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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James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center is giving a Berkman lunch. He's going to talk about aspects of the Gnu Public License that people don't generally talk about. He says he's going to skip the part where he explains how great the GPL is, which he fully believes it is and focus instead on some problems with it. [As always, I'm blogging sloppily, missing stuff, mischaracterizing, etc.]
The Software Freedom Law Center is a pro bono, non-profit law firm for people who produce free software. It spent a year crafting a "really good license." It's a copyright license that gives others conditional permissions to use the software. The GPL is also a patent license, as of version 3.
What isn't the GP? It's not a social contract. It's not the embodiment of an ethos. "It is not the constitution on which the software world is built." It's sometimes treated that way, but it's really just a set of permissions. "There are people running around with images about what the GPL says that don't match what's in the license." E.g., people think the GPL forbids the commercial use of free software, although it's never said that. People insist on believing that. it does It will never be everything that people want it to be. That's the price of having "one dominant license," which, however, is good for interoperability.
Although the license isn't perfect, it's really good. "In fact, we've won." The free software wave is not going to end. There are more projects every day, and they're getting better and better. Businesses use free software not because they believe in the ideals of free software but simply because it's efficient. But that means "we've invited into our community" stakeholders who don't share our "starry-eyed ideals." What do we do about starting a conversation about what we owe each other? What does the partnership actually mean on a day to day and long-term basis?
The GPL is also not a trademark license. Some large free software projects have their own brand managers. E.g., Gnome would like to let people use their foot symbol with some degree of freedom, so they're writing their own trademark license. That's not covered by the GPL.
Q: (wendy seltzer) Does the community need its own, special trademark law?
Q: (me) Didn't that happen because the license precipitated the conversation and was the place where the details had to be worked out, as opposed to thinking that people wanted to read legal language?
The GPL is also not a document that reads itself. Version 3 has more pieces than 2, and the pieces interact in more complex ways. It's tough for a layperson to read. The GPL four freedoms are useful but not enough.
The big benefit of the GPL was that it made it easier to make it compatible with, e.g., the Apache license and the Affero license. (Wikipedia on Affero: "...derived from the GNU General Public License with an additional section to cover use over a computer network.")
Finally, there are the hard cases. " E.g., DRM is complicated. "There will never be a system that allows you to authenticate a Britney Spears song that doesn't also authenticate a client." Some people wanted the GPL to prevent free software from having any DRM, but there were too many unintended consequences of doing so. It's an interesting area we should watch.
Many of the above limitations are inherent in using legal documents to create documents.
Q: (wendy) The technology is the same to authenticate a game client and an authorized copy of a song, the game player can make a choice to be part of a network where no one can cheat, while the music purchaser hasn't made that choice.
Q: (me) How do we have the conversation but not around the GPL? And where do we get a plain English version of the GPL so we can understand it?
Posted by self at 01:28 PM
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Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) is one of those strong-voiced writers who makes a real difference in her domain. Now she is leaving the American Library Association's TechSource blog — which she was instrumental in beginning — in order to follow her writerly instincts. Her last post is a message to librarians that usefully points them toward their fears. [Tags: karen_schneider libraries ala everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 07:42 AM
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I like what Michael Wolff says in his Vanity Fair piece about his new news site:
The metaphor, for 150 years — from print to radio to network to cable — has been the front page: important stuff first. "It should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests," offers [Patrick] Spain, not a man wild with his metaphors. [VF, October, p. 126]
I've been saying for a while, and I think in Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the new front page is distributed across our day and our network. Much of it comes through our inbox. It consists of people we know and people we don't know recommending items for our interest.
So, I was disappointed by Wolff's new site, Newser.com. It presents a view of the news that's much less hierarchical than a typical front page, and it's well-designed for quickly finding what matters to you, but: (1) It assumes its nine top-level categories reflect how every reader views the world; (2) Where are our voices? Comments? Blogs? (3) I couldn't let it arise from my social network (where that network includes people I don't know but whose views interest me). It competes with Google News, not with the intersection of Digg and FaceBook, which is what I'm waiting for.
Posted by self at 07:35 AM
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Ed Yourdon has created a mother lode of a Google docs presentation that gathers tons of info about Web 2.0. Plus, he's inviting bunches of people to add to it, edit it, put in a nicer background, etc.
Posted by self at 10:37 PM
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BradSucks has posted the main track of his new song "Out of It," and is asking you to provide the backup vocals. [Tags: bradsucks collaboration ]
Posted by self at 02:17 PM
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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.
Posted by self at 12:02 PM
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I'm in Aarhus, Denmark, listening to the only English presentation of the day (besides mine), which is a terrific talk by Mark William Hansen about Lego's embrace of Web 2.0. E.g., four days after Lego launched MindStorm, the software had been completely redone. "We could have gone after them with a lawyer," he says, but instead "We embraced the changes." The adult hobbyists, who had been a "shadow market," with Web 2.0 have become key because they drive enthusiasm and stretch the product. Lego is working on "Lego Universe": A social world in which you can build with virtual bricks and play with them online with others; the planes will fly and the boats will sail.
Posted by self at 09:08 AM
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Martin Weller has an excellent article on the future of content, presenting an economic and a quality argument for why it's bound to be (in my terms) miscellanized.
This is the first in a "distributed blogging" experiment that will have three other bloggers responding.
Posted by self at 06:41 AM
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Julian Dibble has a rich post about the interpenetrating of work and play. There's so much in it, it's hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don't have to decide because I'm running late for a presentation...
Posted by self at 04:18 AM
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Here's the video of Tuesday's Berkman lunch featuring four fellows giving five minute talks on the future of the Net, followed by a lively group discussion. It's all part of the global One Web Day celebrations of the Web and its value and its values. [Tags: one_web_day -berkman]
Posted by self at 10:33 AM
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David Isenberg has a good post on One Web Day, Yom Kippur, and their coincidence tomorrow.
So, go celebrate the Web while we still have one that's distinguishable from cable TV.
And if I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I ask your forgiveness. I will try to do better next year, especially if you'll let me know what I did wrong (self@evident.com).
Posted by self at 01:02 PM
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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.
Posted by self at 02:09 PM
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My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, the novelist and writing teacher, ran a piece in her newsletter about how small presses see Amazon. It's by Jonathan Greene of the Gnomon Press. I thought it was interesting. Here it is, in its entirety:
Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill
useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in
incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal
devastation in the eastern coalfields.
But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over
40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than
ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many
instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are
not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon
Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky
enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.
But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that
is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes
the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but
(unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up
condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to
its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut
the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had
to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being
non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would
consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores
complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific
salaries.
Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store
will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry. Research
on-line and contact or buy from the publisher directly. Not all
publishers take credit cards, a reason some would prefer to deal with
Amazon. Barnes & Noble often will not order from small publishers
directly, but often seem to give out their telephone numbers to those
that want books from those publishers. Small Press Distribution and
Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less
to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or
chains at 40% - 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment
and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And
Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores
or distributors return. In other words, it is almost impossible for a
small literary publisher to survive without massive infusions of grants
from NEA and foundations. Or increasingly asking for author subsidies.
And this affects writers who want to be published by small publishers.
The health of these publishers helps the writers they publish. The
worsening condition is also caused by big publishers deciding to kill of
their mid-list authors, authors who do not sell books at or above the
10,000 range. They would rather publish fewer authors selling more
product (a ubiquitous hateful word now in the book trade).
Print-on-demand vendors are a new avenue for authors and publishers. Or
in many instances now the author is the self-publisher. A complicated
situation. Bashing Amazon is not really helpful. Bash Ingram, bash the
fact that mainstream literary publishing is now dominated by
multi-nationals. Knopf, Random House, Farrar Straus, etc. are now owned
by German companies. Or lament the fact that just released figures state
that 27% of Americans do not even read one book a year. One was quoted:
reading made them sleepy. Well, then tout reading for insomniacs as much
healthier than sleeping pills. That should boost book sales.
BTW, Gnomon is no longer accepting manuscripts for publication.
Posted by self at 09:21 AM
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The Beppe Grillo blog (in Italy's top five) quotes the International Herald Tribune [pdf]:
The success of a grassroots anti-politics campaign spearheaded by an iconoclastic comedian is giving Italian politicians pause for thought.
Beppe Grillo is the man behind V-Day (the V stands for a very rude Italian expletive), which attracted 300,000 people on Saturday to sign a petition supporting a common goal: purging Italy of its corrupt political class, which in Grillo's view includes political parties, most government institutions and the media...
The petition wasn't no stinkin' online jobby where signing requires scrolling two inches in order to click on a box. People lined up in 200 towns to sign an honest-to-pete, atom-based piece of inconvenience. And there are physical meet-ups. Sounds like an effective blending of the digital and the analog, with all the pleasures and difficulties of the latter.
Posted by self at 10:25 AM
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My Times is in beta. I'm not sure how much of it I'm getting for free because Times Select comps people at universities. And I haven't played with it extensively. But what I'm seeing I'm liking.
my.nytimes.com lets you choose your feeds. Of course, NY Times material is available, but you could make a page that shows the feeds from the Washington Post, Slate, and BBC and not the NY Times. The site lets you see suggested feeds from various NY Times celebrities. You can add widgets like a Flickr photo browser. You can lay out the page you want. You can add tabs to organize your many feeds. You can even add your own feeds. Plus there's a meta-tab that will take you to Times Topics, taking them from their undeserved obscurity.
It's not perfect, even at first glance. The feeds only show headlines, not any of the text. It doesn't input or output OPML. The feed of the NYTimes columnists only shows the title of their posts, not the names of the authors. There's still no way to comment on the articles, not even a thumbs up or down. The articles don't link to blog posts about them.
Nevertheless, the decision to allow us to aggregate other sources on a page at the nytimes.com domain is a big symbolic deal. [Tags: nytimes media blogs newspapers journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 06:53 PM
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A couple of days ago, my friend Francois Gossieaux (whose name in my address book is marked with a big "THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING") interviewed me (phoninar format) for his marketing group called MarketHum. The mp3 is here. [Tags: marketing cluetrain francois_gossieaux markethum]
Posted by self at 08:53 AM
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Bradsucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, provided the inspirational background while William Gibson was writing his latest novel....
Posted by self at 05:17 PM
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According to a survey of Korean bloggers done by Edelman Korea (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, which is how I heard about this study), the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is "To create a record of my thoughts." Only 1.2% blog "To raise visibility as an authority in my field." This compares with 34% of American bloggers blogging to raise their visibility as authorities and 32% blogging to create a record of their thoughts. [Tags: korea blogging blogosphere edelman]
Posted by self at 10:53 AM
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From the Center for Media Research:
Half of All Web Viewers Watching What The Other Half Has To Say
According to the just released Deloitte's study on Media & Entertainment practice, looking at how American consumers between 13 and 75 years of age are using media and technology today, Millennials (13-24) are leading the way, embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools. Data from the survey show that user-generated content is in tremendous demand across the generations, with 51% of all consumers watching and/or reading content created by others.
Posted by self at 10:56 AM
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Andy Carvin just twittered:
Just realized OneWebDay is the same day as Yom Kippur this year. Guess I'll be giving back to the Net by fasting and being irritable. Yes, One Web Day is Sept. 22, which this year falls on Yom Kippur.
At the Berkman Center, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, at lunchtime, we're going to have a discussion of the near-palindromic Net in Ten, i.e., the future of the Web. Four of the Fellows have agreed to give a five minute talk (a literal five minutes), followed by open discussion. We'll post the video on Sept. 22 (aka Yom Kippur), on a discussion page.
That way, we can have our cake and not eat it, too.
Posted by self at 10:38 AM
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Today's Dilbert is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every Web 2.0 conference for the next two years. And it uses the phrase "tag-based folksonomy," albeit it as a phrase so technical it's suppose to scare us. It
And today's Doonesbury is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every "Future of Media" conference for the next two years. Along the way, the strip mentions DonorsChoose.org, a cool site that will get a boost from the plug, thus inadvertently showing the power of the mass media that the strip questions. (I blogged about DonorsChoose here.) [Tags: dilbert doonesbury donorschoose web2.0 media everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 09:48 AM
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When you're tempted to borrow the Dave Barry trope of adding "And, by the way, that would make an excellent name for a band," you can share the name at NowFormABand, a site created by Aanand Prasad. Recent names include: Foxy Morons, Clot, CornSquat and Eat More Chemicals.
None of the names I saw match the pure, godawful ridiculousness of my band's name in high school: Wheel and the Spokesmen. Even today I can play a truly awful rendition of "This Diamond Ring"...
(Link via Yesh Omrim.)
Posted by self at 07:45 AM
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Doc and I don't always see eye to eye on questions of implementing the privacy goals we share, but his pushback on FaceBook's change of policy is on the nose, in my book. I'd have no problem with FB exposing its members (so to speak) if that was part of the original deal. But as a change in policy, it stinks. FB has become too important to too many people to make it easy to leave — important because of what we users brought to FB: our friends, relationships, and time. danah, to no one's surprise, also has a terrific post on this.
FB could make this right with about two lines of code: Make exposing your FB info to search engines a matter of checking a box. What part of "opt in" does FB not understand?
Posted by self at 09:13 AM
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Jeneane wonders how online and real world retailing are linking our desires across the realms.
Watching tweens on Webkinz and Bella Sara, I started wondering how smart companies will find that same sweet spot with adult consumers—a place where real-world point-of-sale drives the online experience.
This sort of borderless transaction is one-way when it comes to information — the article you read in the paper leads you online, but once online you're unlikely to have to resort back to the real world. Retailers clearly would like two-way relationships. And, as Jeneane says, they're going to come up with every reason they can to get us get our passports stamped.
Posted by self at 10:53 AM
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Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It's called "Googling the Victorians," and the premise is: "Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. " He's got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon's "Remember the grotto!" caption — to make the point that "What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected." Here's another example:
...when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had
been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly
located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical,
The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers
Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights;
and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as
editor in the 1890s.
Leahy goes on:
Such experiences reinforce the
conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been
placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself,
gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and
rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the
internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.
This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?
I don't want to miss another of Leahy's points: "...the vast reach of online
searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one
another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways."
Posted by self at 10:29 AM
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Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes:
The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we're only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove &mdash step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.
That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.
The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas. My apartment's messy piles of papers and mottled floorboards are hard to model in Floorplanner, and it's tempting to imagine a living room without them. But take them away, and my living room wouldn't feel like home. I'm not sure how broadly that last paragraph applies, but the previous ones make a good point. The ability to play what-if with ideas lets us run down dead ends faster than ever, which is an important benefit of the Web. Finding paths of thought that go nowhere is often the best way to find paths that maybe go somewhere.
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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I enjoyed AJ Fortin's post that trains a Mortimer Adlerian eye on blogs and those who make extravagant claims about them. (I seem to be his main example of the latter.)
And John Eischeid, who worked with NewAssignment, is starting a crowdsourced project addressing broad questions of the effect of crowds and crowdsourcing. It's called "The Cult of the Rebuttal," a reference to Andrew Keen's book (which I've tried to explain and evaluate here), but it's really focused on the topic, not the book. [Thanks to Andy Angelos for the link.] [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous andrew_keen]
Posted by self at 09:04 AM
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I've posted a long piece at Huffington Post that tries to put together the strongest, most coherent version of Andew "Cult of the Amateur" Keen's argument against the Web...and then critiques it. Tags: andrew_keen web_2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 06:50 PM
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From Christopher Herot at Zingdom Communications:
The concept is very simple: you add this application to your Facebook account, give it your phone number (just US and Canada for now), provide some selection criteria, and wait for your phone to ring. You’ll be connected, for free, to another person on Facebook who made matching selections. You talk for a minute and it disconnects. You see their first name and their photo, but no other information, such as your phone number or profile, is revealed. At the end of the call, if both of you so agree, the application will re-connect you for a more extended conversation. Otherwise you can move on to the next person.
Chris warns that the app works best when there's critical mass. Also, he writes (in an email): "To install it, you’ll need to add it to your Facebook profile. So, log into Facebook, then cut and paste the following URL into your browser. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4255800247 ."
I haven't tried it. I'm not that social.
Posted by self at 10:08 AM
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BradSucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has released remixes of his albums by more than a dozen other people. Some are pretty damn good.E.g., Bert Fonte's mix of Fixing My Brain brings out Brad's voice and lyric, just to pick one. But, then, I'm a sucker for Brad.
Open source producing. Gotta love it.
Brad also has a call out for artwork for his upcoming album. [Tags: bradsucks remix music ]
Posted by self at 03:30 PM
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Andy Carvin has a good post at the PBS Teachers site touting One Web Day, which is coming up on Sept. 22. It's a day to celebrate the Web, the way EarthDay is a day to celebrate the Earth.
What are you going to on One Web Day to make the Web just a little bit better?
[Tags: onewebday andy_carvin susan_crawford earthday]
Posted by self at 11:11 AM
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Ed Cone's published an interview with me in the Greensboro News-Record that pushes on the philosophical side harder than most. Thanks, Ed! (Note: Ed has provided a backup link in case the newspaper's breaks.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ed_cone aristotle ]
Posted by self at 10:52 AM
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The Wall Street Journal online has published an exchange between Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur") and me. The full version is here. The condensed version is here. (I recommend the full version.) [Tags: andrew_keen web2.0 cult_of_the_amateur everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 09:33 AM
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Susan Mernit has a nice post about what we can learn from Facebook, Twitter, et al., even if you think they're just fads.
My overall lesson from such sites - much in line with Susan's -- is that we really enjoy one another. [Tags: susan_mernit facebook twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 05:09 PM
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The Open Library project has opened the doors on its demo, and it is a big, big deal. Read the about page (written by Aaaron Swartz) to see how exactly promising this project is.
From my provincial point of view, the Open Library Project addresses the miscellaneous nature of books: Lots of editions, lots of variants, lots of relationships.. So, include everything you can and enable the creation of rich metadata.
This is exactly the sort of infrastructure of meaning Everything Is Miscellaneous is so excited about. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries metadata wikis ]
Posted by self at 08:37 AM
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Dan Gillmor has posted a terrific report on the past year in citizen media. Dan is a partisan, but is so innately fair and honest that this report from the front lines is invaluable. [Tags: citizen_media citizen_journalism dan_gillmor media journalism ]
Posted by self at 10:15 AM
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Jeremy Price passes along a Cat and Girl comic strip he thinks I'll find amusing. He is correct. (I also like the other one he recommended.)
And to miss the point entirely, although the strip is right in pointing out that early TV shows didn't show families watching TV, TV's did figure in some of them in interesting, self-reflexive, possibly postmodern ways: In Burns & Allen in particular, George would go upstairs to watch TV to see what Gracie was up to in the show itself. [Tags: tv cat_and_girl comics ]
Posted by self at 08:22 AM
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Supernova has posted a video of Clay Shirky's fantastic opening presentation in which he utters the unspeakable word: Love.
Posted by self at 08:59 AM
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Supernova has posted the video of the session I did with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. [Later: The mp3 version of it is now up.] It begins with my 15-minute version of my Everything is Misc talk, followed by Andrew's more informal opener, and then us discussion whether the Internet is killing culture. [Tags: andrew_keen supernova2007 supernova07 everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:17 PM
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The eighth and last in my series of Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is up. I talk with Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and blogger. We talk not so much about citizens as journalists as about citizens as those who exercise editorial judgment. How will the BBC compete in a world where we're busily telling one another what we ought to read...especially as content gets pulled out of the sites themselves? [Tags: richard_sambrook bbc news journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired]
Posted by self at 01:01 PM
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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.
Posted by self at 01:15 PM
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Doc and I did a panel, led by Jerry Michalski, on the state of markets as conversations. Most of the discussion was around Doc's Vendor Relationship Management model. Interesting dicsussion with the audience.
(The Supernova "conversation hub" is here. And Isabel Walcott's thorough bloggage of the session with Doc and me — with Isabel's commentary — is here. BTW, this is part of the Wharton day, and this track is sponsored by Cisco. )
Now I'm in a session about people doing cool things in the nonprofit domain.
Maria Daniels of WGBH's American Experience series talks about the Citizen Storytellers Project enables citizens to do video via cell phones. It's an unfunded add-on to the series.
Howard Greenstein introduces a video of Farouk Olu Aregbe who created One Million Strong for Barack on FaceBook, from outside the Obama campaign. Then we get Farouk on the phone. What has he learned about creating social networks around candidates? One thing is that the regulatory environment is tough. And there are scaling issues. Q: Is your software available for other candidates? A: It's Facebook and third party software.howard then introduces a video inteview with Rolando H. Brown of the non-profit Hip-Hop Association promoting hiphop as a way to support community values and social awareness. The foundation runs a film festival and educational conferences.
Susan [missed the last name] of TechSoup talks about the Nonprofit Commons Project . The Commons was donated by Anshe Chung, the first SL millionaire. It's an island for nonprofits. Hundreds of member organizations get free space. One of the 1,300 Wikipedia administrators talks a bit about how its governed. [Again, sorry, couldn't hear his name.] He's working on categorization policy. He says that the policy to break categories up into smaller ones was based on the fact that a page can only display 200 linked articles. But, he says, that's an unnatural limitation. So, he started experimenting with making tables of contents for large topics. Within a week, it was on over a thousand categories. Within a month, it was "accepted as gospel" that large categories ought to have a table of contents. It impressed him that good ideas were accepted so quickly. "Innovation takes small steps. Each has to be an improvement. That's natural selection. That's what wikis do." [Tags: supernova2007 nonprofits npg]
Posted by self at 06:58 PM
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Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:
Eventually, soon I think, we'll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. In my terms, he's talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)
Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:17 PM
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Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called "Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks" in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used "deconstruct" twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.
Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: "The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective." I think so, too, although I'm not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.
FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning...
(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]
Posted by self at 10:57 AM
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I was a guest on Dennis Prager's conservative radio talk show yesterday. I was supposed to be talking about Everything is Miscellaneous, but the conversation, not surprisingly, turned to whether the Net's end run around authority is good for the left, right, or both. I thought Prager conducted a very good interview; I'm less happy with my responses.
I'm having trouble telling exactly what the permalink is for the podcast, but try here. If not, look for the June 14, 2007 show. I start at 10:20 and go to 23:36. (By the way, he introduces me as an "Internet advisor to Howard Dean." Because time was short, I didn't correct him to say that I was a volunteer Internet advisor to the Dean campaign, which is closer to the truth. I doubt very much that Dean would remember me.)
Supernova, a conference I'm going to and will be speaking at (debating Andrew Keen, among other things), is posting brief videos of people answering the question "What is the new network." My response and Andrew Rasiej's are here.
[Tags: dennis_prager supernova2007 everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 11:57 AM
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John Palfrey and Erin Mishkin are leading a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center about the "digital natives" project, which "explores what it means to be born digital." The hypothesis is that there's a gap between those born digital and those who came to it at some point in their lives...and the gap is larger than we think.
JP acknowledges right at the beginning that many others know much more than the people on the project do about what's goin' on with the kids. He hopes that a formal project will emerge from the past few years of informal research and discussion. From the project he hopes will come public policy suggestions that reflect the differences. E.g., privacy laws reflect digital immigrants' assumptions
Those who were born digital have a sense that they're always on. (The project will involve research beyond the US, by the way.) JP now goes through some of the slides from the talk he gave at the Internet & Society 2007 on June 1. Stray points from what he says today:
- Online identities frequently are made to be different from the rw identity "because I can."
- The most important global trend that ties natives to one another is that they're creators. (He shows a bunch of great clips by kids and amateurs.)
- What might privacy law and policy look like if it reflected the digital native ethos? E.g., FaceBook and MySpace give a good set of controls, although they're hard to use. But what happens if a friend posts an embarrassing photo of you? At FaceBook, you can remove it, but not at all networking sites. Or suppose a friend posts at Flickr an embarrassing photo of you and tags it with your name. You can't get rid of it. Finally, imagine a friend posts the same photo of you, but doesn't tag it with your name...but a face recognition system does. All these are google-able and part of your online identity. How should public policy reflect and react?
- JP's got a book deal, with Urs Gasser, from Basic Books. It's out in 2008, and it's aimed at lawyers.
Now Erin talks about the project. They'll be doing a bunch of interviews.
They had a logo contest for people under 18 and got 200 entries. A 15 year old Brit won.
There is then lively discussion about the questions the project should be asking. Too rollicking to blog well. So, I'll blog it badly. The following points and questions were raised by various people:
If the technology is transforming the way natives "socialize, engage in the political process, and engage themselves" (which JP and Erin pose as a question, but which I'm taking as an assertion), then how can policy created by immigrants and stay-at-home reflect that? How can policy keep up with "quicksilver"?
What's the driving force? Technology? Social norms? Policy?
The interviews may affect the natives' attitude towards exposing too much info on social sites.
How can the project use Facebook to get natives talking about this topic?
Empirical issue: What is due to developmental issues and what is due to the tech? To sort this out, strong collaboration among this team and other teams in other areas (e.g., Project Zero) would be helpful.
Today's digital natives are still in the childhood of the technology. It's the next generation that will be true natives. OTOH, by the time the current natives are adults, the environment will have changed.
["If you __________, you might be a digital native." Could be a way to generate some interest. E.g.: If you think email should be saved for wedding invitations and pink slips, you might be a digital native. If you get bored before you can finish writing a Tweeter post, you might be a digital native. Ok, maybe not such a great idea.]
[Tags: berkman digital_natives]
Posted by self at 02:50 PM
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Here's the audio of my closing comments at the Internet & Society Conference last week, the theme of which was open access. In it, I say that the Web is revealing knowledge to us as it has always been, and urge that we not be too realistic as we address the Web's potential. I also pay homage to Charlie Nesson 's vision of the university leading the fight to keep the Internet open and free. My comments were freeform, composed just a few minutes before the talk (because I was supposed to be responding to the day), and very informal. The audio is 20 minutes long. [Tags: is2k7 berkman charlie_nesson knoweldge open_access]
Posted by self at 01:35 PM
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The latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I've been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is now up at Wired. Craig Newmark (the Craig of CraigsList) and I talk about why strategic planning can get in a business' way and the value of working with limited resources. [Tags: craigslist craig_newmark business strategy newspapers media ]
Posted by self at 09:25 AM
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Leisa Rechelt posts about her talk on "Ambient Intimacy" at Reboot, and includes her slide show (which is almost all graphics and snippets...and looks terrific).
Ambient Intimacy is a term to describe that sense of connectedness that you get from participating in social tools online that allow you to feel as though you are maintaining and, perhaps in fact, increasing your closeness with people in your social network through the messages and content that you share online - be it photographs or text or information about upcoming travel.
There are lots of other terms that people have used to describe this kind of connected experience including Situational Awareness, Hyper-Connectivity, Hive Mind, Social Presence, Distributed Co-Presence etc. I still prefer Ambient Intimacy because it combined the human ‘ickyness' of ‘intimacy' with the distributed and non-directional nature of ‘ambiance'. These are all ways of getting at the fundamental paradox that the Web is a crowd of unique faces, a roar of distinct voices, a choreography of Brownian motion, an intimacy of details, distributed friendship, communities of acquaintances, topic-based affection, a continuous intermittency, a plenum of parts... [Tags: leisa_reichelt ambient_intimacy reboot09 everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:57 PM
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Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talk about the three orders of order, "meta-business," Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here's the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 08:15 AM
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Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talk about the three orders of order, "meta-business," Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here's the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 08:15 AM
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Bill Griffith's automotive column in the Boston Globe today has a nice quote from Saab USA's new general manager:
"A blogger, I think he was from Tasmania, immediately made a post on behalf of Saab owners," Shannon said. "The gist was, 'You're working for us now, and you better take care of our baby.' " Evidence? Nah. An anecdote that expresses a whole bunch of themes? Yup.
[Tags: marketing cluetrain saab]
Posted by self at 12:39 PM
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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]
Posted by self at 02:27 PM
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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]
Posted by self at 10:20 AM
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Tom Matrullo's got a helpful post about opening up JSTOR, a digitized archive of scholarlship. Tom registers "puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge — knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world."
Damn right it's frustrating. And there's lot's going on trying to free the knowledge. On the one hand, we have the economic hurdles, which Tom's post explains. On the other, we have at least a sense of how much smarter our species could become if enabled open acess to scholarship. Someday...
(Thanks to Frank Paynter for the pointer.) [Tags: open_access knowledge universities tom_matrullo berkman jstor everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 12:01 PM
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Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and the author of Dreaming in Code, has posted at Salon an interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous.
At his blog, Scott adds some "out-takes" from the interview, and recommends the book. [Tags: salon scott_rosenberg everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy tagging ]
Posted by self at 08:02 AM
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HelpALot.org helps you find charities using your social network, and uses social networking tools to figure out which charities you want to support and which ones you trust. I haven't had a chance to play with it much, but I like the concept and the implementation initially seems promising. [Tags: philanthropy charity everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:06 PM
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The always enjoyable Andrew Hinton has an insightful, witty, surprising set of slides 'n' text that tries to explain not only what Information Architecture is, but why it's been so hard to explain. Along the way he has things to say about communities vs. communities of practice, how to attract flies, and why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16. Great stuff, elegantly and entertainingly communicated. [Tags: information_architecture andrew_hinton ]
Posted by self at 11:31 AM
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EOM.
[Tags: james_governor monkchips brevity everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 11:28 AM
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Our new local paper, BostonNow, is taking blogs very seriously. See this post for the explanation. The paper is also tagalicious and comment-wild. Could be the start of something good for the city... [Tags: bostonnow media citizen_journalism blogs everything_is_miscellaneous hyperlocal ]
Posted by self at 09:41 AM
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Wired has just posted the first in the Everything Is Miscellaneous series of podcast interviews I've done on the topics in my book (which, by the way, was officially published today). The series is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center. (A transcript is also posted.)
The first is with Cory Doctorow, who talks about his Metacrap article about the problems with explicit metadata. I think they'll be posting one a week at the Wired business blog.
Coming up in the: Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost, Craig Newmark of CraigsList, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Kayak's Paul English, the BBC's Richard Sambrook, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the DailyKos. [Tags: podcasts cory_doctorow everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired metadata metacrap]
Posted by self at 09:17 PM
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SaveNetRadio.org is asking us in the US to call our representatives to urge them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060), introduced by Jay Inslee (D-WA). Here's what the email I received from Live360 says:
The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) recently denied webcasters' requests for a rehearing on its ruling of unfairly high new royalty rates — a stunning 300 to 1200 percent increase — for Internet radio for period 2006-2010.
Internet radio is singled out from all other radio, burdened with fees not paid by AM or FM stations, and at rates at least 3-4 times paid by satellite and cable radio. The ruling even included absurd minimum of $500 per station per year to penalize the smallest webcasters with the highest rates.
Should this ruling stand, many of your favorite stations will be silenced. You will find Live365's 260 genres reduced to the same meager, homogenized list carried on AM/FM radio, because the unfair rates would drive webcasters in niche genres with unique content unavailable elsewhere out of business.
You can, however, help protect your favorite tunes of your favorite DJs from being silenced.
The Internet Radio Equality Act (HR 2060) has been introduced in Congress by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA). A simple phone call to your Representative to ask for their support on this Bill will go a long way toward ensuring your right to diversity and choice in radio. Better yet, please also write and fax to show how serious you are. They need to know how much your music means to you. You can find your Rep's number here. [Tags: radio digital_rights politics ]
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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Radio Open Source has posted the mp3 of yesterday's show about everything being miscellaneous, with me, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding. Chris being Chris, he drives it more towards than the broad and philosophical than, well, anyone else on radio. And best of all, you can hear me get the name of the author of Moby-Dick wrong! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous radio_open_source christopher_lydon karen_schneider tim_spalding media taxonomy folksonomy]
Posted by self at 11:55 AM
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1. Tonight at 6pm at the Berkman Center, I'm leading an open discussion about civility, codes of conduct, and the price of making rules explicit. We serve pizza. You're invited! [map]
2. Tomorrow night at 7pm I'm the guest on Chris Lydon's Radio Open Source, talking about Everything Is Miscellaneous. It'll also be available as a podcast, of course, because that's what the estimable Radio Open Source does. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous cyberbullying codes_of_conduct radio_open_source berkman]
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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Rob Faris and John Palfrey are giving a talk on "The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering," a talk about the Open Net Initiative . The ONI is a joint project by Oxford, Cambridge, U of Toronto and Berkman. About 50 people have worked on gathering this data.The new study (coming out as a book called Access Denied) reports on forty countries that block access one way or another. Countries can't do this on their own, he says.
Over the past five years, the states doing filtering have gone for a few to dozens. East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East are the main places that filter.
How can the ONI involve more people, John asks. How can the ONI make the data more relevant? Already you can suggest sites to test and you can submit a URL and see where it's blocked.
Rob talks about a "taxonomy of Internet content restriction strategies." There are many ways to limit information on line. A state can take down illegal sites, remove search results, filter content, arrest and intimidate, require registration and licensing and ID, hold ISPs responsible, and monitor. There's no filtering in Egypt, for example, but a blogger was just imprisoned. Bahrain took down access to Google Earth just as a politically uncomfortable mashup was circulating. China blocks Wikipedia. Gay and lesbian sites are blocked in many countries. The Gulf states comprehensively block gambling sites. Thailand blocks access to the book "The King Never Smiles." Anonymizers and The Onion Router are frequently blocked. (Rob mentions the great ONI page where you can see the search results at Google.com and Google.cn for the same term.)
To comprehensively block the Internet, countries rely on software, using automatic ways of identifying offensive material, which makes lots of mistakes. "Internet filtering is inherently flawed." You get over-blocking, underblocking and mis-categorization. Some countries are transparent about the blocking, but many do not.
"Once you put in the infrastructure for social filtering," says Rob, you also seem to institute political blocking.
Q: [yochai benkler] This is important work. But the most important part of it is the detail your work covers. "The level of detail that goes into the country studies suggests" a different way of presenting it. E.g., transparency. How do you do as someone who respects democracy deal with the transparent process in Saudi Arabia? The Saudis say exactly what they're doing. They say they're protecting a cultural discourse. They let people add to it or subtract to the list of blocked sites. Mapping these differences among countries would be very helpful. Q:[ethanz] People in filtered countries are often desperate just to get confirmation that they're being blocked. It's been tough to get rapid response out of ONI. Activists are writing their own tools, often not as good as ONI's tools. And it'd be great if you had a handbook that others could use who are not as technical as you.
Q: There's a lot of data to be gathered about how countries are changing their laws to achieve the aims of filtering. Q: What do you do to help bloggers? Q: ONI is done by a localized group. How do we get the average user to take part in checking on filtering, etc.? Q: As you've said, American high tech companies provide filtering technology. Corporate responsibility has been discussed forever... Q: How can you release the information listing the censored applications? Q: How has filtering changed since you started monitoring it in 2002? Q: [catherine bracy] How do you know what countries want to join the filtering club? Q: [ethan] Should you be helping people filter better? Thailand blocks all of YouTube to get rid of one offensive video. You could help them out... A: [rob] That is remarkably close to The Google Question.
[Conclusion: Not only can the Internet be blocked, it's way easier than we'd thought. There are so many ways to do it. And it can be done at multiple levels, from tech to legislation. Hence, is there no single way to unblock it?]
Seth Finkelstein figured out why BoingBoing got banned from Boston's free wifi. Omigod. Censorship shouldn't be this stupid. Unfortunately, it just about always is.
[Tags: oni censorship digital_rights berkman]
Posted by self at 01:49 PM
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On the second day of NPR's annual meeting, Andy Carvin reports on a discussion about how NPR can enhance our democracy. [Tags: npr democracy politics andy_carvin media ]
Posted by self at 12:48 PM
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Dave Winer writes, "I want a checkbox that tells MSNBC that I don't want any more Virginia Tech stories." Exactly. (He's making a point about checkboxes, not about Virginia Tech.)
In fact, for the past few weeks, as a part of my "stump" speech, I' ve been showing a screen capture of USA Today's redesigned site. It includes a button you can click on to give a Digg-like thumbs up to an article. Great, except, um, where's the thumb down? We want to be able to say to the Britney or Justin or We-Should-Teach-Our-Students-Judo article "No no no no no no no no." We want to tune our news. But we also want our revenge. [Tags: news media digg dave_winer everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 08:56 AM
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Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, posts that free technology is usually free as in kittens: You may get it for free, but the maintenance costs are perpetual. Perfect analogy. And it's just part of a really useful article in the ALA site about managing library IT. "Most of us are buckling under the weight of what we have to support," Karen writes.
(Thanks to Deborah Eliz. Finn for the link.) [Tags: karen_schneider technology libraries]
Posted by self at 08:55 AM
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Now that she's finished the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling is probably wondering what to write next. With all modesty, I have an idea: She should answer her email.
I'm not kidding. Rowling's been good about fan fiction, apparently, happy that her fans are so enthusiastic. That's a welcome break from the brand mentality authors are encouraged to adopt by the life+70 copyright term. So, with those billion dollars in royalties in her back pocket (personally, I'd have it changed into one $500M bill and five $100,000,000's) she could spend a few years on the Web, engaging with young readers and writers in every forum and format that she's comfortable with.
That'd be some real magic. [Tags: jk_rowling harry_potter copyright books]
Posted by self at 11:12 AM
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This Wednesday at 6pm at the Berkman Center, I'm leading a discussion about civility, codes of conduct, and the price of the explicit. I will make some conversation-opening remarks at the beginning, and then we will discuss the topic(s), presumably civilly...although the Law of Irony dictates that it'll turn into fistacuffs.
Pizza will be served. All are welcome. [map] [Tags: civility cyberbullying ethics berkman]
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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Ethanz has a terrific, honest, and unresolved post about living locally and globally.
I've spent summers near where Ethanz lives all of my life, and I've even been to Ethan's house. So I understand the raw pull of the geography itself.
He also has a list of "great talks to watch." I look forward to watching... [Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]
John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he's interested in how virtual worlds "allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities."
The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is "highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged." Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. "It's more a reflex." He points to our "mirror neurons," that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but "our identities are socially embedded." And we all have multiple selves.
How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. "But the Web was born without an identity layer." We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. "How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc." John refers to biological signalling theory — there's a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That's essential to any kind of trust network, says John.
In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They'll want to have a persistent identity. They'll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They'll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they'll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.
Over the past two years, John's been working on a project called "Higgins," an open source interoperable identity system. (It's called "Higgins" because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)
We are getting "new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine." This is a kind of "social physics": there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for "evolutionary stable strategies."
There's an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China's interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]
Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems? Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust? Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus. Q: Do you see a role for government? Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer? Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it's insecure to have a single number encode so much... Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel. Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they'll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not? Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective. [Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an "identity layer." And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]
[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 09:49 AM
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Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager, has joined the Edwards' campaign.
I've been doing some volunteer work for that campaign. Having Trippi on board makes me very happy. If you want to know why, read Trippi's book, The Revolution Will Not be Televised. Joe understands the transformative power of the Net, he understands that it's about we the people connecting and taking democracy into our own hands, and he is an inspiring — and yes, sometimes maddening — leader.Trippi and the team he assembled invented a lot of what's most important in the Internetting of politics. He's got a ton of feet-on-the-ground experience in politics, but I'm betting he's not anywhere near done innovating. Trippi's an idealist who kicks butt. And that's just what the Edwards campaign needs now, imo.
(And while you're ordering books, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Edwards' Saving Graces, which is heartbreakingly insightful and true about many things, including the Internet.)
I think this is a very good day for the Edwards' campaign. And that means it's a day in which our democracy has gotten a little more lively. [Tags: john_edwards joe_trippi politics]
Posted by self at 03:14 PM
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Twitter limits you to 140 characters per posting. You see the postings of people in your social network. The limit encourages frequent postings of small significance.
Twitter thus sounds dumb.
In fact, Twitter is about the intimacy of details. Through it I see small events in the lives of friends about whom I otherwise might only learn the Big Events when we "catch up" after long intervals. [Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 08:35 PM
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I'm at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association meeting in New Orleans where I sat a lunch table with Scott Anderson, CEO of Union Diamond, the second largest seller of diamonds over the Internet. His company's phone policy is that if a telephone rings for twenty seconds, that's ten seconds too long. Everyone in the company is charged with answering calls and seeing them through. I asked him how he'll manage this as the company gets bigger. He said he's like to continue the policy but perhaps have a set of numbers that would direct calls to the right group within the company.
BTW, Scott says that they support the Kimberly process, and only buy from suppliers who certify that they are not selling conflict diamonds.
Nice guy, good policies...I'm ready to buy! I wonder what of mine would look good studded with diamonds...
Here's a random sampling of topics (Day 1 Day 2) at the WOMMA meeting:
JetBlue: Inside the Cockpit of their CrewBlue Brand Ambassador Network
General Mills: Using Community Outreach to Build Buzz
TheFind.com: Tapping into the Web's Power Influencers — Women
Yahoo!: Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest with Yahoo! Video and Jumpcut
Flying Dog Brewery: Leveraging Your Brand's Intrinsic Values
CASA: Honing Refer-A-Friend Word of Mouth Tactics in a Not-for-Profit Setting
Cold Stone Creamery: Using PR as an Integrated Marketing Tool
O, The Oprah Magazine: Driving Brand Advocacy with Special Events
Here's the WOMMA code of ethics. They take it seriously. I talked with the group this morning about the importance of respecting not just the "consumer" (as their first principle states), but respecting the conversation as well. What would marketing look like if it took the ongoing customer conversations as paramount?
[Tags: womma marketing union_diamond ethics business ]
Posted by self at 03:24 PM
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The French have developed a "code of conduct" for bloggers—a project begun in Feb. 2006 but with longer roots—that has been adopted by 200 blogs and two major political parties. It mixes netiquette (don't use all caps), best practices ("When replying to a comment, it can be useful to quote from the original text in order to be understood") and ethical rules ("Comments of a racist, anti-Semitic, pornographic, revisionist or sexist nature will not be accepted...").
From my point of view, it is one possible set of guidelines. We should have lots and lots of them so that — when appropriate — bloggers can make explicit the norms already implicit on their sites.
This evening at 9pm in France, there's going to be a Second Life discussion about the code with the person responsible for the Net campaign of Ségolène Royal. Details here. (I'll be on a plane, so I'll have to miss it, which is just as well given my ludicrously bad French.)
(I blogged about blogging codes here and about my own guidelines in the comments to this post.)
[Tags: blogosphere blogs codes morals cyberbullying ]
Posted by self at 10:14 AM
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I'm still sleep-dprived, but I've had a day to think about what I posted yesterday about truth being a property of networks.
It would have been clearer for me to say understanding is a property of networks. Then I wouldn't have left the impression that I think facts are a matter of majority opinion. Facts are facts. That's pretty much their essence. Understanding, however, is plural, at least in many domains — less so in the sciences, more so in the humanities.
On the other hand, our age should be embarrassed that we've reduced truth to mere facts.
[Tags: truth philosphy everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:41 AM
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Harvard Law has approved a course I'll be co-teaching with the Berkman Center's John Palfrey during Spring 2008. Holy crap.
It's called The Web Difference? Digital Media, Entertainment, and the Law. Here's the description:
This course will examine the claim of Internet exceptionalism and the implications of this claim in the context of the law and society. Is the Web something substantially new that is changing the fundamentals of who we are and how we're together? Or is it just the next in the communication media humans have invented? What are the problems to which these changes give rise? Which of these problems are ones that we'd like to address through reforms in the law, technology environment, markets, social norms, or other yet-to-be-discovered modes of influence? This course will cover the legal and policy issues to which changes in the news media and entertainment businesses, wrought by the web, give rise. Key doctrinal areas of inquiry include intellectual property, the First Amendment, defamation, and privacy. Students should be prepared to experiment with new technologies, including a course weblog, and to perform some coursework collaboratively. Course requirements include gro up coursework and a final paper, and no examination. Oy. Not only haven't I taught since 1986, the topics the course plans on covering are way beyond my reach. So, thank heaven for John Palfrey. I am totally thrilled to work with him. (I won't go on to list JP's virtues both because he's modest and because he's my boss at the Berkman Center. But you can just ask anyone.)
By the way, does anyone know what "gro up coursework" is? [Tags: harvard berkman exceptionalism john_palfrey teaching]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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We've all got a real problem. On some sites comments are so nasty that they are driving people off the Web. Even if the comments on your own site are always respectful and sweet-natured, the verbal violence on other sites is your problem. Our problem. It's not as bad as some in the media portray it, but when Kathy Sierra gets over a thousand messages, mainly from women, saying they've been stalked or bullied, it's an issue we can't ignore.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. A Blogger Code of Conduct goes down the wrong path. Codes only can play a role if they're plural. Very plural.
Lisa Stone puts it all well when she explains why a "one-stop-shopping" code can't work for all:
Images that are appropriate for a blog devoted to the war in Iraq would never work on a parenting site, for example. They shouldn't have to play by the same rules. And we all know how I feel about the First Amendment. :) So, here's a longer way around to the same point. (More of Lisa here.)
The first and least debatable Blogger Code of Conduct is the body of law that sets limits on what we can say in public. Death threats, libel, and giving away state secrets are all out. But when we try to get more specific than "No death threats! No nuclear secrets!" what do we really all agree about? A Code of Swimming Pool Conduct that says "Swim safely!" is of little use. The only code worth posting poolside says things like "No diving. No swimming without a buddy. " But what's the equivalent for blogging, that is, for talking together in public? A single code of conduct would need to drive down into specifics about which bloggers disagree.
Further, no single code could cover all the different ways we want to talk. Conversation shapes itself to its topic, venue, goal and personal relationships. For example, if I'm arguing with a like-minded friend about politics, my social group's norm allows me to be more interruptive and use more curse words than if I'm talking with an acquaintance from the other side of the fence. Our norms tell us exactly how much bad language we can use with our family, at work, at the sports stadium, and when meeting our future in-laws for the first time. We know how loud we can talk whether it's sermon time at the synagogue or South of the Border Night at the bar. There is no possibility of coming up with a single code of conduct because there are too many circumstances in which we conduct ourselves. We are left, ultimately, with our judgment.
Behind the drive for a single code of conduct is often the idea that there is one particular type of conversation at the pinnacle of all conversations: The rational discourse in which two people who disagree work toward the truth. Civility is important there. I'm thrilled to be at an institution — the Berkman Center — where those sorts of conversations happen every day. But those are not the only sorts of conversations we should, could, would, will or do have. Some conversations should be raucous. Some should get people red in the face. Some should have us leaving muttering under our breath. Polite, respectful civil conversations are not the only ones worth having because conversation is about much more than the mutual discovery of truth. Conversation is how we're social, and thus is as rich, ambiguous, implicit, and multipurpose as we ourselves are. Yes, as Tim O'Reilly says, "Free speech is enhanced by civility." Definitely. We need more civility. But free speech is also enhanced by healthy doses of incivility. In our drive to limit harmful speech, we need to be careful to preserve risky speech.
Of course, that's assuming a particular model of civility. If, instead, by "civil" one means only that the conversation should be respectful, then I agree that many more conversations need to be civil. But: (a) Respect is not always the highest value of a conversation. (b) What constitutes disrespectful or injurious speech depends upon the target, the speaker and the context (again, ruling out posts that cross the boundaries of the law and our shared sense of decency). (c) A code of conduct that says that, for example, we should be "respectful" will founder on the details of implementation since there are so many norms about what constitutes respectful discourse — sitting in a quiet room with our hands on the table and our heads cocked attentively being only one scenario. Without the implementation details, the code is as useful as the "Swim safely" poster at the pool.
But then we come back to the problem: People violated - threatened, bullied and stalked - by thugs wielding keyboards. When those comments cross the legal boundaries, there may be legal recourse, although usually that's not practical. It is a problem with no easy or short-term solution. When the comments are posted on the victim's own site, there are tools for dealing with them, although none works perfectly. A blogger can moderate the comments, perhaps add a reputation system, or even forbid anonymity. A code of conduct is one more tool in the box. Such a code makes explicit the rules already implicitly governing a comment space. As we come across blogs more and more randomly, it often doesn't hurt to be told that a site won't tolerate bad language or wants commenters to stay on topic, if those are the local norms. Bloggers can of course state that already — there's an infinite supply of sentences — and many do, but coming up with standard ways of expressing the rules would encourage their expression.(That's what I was suggesting 1.5 wks ago, and it's what I like in Tim's idea.) Transparency generally is good.Posting rules of the pool that make explicit the existing implicit norms can be a worthwhile tool...although pasting a long list of precise rules can indeed inhibit free swim.
As for encouraging civility: Absolutely. I like civility. Truly. I encourage it on this blog's comment pages, and I even try to model it on occasion. But I also like a good fart and a high five now and then.
[Tags: blogs civility kathy_sierra bullying cyberbullying convesation free_speech lisa_stone tim_oreilly everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]
Heather Havenstein of ComputerWorld interviews Lisa Stone on this very topic...
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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Here's the announcement of an evening of thoughtful thought thoughtfully presented by at The New School on April 13:
danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths' access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?
Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a "home," friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized "factory without walls" and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.
Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize. Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. I wish I could be there. [Tags: danah_boyd trebor_scholz ethan_zuckerman sociology economics media ]
Posted by self at 08:14 PM
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Ethanz's got a great post about how the Tunisians beat the Obamanaics to the punch, remixing the Apple 1984 commercial for their own political ends three years ago. You can see the Tunisian version here, but you don't want to miss Ethan's contextualizing of it. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman remix copyright obama tunisia ]
Posted by self at 08:00 PM
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For something I'm writing (for free), I want to make the case for the benefits of having a "wifi blanket," by which I mean, loosely, making wireless Internet connectivity so common that we can rely on it being available just about anywhere we are in this country. Depending on how it's implemented, that might work out to coverage as broad as the reach of TV or cell phones, or, say, cheap or free connectivity available to 90% of the population. (I'm making up this number.) And it doesn't have to be wifi. If it's WiMAX or open spectrum or something else, I don't care, so long as it's cheap or free, truly open, crosses economic strata, and is so common that we take it for granted.
For now ignore the costs and the practicalities. If such a thing were accomplished, how might it affect us? What opportunities would it open? What sort of economic stimulus might it provide, especially if we assume that a wireless blanket would stimulate the growth of wifi phones (or combo phones), which be more general purpose Internet devices. What might the blanket do for education? Politics? News and entertainment? Marketing? National security? Do you have any statistics you've found or made up? Pointers to actual research? Wild-ass speculation? Science fiction scenarios? Paranoid plots? Bring 'em on! [Tags: wifi net_neutrality telephony ]
Posted by self at 11:14 AM
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I'd like to respond to the CNN piece about cyberbullying, but I have the flu and am unable to think longer than a sentence in advance. You can see the piece here. And here is my worry-wart post about my participation in it. Briefly my take is: It didn't do the flat-out, ominous chords scare-mongering, but it nevertheless was perilously close to self-parody. [Tags: cnn media kathy_sierra chris_locke rageboy cyberbullying blogs ]
By the way, I should note that CNN got my attribution wrong. They say I'm a professor at Harvard. In fact, I'm a Fellow at Harvard. To be precise, I'm a Research Fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. (The ampersand is an official part of the name.) And I was very clear about this attribution when CNN asked. There are major differences between professors and fellows, affecting everything from teaching to pay-scales to voting to having to wear a silly cap and picking up dry-cleaning for professors. (I've written about being a fellow here.)
Posted by self at 07:45 AM
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I very much like Tim O'Reilly's post about a bloggers code of conduct.
It's certainly possible to quibble with the specifics of Tim's post, although personally I think he's right on the mark. But more important, his post is among many legitimizing taking responsibility for the comments we allow on our blogs (Tim's point #1). It's a call not for a single code of conduct to govern all sites, but for codes of conduct.
We've always been responsible for comments: There's always been a line we wouldn't allow commenters to cross, or if there's been no line, we've been responsible for that as well. But we need to be OK with setting out explicit guidelines. Conversations always work within norms, although they rarely need to be explicitly expressed: You know not to do a lot of insult humor at a board meeting and you know not to argue with the mourners at a funeral no matter how overstated the eulogy. Likewise, if you've been reading a blog for a while, you probably have a sense of what's ok and what isn't. But people leave comments on blogs they've read once. They come in with their own sense of what's allowed. Fine. Good. But we should make explicit to them what our norms are.
Tim joins many in pointing to the BlogHer Community Guidelines. Count me in. I'm adding them to my comment form this morning. I'll probably work on some minor personalizations over the next few days. (Passover approaches, and I'm under the weather, so it may take me a little longer.)
PS: There's been a discussion along the same lines over at StopCyberBullying [Tags: cyberbullying blogging tim_oreilly blogher]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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CNN just interviewed me for a 3 minute segment they're doing on cyberbullying. Why me? Because they called the Berkman Center and I was around. They're likely to take a few seconds from the 15 minute interview, and use it as something like color commentary. It'll air on Monday morning.
I told the producer in the pre-interview yesterday that I wouldn't comment on the awful specifics of the bullying of Kathy Sierra— the case that's prompted them to do a "Dark Side of the Net" piece — because I know people involved in it. Also, (I told the producer) I'm not a good resource for telling the story of what happened because I didn't know what was going on until Kathy posted about it. But the producer apparently liked what I said about the lack of norms of behavior on the Web. So, they asked me to do the interview anyway. And, true to their word, they didn't ask me directly about Kathy, although several times in context I said how badly she was treated.
I agreed to the interview because I wanted to try to counter the fear-mongering story I'm pretty sure CNN wants to produce about the Web. So, I tried to simultaneously acknowledge the seriousness of the bullying that happens (including the reprehensible battering of Kathy, of course), and dispute the idea that the Net is all bullying all the time. But, in trying to steer them from their Fear Mongering story, I ran the risk of minimizing the awfulness of being bullied, so I tried to keep interjecting how serioius and unacceptable it is. It's all up to how they edit it. And also how well I put it, of course.
They asked me about anonymity (me: we shouldn't remove it just because it's abused by some cowards), the need for regulation (me: real world laws apply, and the Web is constantly evolving ways to manage bullying and obnoxiousness...although none works perfectly), and whether this is a gender issue (me: that accords with expectations and intuition, but we need actual data). I also talked about the fact that we don't yet have well-developed norms guiding behavior on the Web, and the Web brings people together from different backgrounds, although death threats and bullying are never ok; I'm afraid I'll come off as sounding like I believe that bullying is really just a difference of opinion about acceptable levels of aggression. Ack.
Afterwards I realized that I should have made clear that I was talking about adults bullying adults. I have no idea what the level of bullying is among children online. Also, in talking about the ability to steer clear of sites that are nastier than you're comfortable with, I should have appended something about it being different when the bullies are coming to your site. Damn.
The producer interviewed me over a speaker phone, but they had me face forward and talk to an intern seated in front of me, to give the illusion that the producer was in the room with us. After the interview was over but the camera was still rolling (foolish me), I turned sideways to face the speaker phone so they couldn't use the footage, because I wanted to have a meta-discussion with the producer. (The producer promised me that he wouldn't use it, and he seems to be a straightforward and honest guy.) I told him that I thought the CNN story was seizing on one case — a nasty, disturbing case without doubt — and using it to generalize without further evidence or research, because the media likes conflict and likes to raise fears about the Net. A serious piece would do some serious research about just how prevalent bullying is: It might be quite widespread, it might be unevenly distributed, it might indeed be usually gender-based. All that would be truly interesting and important to know. But I don't think that's the story they're doing. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so.
I left feeling crappy, afraid that as I tried to maintain two positions — bullying when it happens is shameful and wrong, but it'd be wrong to characterize the Web as dominated by bullying — the editors will use the juiciest quote from just one of those two points. It's no fun to lose control of your words, although I knew that going in. [Tags: bullying media cnn ]
Posted by self at 06:50 PM
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I'm at [well, I was yesterday when I wrote this] a session at Harvard's Lamoint Library (one of the 90+ libraries here) about Web 2.0 and social tagging. I just gave a 20 minute opener on why tagging matters.
Michael Hemment, the host, begins by showing tag clouds from 50 students who were asked to tag some particular resources. The group quickly guesses that the first tag cloud refers to the libraries, the next is Google, and the next is Jon Stewart. Very amusing,
Michael talks about why slocial tagging matters to libraries. He mentions some initiatives, including PennTags , Stanford IC, and the Steve Museum. Harvard has the CRT (Collaborative Research Tool) and EdTags initiatives. He also mentions iCommons (exploring iSites metadata and tagging) and ARTStor .
He takes a closer look at LibraryThing.com, showing how easy it is to enter titles, organize them, tag them, and get suggestions.
PennTags was created by the U Penn library to enable university members to tag books. (The site is open to anyone, but only U Penn members can add tags.) It begins with a tag cloud of tags used at least 58 times, Users can also create folders to organize bookmarks into projects. [I blogged about it here.]
The Stanford Library Information Center combines tags, blogs and wikis. It includes tagging by librarians who organize resources in a somewhat more orderly way.
Harvard could, Michael says, enable tagging of the libraries' resources, and the Lib-X tool (a browser add-in that gives you access to Harvard's onloine resources) could be used to tag sites, adding to what Harvard knows.
Carla Lillvik, Research and Distance Services Librarian at the Gutman Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looks at "social tagging and bibliographic management." She says you want not only to find resources and organize them, but also to cite them.
She uses as her example the site Five Weeks to a Social Library. She adds it to her page at Connotea and tags it. She could also post it to EdTags.org. But what about resources she finds in research databases, e.g. EBSCO Host? She could add it to Connotea, even though the URL doesn't look persistent. But Connotea doesn't pick up any of the bibliographic info from the database. (Connotea has agreements with a long list of such systems, including BioMed Central, PLoS, Nature.com, and arXiv.org, but not with all of them.) She can instead make a folder in EBSCO, which does indeed pick up all the info. [Sounds like we need a standard API for university e-research systems.] Harvard's RefWorks has the advantage, Carla says, of enabling batch tagging [LibraryThing does too] and enables output in a variety of bibliographic styles [yay!] RefWorks folders can be shared, even with people who don't have an account; they can be shared as an RSS feed, too. (RefWorks works with Google Scholar — you can set a preference so that results can be imported into RefWorks.)
Michael Hemment presents Prof. Dan Smail's Collaborative Research Tool (CRT), a social tagging tool that works within Harvard's e-environment. In Smail's course on Medieval Europe (History 1122) , students are put onto teams (e.g., "France, Germany and italy") and are assigned sources. They create virtual note cards that are tagged, annotated and entered nto a database. Class discussions, lectures, and final papers are based on these cards.
The cards tend to include the passage, comment, related links, and tags. It's easy to navigate by tag.
Pedagogical implications, according to Michael: Students have to reflect on their tagging schemes. [meta learning] They cards "form the basis of complex intertextual discourse on a broad range of medieval topics." E.g., you could see how Ulysses appears through multiple literatures. Also, tagging develops a personal relationship to the source material.
[Excellent. But we still need a way to write a document based on cards, so that adding info from the card automatically creates the right footnote and bibliographic entry in the document, and notes where the card has been used. I blogged about this here.]
Adam Seldow, a grad student at the Harvard School of Education, works on EDTags.org. It's a social network to connect people who share interests in education. It's open to anyone. You can tag a site, vote on bookmarks, email them, blog them, or find related blog postings. You can upload your papers, photos, presentations, etc.
Q: How does tagging fit with scholarly resource? Is there a way to cite where and how a resource is tagged? Q: How about privacy? Q: What types of resources does EdTags tag? Q: (me) What do we do about the fragmentation of the tagging space? I can tag in del.icio.us, Connotea, EdTags... Q: What are the patterns of use at EdTags? Q: Did you build it from scratch? Q: HW and SW behind it? How did you finance it? Q: How to encourage the use of social tagging at a library?
Posted by self at 09:15 AM
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Andy Carvin has had two good ideas. First, he's set up a site to talk about the cyberbullying issue.
Second, he suggests that Friday be "Stop CyberBullying Day." (Let me save you writing the first comment: Of course every day should be Stop CyberBullying Day.)
This is an important issue that stretches messily from free speech to etiquette to gender issues to assault. There are cases where bullying is too gentle a word and cases where it is the wrong word. But, unless we want to spend our time arguing about the word, it'll do.
FWIW, I'd be willing to post a "No bullying" sign on my sites, announcing that I will remove comments that I deem (yes, my judgment) to be out of line. It'd be good to have some semi-standardized language to use to express what the line is; not everyone will agree, so a pick list would be helpful. (Ack. I have to run to an event.) [Tags: cyberbullying ethics ]
Posted by self at 11:50 AM
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Chris RageBoy Locke — who If evil-ass spammers start translating Rilke's poetry into Viagra ads, then Google will have to come up with some social way of monitoring the reader-contributed translations. But this is another instance of the 1% rule: A tiny percentage of people can make the world better for all the rest. And it's pretty darn cool. [Tags: ragrboy translation google everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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Tumblr is a microblog. A nanoblog. A nonce-blog.
Cycle faster, Web crazes, faster damn it! [Tags: tumblr twitter everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 12:55 PM
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Mary Wong of the Franklin Pierce Law Center is giving a Berkman talk titled "Copyright & Access to Knowledge: Rights/Rhetoric, Openness/Opacity, Future/Fears." [As always, I'm typing too quickly, missing stuff, getting stuff wrong, paraphrasing wildly...If you want verisimilitude, the event itself is webcast and recorded in multiple ways.] She's going to talk about copyright policy and the a2k (access to knowledge) movement and how some important terms that, in their use in rhetoric, have been misunderstood.
She points to the simultaneous increase in openness and opacity. The "existing regimes" have put up roadblocks. "What is the future if we have rights battling rhetoric, openness fighting opacity?"
Copyright began as a tool of censorship used by the Crown, became a type of trade regulation, and then was established as a private property right, Mary says. The tropes we use to talk about it derive from that history. These tropes have been deconstructed by people like Foucault and Barthes. Mary says that she's not going to examine today deconstructionist issues such as whether the author is a myth.
She says she's not going to suggest stopping treating copyright as a private property right because she's trying to come up with workable solutions. Rather, what can we do about the expansion of copyright in order to increase access to knowledge? "Reconize the spectrum of alternative property rights?" E.g., the commons, the public domain. "Establish balance through 'user rights'"? E.g., elevate and reconfigure Fair Use, and treat it as a right. "Create flexible mechanisms within property?" E.g., Creative Commons.
On alternative property rights: We can all agree that a we need a robust public domain for democracy and for cultural, social and economic development. [No one here exclaims in shocked outrage :)] But how do you turn that into a concrete policy proposal? We don't even have good definitions of public domain and the commons in a way that would let them serve as alternatives to copyright. Usually the public domain is defined more in terms of what it is not than what it is. Are the commons something unowned or owned by a group of people? Is it owned by society in generally? All of these uses are used in the law, and sometimes they're used interchangeably with "the public domain." We don't have a consensus on a definition for either of these terms, but both have gained currency in the copyright debate, she says. "While they're useful hooks and very important direction indicators, they're not necessarily at this stage...the solution." "How can the current discourse be refocused?" (Mary is encouraged by the fact that NGOs and civil society groups are participating in this debate, worldwide, rather than confining it merely to lawyers.)
Our traditional conception of the author is Romantic and has been affecting copyright law for a couple of hundred years. But this is "inadequate to deal with collaborative, communal and social forms of creativity." The term "author" shows up all over the Berne convention. But it's a one-size-fits-all notion that doesn't work in many of the newer forms of creativity that involve "sharing, collaboration and openness." "Can we at least try to reconfigure or manipulate the notion of the author to better serve the understanding of what it means to create something?"
She suggests considering this in terms of human rights rather than property rights. She points to Art. 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. UDHR says that if you create something, you have rights over it. But in a case in the UK, the court decided that that property right needs to be balanced with the rights of users and readers. Canada has also talked about "users' rights."
She is not saying that Q: (Charlie Nesson ): I'm completely taken by your initial approach. Asking what we can do rather than just talk about it, and the idea of user rights resonate. The user I'm most interested in at the moment is the university. What would be thread that we can pull to effect change? Right now, the burden of proof of Fair Use is on the user, which is tremendously constraining. How about if we (universities) got behind a law putting the burden of proof on the copyright holder? It doesn't require changing the basis of copyright law. It could be a focal point... Q: If we focus on the users, how do we do it? Do we list things you can't do, or the things you can? Q: (J Palfrey ) I love the idea of the university as the user and focal point. But suppose we think of the user as a re-user. Could rethinking who the author is help? Creating isn't just standing on the shoulders of giants but standing on the shoulders of everyone. [Nice.] Q: (me) How would this play out when it comes to making the world's books available on line? Q: (Doc Searls) Terms like "user" implies subordinate status. We're still using real estate metaphors, e.g., sites. This stipulates the Web as a series of places, and places are owned. So we have to change our metaphors. Q: (ethanz): I like reframing it, but I worry about doing it on human rights, which is one of the shakiest of foundations. The Declaration of Human Rights is a huge intellectual battlegrounds, with a number of Islamic nations saying it's incompatible with their views, conservatives in the US objecting, etc. You're building it on one of the most disputed and least binding of "law." Q: (ethanz): You're being aspirational, and the UDHR is the paradigm of aspirational thinking. A different approach is to ask what we're actually doing as users, and then figure out the legislation we need. E.g., in universities we photocopy chunks of text ("No we don't!" yell several of the law professors, who are also chuckling) and hand them out to students. Q: how do you get people to see rights as community based? [Tags: copyright copyleft digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 02:35 PM
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Usually the first economic argument presented for the importance of the Long Tail is that the area underneath the tail is far greater than the area underneath the Short Head. And since that area represents people with whom the point on the curve communicates, the Long Tail represents a far greater economic opportunity. But, that argument thinks of the points as mini-broadcasters and markets as homogeneous aggregations of consumers. Such a simplistic vew misses the knotty nature of the Long Tail. The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too.
Britt Blaser puts this differently and quite nicely in his most recent post: The People Law trumps the Power Law. Here's how it begins:
There are five principles I'm playing with lately:
1. The size of your audience confers limited power 2. A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they're verbose 4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most He goes on from there...and ends it with a nice motto:
Where there's folk, there's fire.
Posted by self at 09:31 AM
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On March 21, at 6:30, I'm holding a Berkman "Web of Ideas" discussion of whether and how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. The discussion is open to all. (The Berkman Center is at 23 Everett in Cambridge: Map.)
It's not obvious that just because we're participating in our culture more, our democracy will also change. Certainly, politics and culture are not distinct realms, so our expectations in one should affect the other. But not necessarily. Take some prototypical objects of cultural participation. What would you choose? Wikipedia? Blogosphere? File sharing? Second Life? Delicious.com? AssignmentZero ? What is our participation in those and what does that participation teach us? How much of that is political? And do the lessons transfer? For example, Wikipedia teaches us — well, those of us who think Wikipedia is awesome — that credentialed authorities are not the only ones who can be trusted. But does that apply beyond building encyclopedias? Does it affect our view of, say, policy experts in the government? What are we learning and does it apply?
I don't have answers to these questions. I'm not coming in with an hypothesis. I'm hoping you'll come and remind us of what Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler have to say on the topic. And who else?
So, let's talk. [Tags: culture politics participatory_culture participatory_democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 10:31 PM
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My book Small Pieces Loosely Joined is now a part of Google Books. Because the publisher owns the copyright, you can only see a few pages of it, but I think it's very cool — you can search for a term and read the pages it's on, for example — and I wish more of it were on line. In fact, given that it has virtually stopped selling, I wish all of it were on line. That doesn't quite align with the publisher's interests, but someone's going to figure out a way to make this work. What a boon!
For example, for $100 a year, I'd subscribe to Google Books as a research tool, with some reasonable restrictions (no massive print outs? relatively few complete book read-throughs?) and let Google divvy up the royalties. Or you can come up with a better idea. Please! [Tags: google books libraries copyright publishing]
Posted by self at 04:38 PM
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I hereby make zero commitment to keep on twittering, but I've found it oddly enjoyable for the past 24 hours.
Yes, yes, I know how unlikely it is, and why should anyone care about the nano-activities of people you only know marginally if at all, and let's all sneer, etc. etc. etc. But, besides what may turn out to be the short-lived attraction of what Twitter was designed for (and for some it will be long-lived), it is a fascinating platform for lord-knows-what to develop.
Connection hates a vacuum. Or is it that connection constructs the distance it overcomes? Before we could Twitter, we didn't need to. Now that we can... [Tags: twitter ]
Posted by self at 08:13 PM
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Andy and Susanne Carvin are videoblogging what their learning as first-time parents: How to breastfeed in public, diaper bag essentials...
I can't wait to see what the videoblogs look like on their second time around...and especially the diff. The story in our family is about how my sister (who was and is a wonderful mom) carefully bathed her first born in the special little tubby, with the special little towel and wash cloth. With the second one, it was just a dip under the kitchen faucet and a pat down with paper towels. (Actually, I made up the part about the paper towels.) [Tags: babies parents videoblogs andy_carvin susanne_carvin]
Posted by self at 04:38 PM
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On Monday, I gave the lunchtime keynote at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting. About 400 people had assembled in the DC Ritz-Carlton to spend a few days discussing cable's future and how to achieve it. It was quite an educational experience for me. And not just because I got boo-ed.
In the morning, I watched a panel discussion by cable industry executives. (I live-blogged it here.) I went to a breakout session on how the cable companies are covering the upcoming presidential election. (Yes, 600 days away has become "upcoming.") I had a chance to talk with a few people outside of the sessions. But I came in as an outside voice, and I left surprised by what I learned...even though I should have known it going in.
My presentation was, at the request of the organizers, cluetrain-y. I talked about the rise of person-to-person communications, contrasting it with the assumptions of the broadcast era. ("Broadcast" to the cablers means "over the air," so I had to explain at the beginning, and remind them a few times throughout, that "broadcast" to me means "one-to-many.") I then talked about networked markets (have you heard that markets are conversations?) and mentioned Doc's other great line: "There's no market for messages." I spent the bulk of my time taking blogs as my example, going through about ten different common misunderstandings of them. I ended by saying that in the P2P era, we're taking back our culture, pointing out very quickly some ways in which we're making it ours, which has become a magic word for me. In the course of listing things that are ours, I had a slide that showed "Support Network Neutrality" sprayed onto a brick wall; in preparing, I thought that those 8 seconds would be all that I spent on the Net neutrality topic.
Well, it didn't quite go that way. Since I had heard the morning panel, I ended up reacting to it as I went through my prepared presentation. E.g., when I introduced the topic of person-to-person vs. broadcast, I pointed out that the "10 megs down, one meg up" mentioned by one of the panelists assumes that we're "consumers" rather than creators; we should have symmetric up and down. And for some reason I dragged Net neutrality into it early, and got hissed. But I'm not sure it wasn't good-natured hissing, if you know what I mean.
But I really annoyed them when I complained about the panel's whining about competition. I said that the cable market isn't competitive. People yelled from the audience. I said that where I live, the town has franchised only one cable provider, although I think we're letting in a second. But, people in the audience said, I could get the Net by satellite or DSL. A more gracious and honest person would have accepted that, and clarified: Cable competes with other forms of delivery, but generally doesn't compete with other cable companies within a region...although they compete for franchises. I instead just got sarcastic. Yeah, real mature. In fact, cable is more competitive than I'd thought, and these folks do wake up every day worrying about competitors, as one of the panelists had said. On the other hand, it's not like before the Supreme Court in the Brand X decision said that the carriers no longer have to rent out their lines to other ISPs. If Congress would roll back that decision, we'd see some real competition.
I also at one point poked at the panel for saying that they were up against big scary Google. "Google has two lobbyists!" I said, which I've since found out was once true but is no longer. They have maybe a dozen. (Whoops. Sorry.) Nevertheless, the Net neutrality folks are certainly out-lobbied by the carriers. But, as I found out later when talking with a friendly Time-Warner guy, the cable industry is used to thinking of itself as the upstart battling the entrenched telephone giants, so it was odd and unpleasant for them to hear me treat them as if they were an entrenched giant. I had no idea.
During the panel beforehand, and in a conversation with a different Time-Warner guy afterwards, they kept coming back to their concern that if Net neutrality passes, the cable companies won't be able to raise capital. Oddly, the TW guy also argued that TW has absolutely no intention of violating Net neutrality. So, I said, TW ought to announce that and take the wind out of the NN sails. But announcing that, he said, would discourage investors. But, I said, it's either part of their business plan or it's not. We did not come to closure on that point. And I'm personally not convinced that that's the real reason they oppose Net neutrality. It sounds to me like a supporting reason, as is the argument that since no one has violated NN yet, we don't need a law forbidding people from violating it, as well as the "Google is getting a free ride" line of reasoning. I think — and I'm indulging my hunches here — that the real reason they oppose NN is that they want to ensure their subscribers have a "good experience," where the criteria of a good experience are those that govern expectations for how television works. They're thinking that users most of all want to be able to watch programs in high def and on demand, and so those packets need to get preference. They are frustrated by Web fanatics who want to hold back this rational load-balancing. The cable companies are in the business of selling us video content, and they see their ability to satisfy their customers being hampered by fanatics holding on to an out-dated architectural principle.
There are, of course, answers to this argument, but I think the primary response should be: No commercial entity should get to decide which experience needs to be optimized. Maybe I want to watch high def video, but you want to play video games, and someone else wants to download the high-resolution scan of the Bayreaux Tapestries. It's not obvious that video should win. The decision should not be made by the people who have a vested, commercial interest in the outcome. IMO.
It was for me a fascinating glimpse. Plus, I got boo-ed twice.
Susan Crawford has two especially fine pieces on her blog at the moment. The first explains the Universal Service Fund scandal. This is money that those with phone access pay to subsidize access for those whom the market would not reach. But it's become a mess.
The second is a well-told vignette about a birthday concert she played for a friend. (She's an accomplished violist. And she's going to make a heck of an FCC chairperson.) [Tags: susan_crawford cable net_neutrality ctpaa telecommunications fcc ]
Posted by self at 11:02 PM
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John Mayer, the Exec Dir of the Center for computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk called "Subclassing the Commons." CALI is 25 yrs old, incorporated by Harvard and the U of Minnesota Law Schools. 204 US law schools and 23 international law schools are members. So are more than 100,000 law students. CALI makes lessons available on line. This year, there will probably be a million lessons run. [John Palfrey has blogged the session here.]
He points out that there are sites that aggregate material put into the commons via Creative Commons licenses. But there's not a lot there for law students. The commons by itself isn't granular enough for communities of users, he says. People post on their blogs, "I've posted a paper at SSRN and would appreciate any comments," or "I'm working on a project and was wondering if anyone else had," or "Where can I find...?" John says, "If we aggregated all answers to those question across all institutions, would that be a commons, and would it have amazing value?"
"We're best known for our lessons," he says. He shows a flow chart of a question. Law professors throw out a question, he says, knowing the ways the students will get it wrong. If one gets it right, the prof branches differently. It's a "pruned tree." CALI's authors write questions as a tree. There are about 600 lessons. Their model is to get 5 profs to write 5 lessons (25 mins each) over 8 months; the profs are paid.
He describes another project: Classcaster , a blog network using open source software. It's built on top of PBX software (!). "With classcaster, you can make a phone call, you can leave an hour message. Then it instantly podcasts it." But it was expensive paying for the phone call and the recording quality is crappy. Instead, they gave authors $1000 and a free digital recorder. There are now 60 faculty members doing podcasts that way. They're available for free as part of the commons. As a result, "students started to tell us that they have this crappy evidence teacher so instead they listen to this other evidence teacher's podcast." And faculty noticed in listening to themselves that they're skipping over some things, so it's helped them improve. Other faculty learned teaching techniques by listening to others. On the other hand, in some courses (e.g., family law) it can suppress class participation.
Lessons are tagged according to a "topic grid," based on how faculty describe their lessons, the "elevator pitch" of what a course is. CALI took a first cut at the taxonomy by looking at syllabi and then letting faculty refine it. They're now going back and tagging the podcasts.
Another project is Access to Justice. CALI designed an interface that asks one question at a time (audibly asks) to help people find the right legal forms. It uses avatars because otherwise you get hung up on providing avatars of every race and gender, in a wheelchair or not, etc. Instead, it provides a non-racial — "blank" — male or female avatar. [Looks pretty white to me.] It shows the avatar on a path to a hall of justice. There are people in eight states working on the navigators for all the forms, but they reuse one another's work because the forms are generally 90% the same in the states. One of the federal courts is interested in doing it and sharing it with the rest of the fed courts. (It's all XML data and is written in Flash.)
ScholarshipPulse is in alpha. On the left it shows a paper. On the right is a comment system. It distinguishes comments as peers, professors or students. They're experimenting with having the font size reflect one's standing in the system. "I know we're playing in ego space here." But, John says, why not let people comment on their own blogs? Press a button and it'll take a capture of the paper and your comment, and post it straight into your blog.
eLangdell.org (named after Langdell Hall at Harvard Law, or maybe after whoever Langdell Hall was named after, which I'm guessing is someone named Langdell) pools syllabi, cases, podcasts, etc. so you can dynamically create case books and other course materials. You can print out your own materials via lulu.com AALS, CLEA and Counseling Central do something similar, he says.
Q: Are you doing anything to help people who are not in law school? Q: What's your business model? Q: (Charlie Nesson) MIT's open courseware opens up syllabi. They've just started videoing classes — 21 of them. They've raised the question for us about whether there's an opportunity for Harvard Law to step into the video YouTube space, recognizing the Law School's mission as offering a legal education — not necessarily for credit — to the world. You've been at this for a long time Somehow there's a relationship between the profit and non-profit. Suppose a company came to you... There are hard problems doing this, he says. One is metadata. "People just drop stuff in." They're going to have to make the contributors do it. "Maybe we can hire students," but for now they have to make it easy. In addition to the taxonomy, they'll allow tags. Charlie points out that tagging might be the fastest way to get it done and usable. I mention freebase as a model for mixing a starter-set taxonomy, a mechanical Turk approach, and a wiki for metadata schema. John says that with a critical mass, it'll get done.
Q: (Gene Koo) Charlie, you have a paper-based text book. Would you switch? A: It's a Clayton Christensen innovator's dilemma. We'll pick off the low-hanging fruit. And, maybe retiring professors will donate their teaching materials into the commons as part of their "legacy." [Tags: cali berkman everything_is_miscellaneous law education teaching commons creative_commons]
Posted by self at 01:40 PM
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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: (Insight) It's up to the parents, but most parents don't use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??] [Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]
Posted by self at 11:17 AM
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The esteemed Henry Jenkins responds to an online discussion of whether Second Life has any political effect on first life.
Henry begins:
The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line. After all, we each really only have one life and there is really only one world
Henry concludes (but do no miss what's in between!):
Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation. We do this as individuals on the Web, trying on roles and characters as if they were clothing, seeing which ones fit and which ones pinch under the arms. And Henry gives good examples of ways in which SL experiences can affect the first life politics of individuals. E.g., maybe you visit the SL Dafur Village and have your eyes opened, or you're able to hang out with other gay people even though you live in a rural and repressed part of the world.
Henry's piece clears out objections to SL as merely "masturbatory," to cite the strongest criticism from the mailing list. This raises to prominence - and leaves us with - two basic questions, both of which are entirely familiar to workers in the field:
(1) The Internet overall enables people to get information they otherwise would not have found and to find others with shared interests. What do the specifics of SL enable that the other services of the Internet do not?
(2) Does (or will) SL affect the way we organize socially and politically, rather than "merely" affecting individual perception? If, for example, a particular SL domain works splendidly, will we be able to transfer the organizing principles to first life or will the virtual particulars of SL make that impossible? Suppose, for example, that the SL success depends on continuous anonymous bodily presence. That's not something we can readily do in the real world. Are there examples already of a SL experience having an organizational effect on first life? Does collaborating (or bullying) in SL make us more like to collaborate (or bully) in first life? Are SL kibbutniks more likely to be real world kibbutniks?
I don't know. But I'm glad Henry and the folks on the mailing list (among others) are working on it.
By the way, on March 21, at 6 or 6:30 (I don't remember which), I'm scheduled to hold a Berkman "Web of Ideas" discussion of how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. It's open to all. And I can tell you right now my answer to the question: I Don't Know. But I bet the names Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler turn up in the conversation. [Tags: henry_jenkins second_life participatory_culture democracy politics ]
Posted by self at 08:17 AM
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Dan Bricklin blogs about a talk given by Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Navy's Chief of Operations about pooling resources in a trans-national community of trust (The 1,000 Ship Navy). And Dan has a really interesting podcast interview with Vice Admiral John Morgan. Man, there's a lot going on! (Not to mention Dan notes Paul Carroll's joke about "pier-to-pier" communications.)
[Tags: dan_bricklin 1000_ship_navy social_software everything_is_miscellaneous mike_mullen john_morgan]
Posted by self at 02:31 PM
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Terry Heaton and Steve Safran discuss the news that MySpace is getting into the news biz. Fascinating. This could be a big way we put front pages together for one another (where front page = feed, aggregator, outcome of any recommendation engine, or a vague handwave in a particular direction).
Today for me basically consists of a few hours at home between planes, but I did have a chance to poke at the USA Today networked journalism foray. It's definitely getting there, although only having "thumbs up" buttons for articles, and no "thumbs down," I suspect will doom that feature to irrelevance. But, we'll see. And they can always add opposed thumbs if they want to. [Tags: media msn news journalism myspace everythin everything_is_miscellaneous terry_heaton]
Posted by self at 03:37 PM
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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. Q: (isenberg) The chat was wondering how much power you have. Q: (brough) What about cognitive radio opening up spectrum? 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? Q: (Elisha McDonald): Is the definition of Net Neutrality workable? How is it enforceable?
Posted by self at 01:31 PM
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USA Today, a newspaper I like more than do most of the people I respect, is going conversational. I haven't had a chance to poke around much — the f2c conference is all-consuming — but I like the way they're talking, anyway. Digg-like recommendations. Feeds from other news sources. Selected blog posts. Comments. I hope they get it right. (Features list.) [Tags: news msm blogs journa journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]
NPR's "Talk of the Nation" has added a blog: Blog of the Nation.
Posted by self at 10:00 AM
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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? 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? Q: Verizon has proposed selling its VT infrastructure to FairPoint, a tiny company. 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? 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. Q: How about if the municipality owns the backbone, with private financing. E.g., Burlington 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? [Micah Sifry, who is in the house, posts to the chat the Gov's financial profile...] [Tags: f2c vermont wifi broadband net_neutrality ]
Posted by self at 09:18 AM
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Ethan Zuckerman and his friend Daniel Beck kick off a new cultural phenomenon: The east coast alternative to Burning Man: Freezing Man. [Tags: burning_man ]
Posted by self at 09:17 PM
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The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that's entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.
It's a nicely done piece, although I'm not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —"Hey, listen to me!" — and I'm not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people's events.
I don't have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we're constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 12:04 PM
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techPresident continues to be informative, opinionated and entertaining. To take an example from the lighter side, its Daily Digest today points to PrezVid where Jeff Jarvis links to two videos of John Edwards. Watch this one first (it's funny). Then this one for Edwards' reaction to the first one. (Disclosure: I've done a tiny bit of volunteer advising to the Edwards' Internet folks. Nothing worth disclosing, except it would feel funny not to, so I am.) [Tags: youtube politics media john_edwards jeff_jarvis video]
Posted by self at 11:47 AM
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From the BostonNow blog:
BostonNOW is a new free daily newspaper launching this year that will incorporate both traditional and citizen journalism. Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists. We will promote your work prominently both in the paper and on the website, not in a "local blogs" or "reader photos" ghetto.
Every day, BostonNOW will direct readers to the Web, where they will find real depth and discussion. BostonNOW will become the place to learn what folks around here really think about politics, entertainment, sports, and their fellow humans. This dialogue will create a newspaper of the people, by the people, for the people.
BostonNOW will truly be your newspaper. Sounds good on paper, so to speak. In fact, it sounds great. They're holding a get-to-know-the-bloggers party this Saturday, March 10:
Saturday, March 10, 2007 RSVP here. (Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link.) [Tags: boston media msn journalism blogosphere blogs ]
Posted by self at 11:30 AM
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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
Berkman lunch: James Vasile on the limitations of the GPL
A: I often tell them they don't need a trademark law; they need a trademark policy delineating what is ok and what is not. The GPL has habituated to thinking that licenses should tell them what's right and wrong, as if a license were a good way to communicate with developers.
A: Yes, but we shouldn't move forward by working on the license. E.g., we need a discussion about trademark, but it shouldn't happen within the framework of the discussion of the GPL.
A: You could let people explicitly opt in rather than relying on the implicit acceptance of the terms of service. But trying to write that into a generally-applicable GPL would be extremely difficult. We thought about it.
Q: I just hate it when people say that there's no difference between bank security and DRM because they really want DRM.
A: Oh, I agree. I am as bothered by DRM as Richard Stallman is. E.g., E-911 legislation forbids the owner of cellphone from disabling the auto-locater functionality. So, "can you deliver a GPL phone in the US without running afoul of E-911 legislation?
A: (wendy) The legislation says that device must be "robust" against user modification, which free software isn't.
A: Try here. And it's not clear where the conversation could be held, and bringing all the voices to the table would be difficult.
Karen Schneider moves on from ALA blog
October 01, 2007
The front page is dead, but not yet quite reborn
September 30, 2007
Web 2.0 via Web 2.0
Backup BradSucks
September 29, 2007
Picnic O7 presentation and (sort of) debate
September 25, 2007
Lego and web 2.0
The future of content
Julian Dibble on play becoming work becoming play
September 22, 2007
Berkman on the Future of the Net - Happy One Web Day!
September 21, 2007
One Web Day and Yom Kippur
September 17, 2007
[scs2007] first sessions
Amazon and small presses
September 16, 2007
Online protest, offline petitions
September 15, 2007
NYTimes continues its slow climb to consciousness
Me interviewed about marketing
September 12, 2007
Bradsucks inspires William Gibson
Why Koreans blog
September 11, 2007
Now that we're in the majority, could you please stop calling us consumers?
[Tags: web2.0 millennials user-generated-content media everything_is_miscellaneous]
September 10, 2007
Andy Carvin's One Web Day celebration
September 09, 2007
Webby Sunday Funnie
September 08, 2007
Collaborative band name exchange
September 07, 2007
FaceBook exposes its members
August 27, 2007
Web2RW2Web2RW...
August 25, 2007
Victorian scholarship and the miscellaneous
August 20, 2007
What-if
August 18, 2007
Adler, Keen and blogs
August 16, 2007
Andrew Keen's Best Case
August 15, 2007
Hello, it's the crowd calling on line 3
August 06, 2007
BradSucks, the remix
Andy Carvin on OneWebDay
July 29, 2007
Ed Cone on the miscellaneous
July 18, 2007
Me and Mr. Keen
July 17, 2007
Susan Mernit learns from fads
Big news on the library front
July 16, 2007
The status of citizen media
July 12, 2007
Cat and Girl
July 10, 2007
Clay on love
July 09, 2007
Andrew Keen and me at Supernova
June 23, 2007
Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous interview with Richard Sambrook
June 21, 2007
[supernova] Denise Caruso on anti-social software and Clay Shirky's lovefest
June 20, 2007
[supernova] Nonprofit projects
June 17, 2007
Dave on open social networking
Deconstructing hyperlinks
June 15, 2007
Me me me. Sigh.
June 12, 2007
[berkman] Digital Natives
June 10, 2007
Knowledge and realism
June 06, 2007
Berkman-Wired podcast interview with Craig
June 04, 2007
Ambient Intimacy
June 03, 2007
Moira Gunn's TechNation interview with me
Moira Gunn's TechNation interview with me
June 02, 2007
Customer loyalty, customer ownership
June 01, 2007
[is2k7] John Palfrey's keynote
[is2k7] Yesterday, and today's opening
May 24, 2007
JSTOR and open access
May 23, 2007
Salon's "Miscellaneous" interview with me
May 16, 2007
The Charity of Crowds
May 06, 2007
What is information architecture? The slide show.
May 04, 2007
James Governor: Brevity Rocks. Love Twitter.
May 03, 2007
BostonNOW goes bloggy
May 01, 2007
Berkman-Wired podcast interview series, starting with Cory
April 28, 2007
Support Internet Radio's existence
April 27, 2007
Chris Lydon's interview posted
April 25, 2007
Web of Ideas tonight, Open Source Radio tomorrow
April 24, 2007
[berkman] Open Net Initiative
A: [jp] We've spent three years collecting data. That's been our aim. Now the challenge is how to make it useful. Do we want to give an open API to all the sites that are blocked? Do we want to give this list to everyone including the censors? And how much should we write in our country studies? The first ones were very long, with lots of context, but not many people read them. So, we've shifted to shorter reports, more coverage, and deep dives at times. And we've done a book that gives straightforward data, plus a series of contextualizing chapters. We're trying to have it all ways. [I.e., they're being miscellaneous. :) ] Also, we're working with several companies on a code of conduct for international companies.
A: We've started doing that. We've sent clinical students to countries to look into this.
A: We're not advocating, at least at this point. We're just describing.
A: We're definitely thinking about this. Jonathan Zittrain wants to do a distributed app, like Seti@Home . We've started the design of this.
A: For the past two days, a group has been meeting in London, drafting principles. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Vodaphone are there, as well as the ONI.
A: We have a tool under development that lets you see which countries block a site. We're struggling with making it available because we are reluctant to give this information to censors. [The demo shows that Technorati is blocked in China and Iran and BoingBoing is blocked in Iran, Saudia Arabia, Sudan and Tunisia.]
A: We haven't collected enough data. When we started we only looked at a few countries.
A: They're debating legislation. There are a half dozen in Latin America. A bill is floating in Norway that's breathtaking in its breadth...
A: [jp] I had a frank conversation with the Thai censor. Fascinating. I see us doing more of that.
NPR and democacy - Andy Carvin reports
Media revenge
Free as in kittens
April 23, 2007
JK Rowling's next book after Harry Potter
Web of Ideas: Civility, Codes of Conduct, and the Implicit
April 22, 2007
Where Ethan works
April 20, 2007
[berkman] John Clippinger: A Crowd of One
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn't mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there's another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I'm interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.
A: The layer won't be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can't get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.
A: They'd be persistent, not consistent. It'd be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn't know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it's ham-fisted. It's either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That's the new generation of social technology we now need.
April 19, 2007
Joe Trippi joins Edwards campaign
April 18, 2007
Why I like Twitter
Union Diamond - give them a call
April 17, 2007
French code of conduct for bloggers
April 14, 2007
Networked truth, part 2
April 12, 2007
Co-teaching a course at Harvard Law
April 11, 2007
Code? Nah. Codes? Maybe.
April 07, 2007
danah, Trebor and Ethan - Together live!
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid IDThe Tunisian remix
Why a wifi blanket?
April 04, 2007
Flu beats CNN
April 01, 2007
Blogger Codes of Conduct
March 29, 2007
The knot in my stomach is CNN
March 28, 2007
Harvard Forum on Social Tagging
A: (Michael) Not in the major tagging sites, e.g., del.icio.us. The lack of rules has been one of the advantages of these sites.The noise introduced can often be negated at least in part by the good rising to the top.
A: (Adam) EdTags lets you set the level of privacy. And it's an actively managed site.
A: (Adam) Mainly "gray literature" — blog posts, preprints, Web sites, course-generated papers.
A: (Adam) A condition when we built EdTags was that it has to be able to talk wth del.icio.us or export to an XML file. Personally, I use different tagging sites for different types of research.
A: EdTags has been live for a little over a year. (It started as TeacherShare.) First year doctoral students, who were trained on it, use it. It's being used in some specific courses and teacher education programs, plus a community of faculty members interested in emerging trends in education technology. The person who uploads the most bookmarks is a woman from Slovenia. There are about 400 users. About 100,000 hits/month.
A: It's a mashup of Scuttle, an open source platform, with lots of custom work.
A: (Adam) A Harvard Provost Innovation Grant financed it.
A: (Michael) I don't know that we want to encourage it. We're exploring. [Tags: libraries tagging social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]
March 27, 2007
Stop cyberbullying
March 26, 2007
Distributed translation
m, btw, has posted a knockout portfolio of his Web design work — points out in an email that pages Google translates automatically now let any reader suggest a better translation. So, if you go about a third of the way down this page and look for the first book cover, you'll see a work by Alan De Benoist, titled "On Being a Floyd." Hover over the title and you'll see "On Being a Pagan" in a popup, with a button for you to suggest your own alternative translation. RageBoy is the one who suggested "On Being a Pagan." Chris refers to Google's approach as "wide area knowledge acquisition."
March 23, 2007
Tumblr is the new Twitter
March 20, 2007
[berkman] Mary Wong on copyright and human rights
copyrightaccess [whoops] is a human right. She is suggesting (she says) adopting the human rights framework to bring in more broad and flexible considerations, to give a foundation to users' claims. Even within the US's utilitarian claims (i.e. copyright enables the advancement of the arts and sciences) there is room for natural law claims. And she points to WIPO's acknowledgement of the special needs of developing countries.
A: I'm with you on that totally. To do this, we need to change the mindset. Maybe have the university focus on the human rights frameworks.
A: We talk about Fair Use as an exception to copyright. What do we do with the existing language?
A: The reconfiguring of authorship fits in this paradigm, and fortifies it.
A: Prof. Nesson's idea of changing the burden of proof would work well here. It would be an opt-out scheme, rather than opt-in, for the publishers. We'll see a battle between the copyright right holder and another right holder.
A: Copyright came from literal property. We do need to move past that.
A: I'm trying to distance my suggestion from wading wholeheartedly wading into that particular fray. I'm not saying it should be a full-fledged human right. But that framework provides a good "hook," Article 27 gives us ammunition because it recognizes both the rights holder and the user. .And then maybe tap into WIPO's new interest in copyright for developing companies.
A: Yes, it's aspirational. I'm hoping that if you change mindsets, you can change policy. Lawyers like starting points that are definable, neat and can be generalized. But if you have fair use for universities, you end up with various laws for various domains.
A: It's a challenge.
Britt Blaser: The People Law trumps the Power Law
[Tags: long_tail britt_blaser everything_is_miscellaneous ]
March 18, 2007
Web of Ideas: Does participatory culture lead to participatory democracy?
Small Pieces Loosely Googled
March 17, 2007
Twittering
Dirty Diaper Diaries
March 13, 2007
Among the cables
[berkman] John Mayer: Legal education commons
A: At CALI's LearnTheLaw.org lets you pay for access to the CALI lessons. [It's $50/yr.]
A: 200 schools pay us $5K year. For that they get everything we produce, but I'm trying to give away as much as possible. Not the lessons. If gave them away, the law schools would stop paying us. Everything else, just about, is open and free.
A: We don't need profit but we do need sustainability. The case book market is about $90M. Suppose you came in with uber casebooks that you could mix and match. We'd pay faculty to write those. That would put pressure on faculty to use the free PDF (or $18 lulu version) case book. A $90M market would become a $20M. That's what eLangdell is.
A: (Charlie) I'd love to. Unfortunately, my publisher owns the copyright.
March 12, 2007
[ctpaa] Cable panel on Net neutrality
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: (Rainbow) The computers aren't in the kids' bedrooms.
Henry Jenkins on Second Life's effect on first life politics
March 09, 2007
Navies are conversations?
March 07, 2007
MySpace News
March 06, 2007
[f2c] Commissioner Adelstein
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.
A: I'm one of five commissioners.
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.
A: It's so much easier to give away carrots. Politicians like to do that. It's happened time and again in spectrum policy.
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 ]
USAToday takes the plunge
March 05, 2007
[f2c] Gov. Douglas on covering Vermont
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!]
A: No one. [Chris Meyer, sitting next to me, points to the RI-WINS program for border-to-border coverage in Rhode Island.]
A: We haven't decided whether we'll support this transaction.
A: Libraries are important. We hope they'll play an even bigger role. E.g., access the Oxford library.
A: Parents should be parents. [paraphrase]
A: There are lots of models that work.
A: I'm cautious fiscally.
March 02, 2007
Ethanz's freezing, man!
Live Blogging: Threat or menace?
March 01, 2007
TechPres delivers, and John Edwards makes his hair safe for democracy
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