as far as they go, but they don't go far enough." The principles are:
1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
[David Isenberg has pointed out that the FCC Commissioner Martin's modification of these rules effectively guts them.]
The new bill gives the FCC statutory authority to enforce the principles. It gives it a complaint process so that the agrieved party could file a complaint and the FCC could resolve it with authority. But the FCC would not be allowed to elaborate on these principles; they can't expand on them by issuing a rule. The big problem, he says, that when the principles were announced, no one knew that the telcos would be charging content providers (e.g., Google, Microsoft) for fast-lane treatment. Everyone else gets slow-lane. The major problem with this is that there could be a dramatic adverse effect on innovation. "It wasn't very long ago that Google was in a garage getting started, and there are Google wannabes in garages right now. How is that Google wannabe going to pay every provider to get fast ane access. In the slow lane they won't be able to compete." [Yay!] [As always, all quotes are approximate, and all non-quoted paraphrases are even more approximate.]
The telephone companies say "Let's wait and see how the market developments." But, says Boucher, once revenue is being derived from a business model it's simply impossible to outlaw the business model.
Boucher and three other Democrats will offer an amendment that says that if a telephone company or broadband provider of any kind decides to prioritize any content, they have to offer that same fast-lane treatment to all content providers without charge.
Q: (Frankston) The bits have noting to do with the content, so why isn't there anti-trust case?
A: This is a competition issue in part, and it's an effort on the part of the telephone companies to exert market power, extending their power from transport to content. Under traditional antitrust principles, that is viewed with suspicion. The House Committee on the Judiciary has antitrust oversight, and we've begun to look at this and the recombination of Ma Bell with SBC now having acquired most of the local exchanges and AT&T's long distance service, although I think there are less obvious antitrust implications because of the dramatic changes since it was broken up. But I'm excited about looking at the antitrust implications of going from transport to content.
Q: (Cynthia de Lorenzi) Why are we cutting off copper when we put in fiber? It's a usefully redundant network, and unlike fiber it doesn't run on batteries.
A: This is a big issue. There's no reason to root out the copper. The telephone companies say that if they're required to leave it in place, they have to maintain it even though they're not using it. The better approach might be to buy the copper from them. [Who would maintain it?]
Q:
A: The principles would apply to anyone who offers broadband service to customers, over the last mile, no matter who or what technology.
Q: Yesterday Michael Powell warned us not to codify his principles
A: These principles are broadly applicable. I don't know what his concern is. The FCC ought to be able to assert its authority in a case like the Madison River case.
Q:
A: If we all had lots of bandwidth, these issues wouldn't arise. But so long as we're restricted to a couple of megabits, this is a critical issue. It's a transitional issue. (He says 30Mbps would be a good starting point; the IRC disagrees where one contributor says Japan has 100Mbps symmetric for US$ 30/month.)
[Tags: f2c rick_boucher net_neutrality ]
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[f2c] Col. Dave Hughes
For personally dumb reasons, I came in at the end of Dave Hughes' presentation, just as he was advising innovating our way around restrictions. Sorry I missed the full presentation. [Tags: f2c dave_hughes]
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[f2c] Michael Powell
Michael Powell is interviewed by Jonathan Krim.
Powell: We are looking at a radical reframing of spectrum. I've always been a big fan of open spectrum. But there's very little spectrum left to give out. [That is, he's a fan of opening spectrum, not of Open Spectrum in the sense of unlicensing spectrum and letting smart/cognitive radios negotiate frequencies.] And it requires coordinating with many many agencies: DoD, Dept. of Transportation, etc.
Q: Would Net neutrality matter if there were more competition?
A: I'm not happy with there being so few competitors. I'd like to see gov't dedicate more of its energy to developing alternative platforms. Multi-platform competition is the key. If we're going to get the Star Trek world I dream about in which you flip open your device and you're connected to the world's information, you need at least three ways of connecting. Anti-trust lawyers like me believe magic things happen at three.
Q: Will three come quickly enough?
A: In the history of infrastructure deployment, it's pretty darn quick. You're right to be impatient, but remember that infrastructure is a construction project. And I'm proud that this country is pursuing a multi-platform strategy rather than building up a single platform in order to get faster penetration. We should stop talking about tech as a utility; tech policy is education policy, is social welfare policy, etc.
Powell: It's a mistake to rely on the government to maintain Net neutrality. The legislators have a very shallow understanding of the tech. Let the weight of inertia be on your side. Don't play their game.
Q: Should gov'ts be prohibited from launching muni wifi?
A: No.
Q: Is it fair for consumers to think of the Internet as a public place?
A: As long as there are producers chasing value for consumers in order to make a profit, it will be a private enterprise system. "The Tennessee Valley program for broadband is not coming."
Q: (Isenberg) At the FCC, you did at least 3 great things, one of which survives: You created a more technologically literate commission. That survives. Then you initiated the spectrum policy re-thinking, which stopped when you left. Third, you articulated the four Internet freedoms which the current restatement significantly waters down.
A: You rarely make linear progress in policy.
A: Maybe we need a secretary of technology....
Q: Does the common carrier model work for where we're headed?
A: I loathe the common carrier model. The queen grants you exclusive use of her land if in return you serve the people. It's cumbersome and stymies innovation. I'm not sure I want the model for the Internet to be 16-gauge rails for Northern Pacific or ferries across the Thames. [Tags: f2c michael_powell]
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April 03, 2006
[f2c] View from Capitol Hill
(Moderated by Drew Clark of the National Journal.)
James Assey (Senate Commerce Committee) says that the new House telcomm bill should have a "markup" before Easter. After Easter the Senate will start putting together a complementary package. Congress is trying to figure out "what the right rules of the road should be to create greater certainty and meeting consumer expectations."
Josh Lamel (office of Sen. Ron Wyden) says that network neutrality is a contentious issue. (Wyden introduced a net neutrality bill.) "After BrandX and the FCC's DSL order, there is no net neutrality. If we don't address this through legislation, the status quo is that there is no net neutrality."
Dana Lichtenberg (office of Rep. Bart Gordon) says Congress needs to think much harder about what net neutrality actually means.
Mike O'Rielly (legislative assistant to John Sununu) says Sununu is still trying to figure out what to do about net neutrality.
[It suddenly gets much more interesting. Too much going on to continue blogging. Sorry.]
[Tags: f2c]
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[f2c] Brad Wurtz
Brad Wurtz, ceo of Caspian, says the keys to industry growth are: 1. Ensure quality and choice for consumers; 2. Enable innovation for online services; 3. Achieve requitable return on investment.
To achieve this, he proposes "fair use": 1. Divide bandwidth equally among active users, regardless of the applications they're running. 2. Allow dynamic, fledxible premium services for online providers and incumbent operators. [Tags: f2c brad_wurtz caspian]
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[f2c] What the hell do Doc and I talk about?
Doc and I are scheduled to do the last session at Freedom to Connect today. Last week we decided we'd interview each other and came up with some questions. But now those questions seem uninteresting. Plus everyone here knows more than I do about this topic. We're probably going to stick with the mutual interview approach. Any suggestions for topics/questions/tap dance routines?
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[f2c] Blind people and elephant
in this session, a bunch of people get 8 minutes each to talk.
Dewayne Hendricks is a network activist. He says that three years ago he was saying that wireless will be a competitor to cable and telcos, but people thought he was crazy. Now muni wireless is sweeping through. If you couldn't see it three years ago, what did you miss and what are you missing now? Five years ago, Yakima County (sp?) in Washington state built a county-wide wifi network for public safety officials. Yet, wifi isn't supposed to be able to go further than 300 feet, according to Michael Powell's testimony to Congress three years ago, plus it's going to moving vehicles. People making decisions don't have standing because they're not implementers.
A year ago, Dewayne says, counties started to put in clouds. All you hear about are the cities. Forces seem to be at work to keep us from hearing about the county implementations. He talks about Sandoval county where Dewayne's business has already finished the first phase of a project to deliver 100mb to anyone in the county. This is the tipping point, he says, to make wireless a competitor. (The project started last October.) What's changed is that there are now cheap, good commodity radios — you can put in multiple links to gain more capacity, plus range is better. Dewayne's project is trying to drive the cost per megabit to a dollar, where it's currently $125/mb. So far, Dewayne's gotten the cost down to $50 and they hope to get it down to $25 soon. (In Hong Kong, you can get a megabit for $0.24, he says.) "Once you know something is possible, it changes everything. Wireless is the wild card. Let's play it."
Michael Calabrese is VP of the New America Foundation. He considers the empty TV channels as "rocket fuel for Dewayne's vision." Just the channels that have no licensed users range from 20-75% in various markets. There's legislation that would free this up. It's our "best chance for a commons."
Rick Ringel, director of engineering at Inter-Tel, wonders how we define progress. What will the end-user's experience be in the new network we're building. He calls the new network "The Enlightened Network," because in the Enlightment we talked about personal choice and fundamental rights.
Ben Scott of the Free Press. "We have a major education problem on the Hill" when it comes to the Internet. And with the rest of the country. So, here are some ways of telling the story: 1. The question is not who controls the architecture of the internet but who controls the user experience of the Net. 2. Net neutrality is about whether the Internet will become like the cable television networks where the operator determines what you can see. [I missed #3. Sorry.]
Brad Templeton, chairman of the EFF.org [you are a member, aren't you?], talks about the invention of the Internet as a contract in which we all pay for lines to the middle and don't worry about packets. Then his evil twin takes over and argues in favor of stopping competition and innovation by requiring permission to innovate, e.g. CALEA. (Brad's presentation is here.)
Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy: "It's time now to stand up and fight to create a digital medium and a society that reflects our highest aspirations of our culture." "We have to have a loud cry!"
Bruce Kushnick of Teletruth and author of "The Two Hundred Billion Broadband Scandal" — the scandal is that customers were charged for a fiber optic network that was supposed to be open to all competitors. "Why don't we get the money back?" It began when Al Gore proposed an information superhighway. (His father had helped create the national highway system.) The Bells said they'd do it. Bruce has a document in which Verizon promises NJ that it could provide this service by 2001. "We were lied to." They couldn't build the networks so they rolled out DSL over the existing copy wires. "This happened in the majority of states." Bruce thinks the municipalities ought to get their money back. "We should get mad." Instead of making the argument that there are God-given rights, we should be pointing out that we already paid for a network that wasn't built. [Tags: f2c bruce_kushnick net_neutrality jeff_chester cynthia_de_lorenzi, dewayne_hendricks brad_templeton rck_ringel]
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[f2c] Martin Geddes
Martin Geddes argues against Net neutrality.
Price discrimination is a good thing, he says. It's good you can save some money by buying your airline tickets in advance.
And there is no moral right to Net neutrality.
"The Internet isn't sacred." So there's no reason to worship the Net as it currently stands.
Net neutrality also doesn't stand up as a practical issue. The telcos will be able to get around it because there are so many ways to get around it, from obscure terms and conditions to setting defaults. "You're fighting the telcos on their natural ground, lobbying."
It would be a benefit to consumers to let them access an only-local network that gives them p2p access to neighbors. Or maybe we do want a network that lets Google subsidize delivery, e.g., they subsidize the 10mb download of Google video to consumers who have only bought 2mb connections.
The current network, he says, is not neutral. It has beliefs embedded in it. E.g., the Internet address space doesn't respect country values, which is a value. And it doesn't let you trace back to the individual, only to the ISP.
He does concede that there's a free speech issue.
The Net neutrality harms people at the bottom of the economic scale because it disallows price discrimination. E.g., suppose the cheap account only gives you access to Yahoo or MSN, etc. [There's a difference between discriminating on the cost of bandwidth for accessing an open network and discriminating based on what you can access. The latter distorts the open market for innovation.]
We need to focus on innovation on pricing, financing and purchasing of networks, he says. We cannot now easily allow a community to create its own.
David Isenberg: Well, that was provocative!
Tim Wu: Were the attachment rules a mistake? (= the rule that you are allowed to attach whatever device you want to the phone network)
Martin: No, because there was no competition.
Tim: Do you think the broadband market is competititive?
Martin: No, it's not. But network neutrality takes you away from alternative funding models.
Tim: So you want the Internet to look more like cell phone networks.
Martin: No. It should be able to do price discrimination but if the Net market were competitive, that would constrain the price discrimination.
[Tags: f2c martin_geddes net_neutrality]
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[f2c] Tim Wu
Tim Wu asks if Network neutrality is a fad. Such phrases have a lifecycle, he says. The phrase doesn't matter as much as the ideas and intuitions it captures. It depends on what you see a network for, he says. If you see a network as something that facilitates other human activities — the idea that the "value of a network is what it makes possible" — is enough to get you to want law to keep the network as open as possible. "That's the link between neutrality and the social value of the network."
Tim talks about the history of the telegraph. In the 1876 election, a squeaker, Western Union leaked information about Democratic concerns to the Republicans, which ultimately changed its outcome. This is an example of what happens when a carrier isn't neutral. The same arguments occurred over opening ports to any type of cargo. Our intuition that openness works better is strong and right.
You'd think carriers would figure out that being neutral is in their interest, says Tim, but sometimes that doesn't happen: Hotels refused service to African Americans for a long time. Sometimes it takes government action.
Tim says there are internal battles in the relevant companies with people — often engineers — saying the restrictive, discriminatory models are crazy. Some of the most successful companies offer general purpose tools.
Tim singles out blocking, non-transparency and tiering as problems.
[Excellent]
(Frank Paynter recomends the wikipedia article on the Kingsbury Commitment. Looks good.)
[Tags: f2c tim_wu net_neutrality]
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[f2c] Live audio and IRC
Live audio of the Freedom to Connect conference (provided by Berkman).
The IRC is open. Try here. (Note: It's projected behind the speaker.) [Tags: f2c]
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[f2c] Michael Copp
Michael Copp, an FCC commissioner, paints a distressing picture of the FCC's role in restricting the Internet. Copp pushes for Network neutrality, i.e., preventing those who provide the pipes from controlling what goes over the pipe.
If providers can favor their own content, he says, we'll end up with a balkanized Internet. "That inverts the entire democratic genius of the Internet. It makes the pipe intelligent and the end user dumb...It artificially constrains the supply of bandwidth."
Copp thinks broadband access could become a grassroots issue. [Tags: f2c fcc net_neutrality michael_copp]
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