November 18, 2007
Future of books
Aargh. Steven Levy's excellent article on the new Amazon e-reading device came out a day before I was about to send out the new issue of my newsletter, the main article of which is about the future of books. I hate when that happens!
Well, I'll send it out anyway, and will link to it here tomorrow. Damn the pace of human events!
Posted by self at 02:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 14, 2007
Crowd cover
Jay Rosen has another initiative launching today: Enabling a dozen beat reporters to have a social network composed of people who know the topic and have an interest in having the coverage be thorough, accurate, and deep. Very cool experiment.
Posted by self at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2007
Berkman lunch: Gary Kebbel on the Knight News Challenge
Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on copyright. He administers the Knight News Challenge and is the journalism program officer. He says he wants feedback about the way the News Challenge has been run. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, getting things wrong, etc. You can always listen to the entire thing at Media Berkman. Also, I'm posting before proofreading at all.]
The Knight Foundation was founded in 1950, he says. The founders believed that a good newspaper can pull communities together around information. But as newspapers lose readers and especially lose young readers, what happens to this function? Their mantra is now: "Serving the information needs of communities in a democracy." That's ultimately what the News Challenge is about. And it's led them to focus on physical, geographic communities. Voting, schools, taxes, etc., are all defined by geography. The Challenge looks for projects use digital information to build or bind community in specific geographic areas." They hope they can "lead the news industry into the digital revolution to help them gather new audiences, keep new audiences, and not only keep their perspective, but their important position." Newspapers may die, but losing the function newspapers accomplish would be quite bad.
He talks about the grants they've given. Some are designed to gather information: MTV is putting 51 youth journalists into the field to report on the presidential election for mobile media. They hope to find out if that's effective. At MIT, the idea is to study the information needs of communities, and to create new products and processes. Arizona State is creating an entrepreneurial center.
Some are designed to lead. In Chicago, they're hiring community organizers to train citizen journalists, and retain them. Also in Chicago, they're funding a project called "EveryBlock": Type in your address and find out everything going on there. They've also given three grants for games, looking at how to use games to explain ongoing stories, and whether they could be templated for newspapers.
Third, they hope to help the profession: The Berkman Citizen Journalism Law Project that looks at legal questions around citizen journalism. Village Soup is aimed at creating a free content management system for any citizen who might want to start a local newspaper. Northwestern is going to give nine scholarships to technology students to teach them journalism.
This year, Gary says, the number of applicants doubled to over 3,000. This year, when you submit an app you can submit it as open or closed. If open, the world can see it, rate it, and comment on it. You are allowed to incorporate the best of the comments and resubmit. They advertised the Challenge in ten languages, including through MTV globally. The number of young people and the number of international applications has gone up dramatically (from 15% to 40%).
This year, it's been a bit disappointing because too many people missed the point of being innovative; people took last year's winners and applied to a new content area. But the Knight Foundation's definition of innovation wants new ideas, not new applications. They are seeing lots of applications for Facebook, use of GPS systems, place-tagging for wireless (e.g., systems that tell the history of a spot as you pass by it).
Problems and issues: Should they judge innovation relative to the geographical from which the proposal stems? And what does that do to some of the international applications. Also, it's hard to make international grants to individuals because of the PATRIOT Act. And how do they monitor grants around the world? Also, the open submissions might create intellectual property issues.
Q: (ethanz) I'm thrilled the international outreach has gone as well as it has. To what extent are other funders looking at what you're doing with this challenge, and do you have funders deep in, say the former Soviet Union, approaching you so they can do what's innovative locally and that they can monitor?
A: Great way to go that we have not gone yet. International is a growth area for us. We don't know who might be good to work with in Russia. We've given grants to Internews and the International Center for Journalists, etc. They have programs throughout the world and they might be able to help us monitor, choose and administer.
(david ardia) The networking with other winners has been really beneficial. Did you anticipate that? Is there a way to develop that?
A: In October in Toronto we got all the winners together. I thought we would have such big egos in the room. But it was just the opposite. It was delightful to see. I was thinking, "Right in this room is the future of journalism."
Q: (cbracy) How many of the applications were open?
A: 40% I thought that was pretty good. There were an average of two comments per application. Some people did indeed resubmit.
Q: How will you evaluate whether that's been effective?
A: We'll investigate with the winners afterwards.
Q: [cmaclay] How do you get these ideas connected with the existing mainstream media?
A: We bring the winners to the conferences to talk with the traditional media. And we have a blog at PBS called "idealab." (Look for an announcement there tomorrow.)
Q: (max) Have you looked at providing incentives for those who apply openly?
A: We made it clear that you wouldn't be punished no matter which way you apply. I was afraid that someone would read an application in the open category and then apply in the closed category, maybe slightly modified. The advantage of submitting openly is that others can help make your proposal more complete.
Q: (ethanz) Do you think the curve of applications will continue upwards? How many years do you think the model of soliciting all proposals will work?
A: I think the amount of innovation is likely to be constant. Our goal is sustain it until it dies out. (We've been authorized for five years.) BTW, the Knight Foundation is having a conference in February to bring together community organizations to think about the role and importance of information to the community.
Q: (jpalfrey) First, the Berkman Center relies on grants, so thank you for your candor about how the decision process works. Why is more information better for democracy? And as you go international, are you aiming at a certain type of democracy? Are you willing to make grants in non-democracies?
A: Yes., we're willing to make grants in non-democracies. Most of the people in senior management at the Foundation came up through journalism, with the belief that the best way to combat bad speech is through good speech, etc. We're also willing to say that we don't know that more information is better for a community, so we're going to study the information needs of communities. There's one underway at the U of Missouri (co-funded by Pew) that looks at whether communities that have a lot citizen-generated media have higher levels of civic engagement.
Q: When you talk to communities, are you talking about ways for organizations to become publishers or how citizens can become content producers?
A: Part of the idea for this came from Dan Gillmor who said in an article that community organizations need to get involved in community information. As newspapers cut back on investigative reporting, citizens may have to take up more of the slack. We read it and decided it's exactly what we need to do.
Q: (me) What type of information do you prefer to fund? W/hich section of the newspaper?
A: The local section. "We're not looking to fund bloggers in this project or editorial cartoonists. We're looking to create an awareness of communities that newspapers are changing, with them some important roles that they perform may be changing. Wake up and smell the roses. You shold be trying to do something about this."
Q: (lisa williams) How do you feel about the survival of the current journalistic institutions?
A: The Challenge is not a newspaper preservation act. It is a news and information preservation act. We're not hung up on the form of the information. The function of info dissemination has certainly been diffused. The one-to-many model is deed. The many-to-many model is alilve and well.
Q: Then let the applications be public even if they've lost. Maybe they just need more time and thought.
A: I suspect it would be helpful to people.
Q: Ones you reject might be useful to others.
A: I agree.
Q: (ethanz) At GlobalVoices, we held a contest and we've encouraged applicants to enter into community with other applicants, talking about why their grant won or lost. Most of the applicants are going to do their project even if they didn't get the $5K from us. There may well be even more synergies among those who didn't get support.
A: Another way we need to improve what we're doing: How do we create a second life for some of these applications. (Not Second Life ™.) Other foundations may want to fund the ones we can't.
Posted by self at 01:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
JCMC special issue
danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have guest-edited an issue of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It's got bunches of articles with interesting titles (I haven't read 'em all yet), including Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com (by Dara Byrne), Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube (by Patricia Lange), and Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites (by Eszter Hargittai). Actual research! Manifold ideas!
Posted by self at 09:37 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 10, 2007
Web of Ideas: Designing copyright from scratch
I'm holding a discussion this Wednesday at the Berkman Center about what copyright might look like if we designed it from scratch. My aim is not for us to design copyright from scratch, because copyright changing radically is a pipe dream. Nor is it really to come up with a proposal that could actually pass Congress, because it seems the only change Congress might make is to lengthen the term of copyright from 70 years after the holder dies to waiting until the dead creator telephones the RIAA and says s/he's ready to let it go. Instead, I want to use the discussion to explore the cultural and moral objectives of granting copyrights.
The discussion is open to everyone. It'll start at 6:30. We serve pizza. [map]
Posted by self at 06:13 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
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.")
Posted by self at 07:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 05, 2007
Open access to Journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases
Public Library of Science has started yet another open access journal. This one, appropriately enough, is the PLoS Journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS is a peer-reviewed journal that limits what it publishes to what it considers to be the best and most important articles. According to A Blog around the Clock, written by the online community manager at PLoSOne, the inaugural issue is fully international, and the site is now using TOPAZ software that enables comments, annotations, ratings and trackbacks. It will also take an interdisciplinary approach because, as WHO's director general Margaret Chan writes in a guest commentary:
Although these diseases have been overshadowed by better-known conditions, especially the "big three"--HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis--evidence collected in the past few years has revealed some astonishing facts about the NTDs. They are among the most common infections of the poor--an estimated 1.1 billion of the world's 2.7 billion people living on less than US$2 per day are infected with one or more NTDs. When we combine the global disease burden of the most prevalent NTDs, the disability they cause rivals that of any of the big three. Moreover, the NTDs exert an equally important adverse impact on child development and education, worker productivity, and ultimately economic development. Chronic hookworm infection in childhood dramatically reduces future wage-earning capacity, and lymphatic filariasis erodes a significant component of India's gross national product. The NTDs may also exacerbate and promote susceptibility to HIV/AIDS and malaria.
PLoS is trying to be a high-quality, recognized journal, and there's value in that. It therefore limits what it publishes to what pases peer review and is deemed important. PLoS One, on the other hand, publishes anything that passes its peer review process even if the topic is relatively minor. I wonder: Do all articles that pass PLoS' peer review but that don't make it into PLoS get sent over to an appropriate PLoS One journal, if there is one, and if the authors agree?
Anyway, neglected tropical diseases is a perfect topic for an open access journal. But, then, I sort of think everything is.
Posted by self at 07:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by self at 07:34 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
November 03, 2007
P2P leads to Pay 'n' Pay
Michael Geist blogs about a Canadian government study that found that the more you do peer-to-peer downloading, the more CDs you purchase. Says the study: "We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year." The post has been slashdotted where there's useful discussion trying to figure out what the stats actually mean. [Tags: music p2p riaa michale_geist everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 07:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 31, 2007
Why Google Phone matters to me. (Or: Google and Verizon up a tree...?)
An article in the WSJ today, which they have chosen to make inaccessible to bloggers, reports that Google is talking to Verizon and Sprint about using the Google phone operating system. Money makes such strange bedfellows!
Do I care just because I am a Google fanboy? Not exactly, although that does amp up my excitement. With an open platform for development for mobiles, plus Google's conquest of Jaiku for its mobile/presence capabilities — I am a big fan of Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, a smart and innovative person devoted to the Net's common good — this could be the disruption that turns mobile phones from annoying bricks of bad reception into a platform for apps that can assume constant presence and that know where we are and who our friends are. It could make FaceBook look like CompuServ.
Or, of course, the rumors could be wrong, the implementation could suck, the lawyers and lawmakers could screw it up, or it could fail in the market. But if ever a market was ripe for disruption — an archaic system bottling up the power of having everyone present in your pocket — it's the mobile market.
Here's hoping.
Posted by self at 05:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2007
Is the Web as weak as its weakest link?
Donnacha DeLong argues that "Web 2.0 is rubbish" in an article in The Journalist, the National Union of Journalists' magazine. The article argues against wiping out traditional media and replacing it with citizen journalism, which is not a position a lot of people hold. He concludes:
There are those who claim that Web 2.0 democratises the media. It would make everyone equal, yes, but should they be? It’s like saying anyone can play for Manchester United. In one of the main examples given to explain Web 2.0, Wikipedia replaces Britannica Online. Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access, regardless of their level of knowledge, expertise or agenda?
Oh sigh. This commits two fallacies.
First, it equivocates on "equal." No one argues that all blog posts and all bloggers are of equal value. That's why we have blogrolls. Hell, that's why we have links. But, we all (well, all with economic means, physical access, etc.) have an equal ability to post. Equal access to post != equal value of posts.
Second, Donnacha ignores the social dynamics, as if Wikipedia (for example) were nothing but a series of posts by random individuals. In fact, Wikipedia results from a complex social dynamic and set of processes designed to move articles towards encyclopedic goodness. We can argue about whether those processes work and whether Wikipedia is reliable, and so forth, but Donnacha ignores those processes altogether. In fact, the processes are designed to keep all entries from being treated as equal.
Donnacha acts as if the Web were as weak as its weakest link because we can't tell the difference between weak and strong links. In fact, the Web at its best is stronger than its strongest links, because those links get tempered through the exposure to multiple points of view. Of course the Web isn't always at its best, and Donnacha is right to remind us of that. But perhaps this is Donnacha's third fallacy: Citizen journalism is not "everybody writes what they want and we have to read it all as if it were all of equal value," just as Wikipedia isn't just a big blank scratch pad with publicly available pencils. Citizen journalism is founded on the idea that while many people can contribute, we need ways to surface what is of value. Everyone working in the field of citizen journalism understands Donnacha's objection. Donnacha's complaint isn't a criticism of citizen journalism. It is citizen journalism's starting point.
The fact that Donnacha's credit at the end of the article reports that "He represents new media journalists on the union’s National Executive Council" is a bit scary. Indeed, veteran journalist Roy Greenslade resigned from the National Union of Journalists because of its attitude toward new media. Laura Oliver has an article about Roy's resignation here. (Thanks to Richard Sambrook for the link.)
Posted by self at 12:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 27, 2007
What you may draw
Microsoft has clarified its rules for how you may use its game software to create animated movies (machinima). There's excellent coverage and discussion of this at Law of the Game. The rules, which are written in remarkably accessible language, include the following restriction:
You can’t use Game Content to create pornographic or obscene Items, or anything that contains vulgar, racist, hateful, or otherwise objectionable content. We can’t help you much here except to say that just like the old saying goes, you know it when you see it.
I am so not a lawyer, but at first glance, this seems like Adobe saying you are not permitted to use Photoshop to create pornographic images, or possibly like buying a sketchpad in an art store that says you may not use it to draw sexually explicit pictures. But there is a difference: Machinima uses graphic elements created by the game company. Even if you're using those elements essentially as clip art, the company has (apparently) the right to keep you from publishing its content in configurations it finds objectionable.
I say if Spartan-117 wants to get it on with Lord Terrence Hood, and if they want to bring in Daffy Duck for a threesome, and you're not making money off the machinima that shows all the high-res clanking, well, that's the price creators pay for successfully contributing to our culture. But, apparently I'm wrong.
Posted by self at 09:53 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 23, 2007
Berkman lunch: Aaron Swartz on Open Library
Aaron Swartz is giving a Berkman talk on the Open Library project. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing stuff, getting things wrong. You can hear the whole thing as Media Berkman.]
The basic idea is to give each page a Web page that collects all the information about that book. Books have never had "a first class place on the web." They've been distributed across publishers' Web sites, etc.
The book pages are a "structured wiki." Wikipedia lacks the structure required to let computers access it. So, the OL wiki page has separate fields for all of the metadata about it. E.g., click on the author's name and you get a list of all the books the author has written.
It has to be really open, Aaron says. "This is something that has to be a collaboration among a lot of different people." They've brought in publishers, reviews, authors, etc. It's all available for free, for download or reuse. Anyone can use it.
When books are out of copyright, the OL brings in the full text, when available. But that raises issues about how people want to read books on line he says.
OL also wants to be able to point people to libraries that have copies of books. There are "Buy, borrow or download" options for every book (when possible).
Readers can review books on the site.
The first thing librarian argued about when they saw OL was what subject classification system to use. "We don't have to choose on the Internet. We can store all the category systems and let people choose which ones they want." Likewise with all the different identifiers, e.b., ISBN, OCLC numbers, OL identifiers. ("We have to make our own identifier system because we're going to have more books.")
Ferberization means connecting physical books to all the different abstractions, e.g., print runs, editions, translations, etc. The library world has focused primarily on the physical books on the shelves. "We're going to have to come up with new ways of expressing the relationships," including allowing people to create new relationships, e.g., this book is based on that one, this book refutes that one, this one replaces that one.
They'd like to be able to do print on demand, and mail you a physical copy. Also scan on demand: You pay some money and someone goes and scans it.
Amazon is doing something similar to OL. But Amazon is trying to sell you stuff and doesn't have good info about books that are out of print. Google Books has very few community features. And there's WorldCat from OCLC, but their business model depends on selling information. OL wants to be a public group available to everyone.
Q: English language only?
A: Right now we're English only but internationalization is a huge part of this. We want to get summaries in multiple languages as well as
Q: (terry martin - law school librarian) Journals?
A: Serials are the next task after this. Serials are more complex. They're in vast sets over long periods of time.
Q: (wendy) Fuzzy connections? Is West Side Story an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet?
A: Library systems are generally binary. We have lots of ways of connecting books but we haven't really done anything fuzzy.
Q: User-generated categories?
A: Sure. Tagging.
Q: (jpalfrey) We'd love to hear what you say about how a huge library, such as Harvard Law School Library could contribute...
Aaron now talks about the current status of the project. The software is working well, he says. They worried about it because it combines a database and a wiki in a new ways. They have about 10 million catalog records, including 6M from the Library of Congress and 5M from U of NC. They have about 400,000 full text copies, mainly from the Internet Archive. Publishers have been good about providing info. They're looking for collections of reviews. Publishing on-demand works well; they have machines that print and assemble books in about 5 mins. They're going to repopulate the New Orleans public library with the 400,000 books the OL has. OL wants more data. Also, they need more programmers. "If you love books, we'd love your help soon curating and annotating them."
Q: (sj klein) Interlibrary loan for books in copyright?
A: We want to do digital interlibrary loans. We scan a copy and send you the pdf. Some publishers seem ok with it. Some are going to go ahead with it, with us as their partner, for books you can't get in a bookstore but not yet out of copyright.
Q: (gene koo) The publishers are ok with it but the non-profit book association has problems with it?
A: For publishers, it's another way of promoting their books. They have Onyx Feeds in XML that promote their books. Libraries have been much more difficult, primarily because of the complicated bureaucracy and concerns about legal issues. It's been a long hard slog to persuade them to give us their records. Can any librarians here give us advice?
Q: International?
A: We're working on several countries. We know people in India. We're looking all the time for people who can help us with it.
Q: Are you working with delicious library, etc., to see if they can contribute?
A: We've been working mainly with LibraryThing.com. Delicious etc, generally aggregate existing library records.
Q: What are you doing to reach the social tipping point?
A: The plan is to do it in two phases. First, get the data into the right format. Second, we need to bring people in, getting them to contribute. We think that a lot will be pulled in through Google.
Q: (oliver goodenough) Money?
A: Mainly funded by the Internet Archive. We have a grant from California. We hope that long-term it will be funded through affiliate fees and some scanning on demand fees.
Q: What is the glue? I don't see a unique ID...
A: Working on it.
Q: (me) FRBR is pretty structured. But the number of ways we might want to connect things is open ended. How are you going to figure out the right way to have structured vs unstructured?
A: We'll start with something. We'll pick the ones we like. Then we hope the user community will emerge and figure out the right ways to categorize and connect.
Q: (tim spalding - librarything) Tagging allows for multiple categorizations and relationships. E.g., at librarything we got pressure to include more choices under gender. How to resolve?
A: Tough problem.
A: (terry martin) Some data is unambiguous. Author names should be unambiguous.
A: (aaron) It'd be good to have a shared point of view, as at Wikipedia.
Q: (sj) Are you hotlinking to any databases? I.e., not importing but doing calls.
A: When you have 10M records, you have to do the import. For price records, we'll do live queries.
Q: Frequently, wikipedia will put in a note to clarify ambiguous categorizations, e.g., a gender categorization that isn't right. But OL is more constrained
A: From the beginning we've faced the tension between reusable data and flexibility. Our compromise is that things are structured but can be changed on the fly for an individual entry or class of entries. The hope is that people don't change the names of the fields so the database remains reliable.
Q: (Terry martin) Greg Crain, 25 yrs ago you did something like this for a closed domain. Would you do it this way now?
A: (Greg) People don't care about books. They care about a poem or a chapter. Most of the world's expertise is distributed. How to take advantage of the distributed labor. Tricky question. Not just a means but an end. Wikipedia is the dog and the academy is the tail. How do you integrate the two? And it's not books, it's objects. E.g., we're dealing with the European museum classification system. The general issue is how you add more structure within the book.
A: (aaron) That's the hope. And it certainly comes up with journal articles, and songs where you want to point to a song within an album.
A: (greg) The important thing about what you're doing is that it's open.
Q: (sj) What about unpublished works?
A: You can scan them and upload the metadata. There's a bit of question about what belongs in the OL library, but we're not in a position to kick things out. Maybe we'll have metadata indicating that it's not a "real" book.
A: (oliver) This could become a self-publishing system.
Q: (me) And then doesn't it get spammed as people link their self-published book to existing books?
A: It's the Internet. Everything is spammed. If it happens, there will be spam fighters.
Q: Why won't OCLC give you the data?
A: We'd take it in any form. We'd be willing to pay. Getting through the library bureaucracy is difficult...
A: (terry) You need to find the right person at OCLC
A: We've talked with them at a high level and they won't give us any information. Too bad since they're a non-profit. Library records are not copyrightable. OCLC contractually binds libraries.
Q: (tim) The greatest thing about OL is that it's an OCLC killer. Libraries shouldn't pay for it. Why not just explicitly say that the enormous value is that libraries won't have to pay for cataloging records.
A: (librarian) Who's going to create the records?
A: They're created already. We just need to get a couple of libraries to provide their collections.
Q: (sj) OCLC culls and curates. OL will need this.
A: I'd love to talk about this with the OCLC more. Their mission is the same as ours, but they have this enormous revenue stream from the records. They've gotten more open maybe partially in response to us.
A: Why not just give OL the records?
Q: (terry) Because we have them from OCLC and we're contractually bound.
A: There's an exemption for providing them to non-profits.
A: (terry) Hmm. Maybe. It includes lots of journal records. But where does it take us? Do you have out of copyright books? I'm not particularly interested in promoting in-print commercial books.
A: Yes. Publishers are happy to hand over in-print data. The struggle is getting out of print books. Everyone at the project is more interested in out of print books. We want to pull people from the latest, hottest thing to the older and more interesting books. We're happy to link to already scanned collections.
Even if contracts allow you to distribute your records, wouldn't that annoy OCLC?
A: (terry) Nah.
Q: (sjklein) What happened to Wikicat?
A: It seems kind of dead.
A: How do you plan on promoting it once you open it up?
Q: We want to get ranked highly in Google. We're also talking about a partnership with Wikipedia. Right now, citing a book in Wikipedia is complex. We're working on letting you just search at OL and it populates the record.
Q: You will have solved the age old problem of where the ISBN number points to.
Q: (me) What do you need to succeed?
A: More data. More people contributing. More book lovers, like at LibraryThing.com. And a few more programmers.
Posted by self at 03:26 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Debatepedia launches
Debatepedia wants to collect the best arguments pro and con for issues that matter. It's not a place for people to shout at each other. On the contrary, it aims at assembling reasoned arguments.
It's a noble idea. I don't know if it'll catch on, of course, but I do like the way the Web is shortening the MTBNI (mean time between noble ideas).
Posted by self at 07:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 22, 2007
From data to presence
There's a good article by Ivar Ekman in the NY Times about the meaning of Google's purchase of Jaiku. Relying heavily on Tim O'Reilly and Chris Messina (two good people to rely heavily on), the article says it's all about expanding the services Google can provide for one's presence.
So, here's the story so far. Computers are invented. They're all about bits, data and information that reduce experience to what can be managed by digital processors. PC's are invented. They are about making us big-brained. The Web is invented to make the Internet usable. The Web is about creating a new type of public in which we can connect with one another in ways we're still inventing. Our presence thus goes from being a reduction to holes in punch cards to being rich, open-ended and fully socially shaped and defined. But, so long as we access the connected net through a computer, it is a place we visit. As it becomes something we carry with us everywhere, it swallows us whole. Our presence in this world becomes constant, intertwingled with the real world, and connected in ways that will emerge from constancy and intertwingling.
From data to connected, ubiquitous presence. Quite a trip.
Posted by self at 06:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
When locks protect you right out of the market
Scott Kirsner has a terrific post about why trying to control PR can hurt PR. After arguing with a film company about its policy of requiring a password to log into the PR site, Scott actually went through the process of trying to get a password. It happened at postal speeds. Making it hard for people to talk about your film is probably not the best way to market your film.
Posted by self at 11:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 21, 2007
Aaron Swartz on the Open Library project
If you're interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you're in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It's also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There's Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.
We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there...or on the webcast. (Details)
Posted by self at 10:15 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 20, 2007
Alan Watts lives
Here's Alan Watts talking to IBM (1 2), probably in the early 1970s, although I'm just guessing. Very Alan Wattsian, very Sixties yet contemporary, and very enjoyable. Here's a bite:
"But nature itself is clouds, is water, is the outline of continents, is mountains, is bilogical existences. And all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance, because we want to figure it out."
(Thanks to Steven Kruyswijk for the link.) [Tags: alan_watts everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 18, 2007
Copyright kidnappers, Google, and the prior restraint of Fair Use
The copyright cartel has decided how they want us to play. According to Reuters:
The companies agreed to use technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content uploaded by Web users and to block any pirated material before it is publicly accessible.
Yeah, well that sucks. Will their fingerprinting technology be able to tell that I'm posting 15 seconds of Bill O'Reilly as part of a mock news report to make fun of him? That's Fair Use. Technology can't tell Fair Use from infringement. The copyright cartel's idea would squeeze the leeway out of the system that allows culture to advance.
Google's idea with YouTube is a lot better. Copyright holders would register their stuff so that Google can fingerprint it. If I then post the fingerprinted clip of O'Reilly, the copyright holder is notified (actually, Google says they'll have a tool to identify infringers, so I don't know if they get actively notified) and is given the option of asking Google to remove the clip or keep it up and get ad revenues from it. If the copyright holder has Google take my clip down, I'm notified and can counter-notify. (This is much like the DMCA, but it's not the DMCA.) Google's lawyers will then adjudicate the claim. If it's not covered by Fair Use, the clip comes down. If they think it is, it stays up.
This beats the cartel's plan by a mile. Actually, by three miles:
Mile 1: Material is not preemptively blocked from being published. Google thus allows for the possibility of Fair Use.
Mile 2: I have a right of appeal, so to speak, to Google's lawyers.
Mile 3: Google has provided copyright holders with a damn good reason to allow people to post copyrighted material -- the holder not only gets the mind share that comes from letting your material be spread, they also get cold hard cash via ad revenues.
Note, please, that IANAL. If I'm misunderstanding how either the cartel or Google plan works, lets me know. But, as I understand it, Google's plan is far more aligned with our Founders' intentions than the piratical cartel's plan is.
Posted by self at 03:59 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
YouTube Q's for the candidates
From Andy Carvin's blog:
Move over YouTube debates, now for something meatier! A coalition of blogs and news organizations is using Web 2.0 tools to create another exciting experiment in interactive presidential debates. It might even be a chance for your students to pose the perfect question to them.
This week, techpresident.com teamed up with the New York Times, MSNBC and a whole slew of blogs to launch 10Questions.com, an online presidential debate that’s a fascinating mix of video blogging, tagging and user-generated content. Joanne Colan, My colleague at the video blog Rocketboom put together this video to explain how it works:
Andy also provides a clear text-based explanation if you don't want to watch the video.
Here's my question:
Posted by self at 10:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 17, 2007
Everything is miscellaneous explained in a 5 and a half minute YouTube
Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful.
Posted by self at 10:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 16, 2007
Berkman lunch: Oliver Goodenough on Modeling Cooperation
Oliver Goodenough, a fellow at the Berkman Center, is leading a lunchtime discussion on the topic "Modeling Cooperation for First and Second Lives: Suggesting a General Case." [As always, I'm live blogging, typing quickly, missing some points, paraphrasing throughout, getting some things wrong. Sorry. But you can always see the presentation itself at Media Berkman. (This talk was particularly over my head, as you'll see.)] [The paper is available here.]
Oliver says: Cooperation is "a key element of our existence." Economically, biologically, we are cooperative. But we haven't understood it well. And neoclassical economics assumes that cooperation is easy (e.g., contracts) and that it's impossible (the "rational actor" model). And biology's "selfish gene" assumes that we're selfish.
"Outcomes that vary from Nash equilibriums have not been well studied." "Many of the opportunities for cooperation come in defection-prone contributions." E.g., I can offer to pay you, get the goods, and then not pay you. "Cooperation is likely to occur in circumstances where it is the dominant game strategy." We're not stuck in bad games. "We can choose and shape the games we want to play in." The Mechanism Design approach (its creators just won the Nobel) lets us evolve the game. We can cooperate in the design of the mechanism we're building. We can have deals and create institutions.
The mechanism design toolkit for constructing institutions and mechanisms includes reciprocity, hierarchy, partnership, contract, property, fairness... And these mechanisms can be located in various institutions and mechanisms, e.g., dual key lock box, genes, psychological values, law, culture, code...
Examples of mechanism design: A Coke machine in a college dormitory is made reliable to the Coke company via physical armor. It is made reliable to the buyer via Coke's reputation, the big sign, the history of transactions. eBay has a different set of mechanisms. YouTube is making it possible for copyright owners to give permission for the posting of their material in return for advertising revenues from those postings. These are all mechanisms.
So, we are making progress in understand cooperation. Some of the progress is coming from outside of economics.
Q: How about non-monetized projects like Wikipedia?
A: There are lots of motivations other than money.
A: [andrew] There's a literature on why people contribute to open source software.
Q:(wendy) What about DRM? It is an institution written in code to keep us from "misusing" copyright works. But we are not free to refuse it.
A: Individuality rationality says that we don't accept the best deal we could design, but we take the deal that's the best we can get. Between the quicksand and Nirvana of cooperation is a continuum. We could even look at politics as the renegotiation of distribution rules.
Q: (doc) What about generosity?
Q: (corinna) The more close knit the network, the more likely you are to cooperate. How do you transfer this to the digital world where you're unlikely to know the person directly, e.g., eBay. (gene) If you were doing the mechanism design for record companies, what might be a mechanism that would work?
Q: (me) What domain is this theory in? What do we have to stop believing to start believing this?
Q: How does your theory view law? Is it something that can bring about good outcomes for everyone? Or does it always involve hard political questions?
Q: You sound a bit like early Douglas North: Institutions fix the problem. I think the really new stuff in what you say has to do with the technology piece. Tech can constrain where you put the mechanism.
Q: (gene) Is it the monetization that undermines cooperative systems or the rational counting of it. E.g., at eBay, you can look beyond the numbers to see what kind of seller you are.
Q: (jp) You probably have most of us convinced of your critique of classical economics. We've all seen lots of motivations online. What is it about the digitally mediated environment that causes people to act differently? What are the strands you could pull together about what makes the digital world differently? Also, what is the institution you want to build? What problem are you trying to solve?
Posted by self at 02:12 PM
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It might be sorta interesting to aggregate when people last saw a presentation that used an overhead projector (acetates, the heady smell of marker...) and in what domain.
And while I'm being trivial, we need a word for the sense that you keep getting the same captcha codes (the "Please type in this code so we know you're a human" codes).
Posted by self at 10:37 AM
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I have a friend who is in charge of managing the peer review process at some serious scientific journals. It's a tough job requiring a set of skills that includes dealing with sometimes ornery people, managing multiple schedules, and expertise in the fields in which she works. She makes a good case for peer review, and for the journals that rely on it. Peer review has value and costs money, she says. So, journals have to charge fees to support the peer review process, and they have to hold onto the rights at least long enough to recover their costs.
I recognize the value of peer review. It not only directs our attention to worthwhile research, it is part of an editorial process that improves articles before they're published. But peer review doesn't scale. There's so much research being done. A lot of it is good work but isn't important enough to merit the investment in a traditional peer review process (including the failed hypotheses that we were taught in school were not failures at all). Peer review is valuable, but it's a choke point required because traditional publishing's neck is so thin. And it may — may! — turn out that the combination of crowds and quirky individuals can replace peer review's value. Of course, we'd want the crowd to consist of people with some standing for evaluating the research. And we'd want to be sure that the quirky individuals who buck the crowd are not delusional psychotics. I of course don't know what the world will look like (or what it does look like, when you come down to it), but I suspect that we're going to have a mixed research ecology, with peer reviewed journals making recommendations we trust highly, and a wide variety of other ways of finding the research that matters to us. With PLoS and PLoS, and arXiv, and Nature's version of arXiv, and all the rest of it, we're already well on the way to filling the important niches in this new knowledge ecology.
In fact, peer review generally establishes two characteristics of a piece of work: It was performed properly and it is important enough to merit throwing some ink at it. Those are important criteria, but hardly the only ones. "This hastily performed work uses a flawed methodology but turns up an interesting fact worth considering" is the type of criterion researchers use when recommending articles to one another. There's value there, and with research that has good data that it misanalyzes, research that is promising but incomplete, research that inadvertently demonstrates a flaw in some lab equipment, etc. etc. etc. And, as always, the value is in the long tail of et ceteras.
Posted by self at 01:36 PM
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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.
Posted by self at 03:12 PM
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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.
Posted by self at 06:30 PM
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I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. (Disclosure: Jyri is a conference buddy.)
It'll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.
And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle.
Posted by self at 01:37 AM
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I started poking around at Madame Levy's quilt gingerly. As luck would have it, the first link I followed was to Arcade Fire - Neon Bible live in an elevator. As I kept poking, I found more and more. As Frank Paynter, who pointed this site out to me puts it, this is curation. It is indeed curation as art. [Tags: madame_levy curation art everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 07:42 AM
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James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, "Unlock the Rock," which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump'in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it'll play that. If there's an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it'll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.
Interesting. It'd at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it'd be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data....
Posted by self at 02:00 PM
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A: When you're designing digital mechanisms such as eBay, you're combining a reputation system, a repeat transaction history, network reputation, access to Paypal, a trusted intermediary, etc. These are mechanisms.
A: The record company was a mechanism. The technology is destroying their role as middle broker. They're desperately hanging onto a IP position to maintain what was a market position?
Q: So, would your model suggest that Radiohead will succeed?
A: That asks what mechanisms a band can use...
A: Economists will tell you they explore behavior. Biology and psychology also explore behavior. The most serious formalizations in economics and biology don't get how this works. Now institutional and game theoretical economists have advanced this. People like Martin Nowack (sp?) are undoing the blockages in biology. My one contribution is perhaps to turn it around to mechanism design and see that there's a general case there.
A: In a mechanism structure, there are people who getter better or worse deals. Is being part of that mechanism individually rational is a different question than "Would I redesign the game if given the opportunity."
A: I have taken a bunch of ideas from North, but he doesn't take the next step to mechanism design. The most I'm doing is putting the pieces together...
A: There's a literature on impersonal vs. personal exchange. One of the problems in designing big markets is whether you want to strip away all the personal signals.
A: I take these as challenges. I'm working on the business instance. I'm trying to figure out how a constraint-space within which we could use the techniques of contracts combined with software to create a space where people can design something better. Can I help create a legal framework in a state that is friendly to virtual businesses?
Q: (jp) The contracts in the Web 2.0 space are a house of cards. E.g., 5,000 build FaceBook apps without good contracts underneath them. Your work could help in such cases.
A: Emergent is great when it works, but hierarchy has its place, too.
Trivial crowd sourcing project - The death of a technology
October 15, 2007
Peer review review
October 11, 2007
Veerstichting conference
October 10, 2007
My maybe-talk at Veerstichting
Google buys Jaiku
October 06, 2007
Quilt
October 02, 2007
Meta-radio