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 12, 2007
Webbifying Dewey
The estimable Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC points to a presentation by Michael Panzer (also of the OCLC) about how to "webbify" the Dewey Decimal System.
The question Michael addresses is how to take the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the "networked level," defined as "Infrastructural improvements to make a KOS [Knowledge Organization System] web-scale accessible, to make sharing, syndicating, leveraging of its data feasible." He begins by scoping the problem. He then talks about the issues in webbifying the DDC, which he boils down to three: URI design, caption design, and format considerations.
He proposes a scheme for URI's (which, especially in the condensed form of a PowerPoint presentation I don't fully understand, but are probably beyond me even if spelled out), with examples such as http://dewey.info/concept/338.4/en/edn/22/. Notice the DDC number after the "concept" designation.
Captions he acknowledges depend on context, and with Web services (Michael points out), one cannot always know the context in which one's captions are going to be used. He also discusses the importance of maintaining the hierarchy, but the bullet points are too compressed. (Not a criticism. The PowerPoint deck wasn't intended to be self-standing, and I don't know enough to be able to fill in all the missing context.)
To the third point, he looks at adopting either the MARC 21 or (and?) SKOS formats.
As Lorcan says, "This is part of an ongoing investigation of what it means to release more of the value of 'classic large-scale vocabularies' in a web environment." There's lots of info packed into Dewey's system. How can we best liberate that info?
Posted by self at 06:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 10, 2007
Dave Snowden: From fragments to sense
Terrific post by Stu Henshall about what sounds like a fantastic talk by Dave Snowden (whose blog is here) at KMWorld. Dave combines the broad and deep with the incisive and the practical. Yikes! (Don't miss the four posts from Dave that Stu points to as "must reads.")
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
OpenSocial explained
Marc Andreessen has a terrific post explaining the nature and effect of the OpenSocial standard promulgated by Google and a gaggle of social networking sites ... an EBFB (everyone but facebook) coalition. The API allows access to profiles, networks and apps, so that a developer can write an application that will run within any social networking site that supports OpenSocial.
Thus, the walled garden approach will at least allow us to move among the walled gardens. [Tags: opensocial social_networking_sites marc_andreessen google facebook everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 01:16 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 29, 2007
Blogclouds
While chatting with Chris Heuer today — one of those f2f chats like they used to have when our homes were lit with whale oil — we had an idea. We were talking about blogrolls and Grazr. I was complaining (about myself, to myself) that I don't update my blogroll hardly ever, and when I do, I find it to be a psycho-socially fraught activity. On the other hand, the blog-writing software I use logs every link I make, along with the date and the anchor text. So, imagine if you will a blogroll that consists of the places I link to most often, the places I've linked to most recently, the anchor text phrases I've linked to most often, or (if I started logging more data about each link) the places I've linked to sorted by the tags I've applied to the posts the links are in. And a lot more, too. Imagine aggregating all this socially.
Why not? It's just technology. [Tags: blogroll blogs chris_heuer everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 08:16 PM | Comments (3) | 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 25, 2007
Finding what we can't spell
I went to look up Plumpy'nut - a peanut-butter based nutritional compound important where people are starving - at Wikipedia, but I thought it was spelled "plumpinut." The misspelling leads you to a Wikipedia dead end page. I thought about creating a "plumpinut" entry that does nothing but point to the Plumpy'nut entry. But somehow I don't think Wikipedia wants to have entries that are misspellings.
Anyone know the right way help people find the entries of terms they don't know how to spell?
Plumpy'nut, which essentially is a recipe, is patented. If you want to mix up peanuts 'n' stuff, you may be violating the law. Christine Gorman, at the Harvard Nieman Center, has a blog on the patenting of peanut butter + mixins.
Posted by self at 02:01 PM | 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 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
A river runs through it
Dave Winer has come up with a clever way of reslicing the NY Times. Not only does it group articles by keyword, the layout creates a histogram of the topics.
Posted by self at 12:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
When satisficing is good enough
After years to talking about our move to "good enough" information, I'm just a little late to learning that Herbert Simon coined a term for this phenomenon in 1957. Yes, it's the fiftieth anniversary of "satisficing."
I found this via a very interesting blog post at Just Communicate by a knowledge management grad student who, in the course of discussing the wisdom of Cory Doctorow's Metacrap article, also points to a post by Steven Bell at the Association of College & Research Libraries blog, on using social sites to move good enough research beyond good enough.
Posted by self at 09:19 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
The miscellaneous is making my eyes bleed
You know what's not helpful? A bill from AT&T that spreads across 56 pages of tiny print the information that explains why my bill is twice as high this month as usual.
You know, if they organized their information in a useful way (which is actually what my sense of the miscellaneous is about), I might even be able to tell that I should up my plan and pay AT&T more money every month. So, how about fewer lists of data — I don't really need to know about each and every text message our children send — and perhaps some notifications of where my usage has swerved off the norm?
Who designs these bills? Squirrels? [Tags: information_architecture, whines]
Posted by self at 10:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 15, 2007
Peer review review
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 | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 12, 2007
Auto-tag your blog
Jeremy Wagstaff on Jiglu for auto-tagging your blog and its archive...
Posted by self at 03:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Auto-tag your blog
Jeremy Wagstaff on Jiglu for auto-tagging your blog and its archive...
Posted by self at 03:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2007
My maybe-talk at Veerstichting
I've been working hard on a new presentation, to be given tomorrow at the Veerstichting conference in Leiden, in the Netherlands. After tonight's speakers dinner, I'm thinking maybe the last half (including the Wikipedia portions) of my Everything is Miscellaneous talk would be more suitable. I don't what I'll decide.
Here's the gist of the new talk. I'm going to be sketchy, because I have to go to sleep very soon, but mainly because there's something missing at the talk's core. The title is something like "The Challenge of the Implicit." It's a 20-minute talk.
The Web is best understood as a social realm. But groups (vs. mere groupings) become real when people know more about one another than they can say. For example, I can't tell you much of what I know about my kids. And when you can express a character in just a phrase, the character's been badly written. What makes a group a group is not the lines among the people, but what is unsaid and can't ever be said fully
But computers are monsters of the explicit. That's why in the 1950s they symbolized the mechanizing of relationships. From the beginning, information itself was invented to manage, and thus reduce, complex relationships. Now this poorly defined word (few use it in Shannon's sense) has become an assumed part of how we know our world.We think we're constantly emitting info. E.g., a street scene used to be a river with eddies of public and private. Now it's all info. This has enabled a switch in how we think of privacy, from that which we exclude from the record, to what the authorities are not allowed to pay attention to in the record that now includes everything.
The Web is a disruption in this informationalization. It is built of links, which use language to contextualize relatioships. Links are the opposite of databased information: They enrich rather than reduce, are decentralized, personal, and fundamentally social in that they are written by one person for others to use.
Yet the Web is (in a sense) lousy at the social. It knows about links but not about people or groups. That's why social networking sites are rising so quickly. They internalize the Web, providing the connective features we're used to on the Net (email, IM, etc.).
While groups depend on the implicit, social networking sites start by asking for explicit info about our network and interests. But that's ok because they so quickly transcend those sticks and twine. Real, messy social relations grow. Good!
But: (1) Making things explicit can be highly disruptive. Computers — and software designers — are not always good at this, especially since we don't have good norms yet, and perhaps never will. (2) Much of what's of value in the implicit was created without intending to. There are thus issues about how much we are entitled to make not just explicit but public. (3) The implicit is by its nature messy and connective. It always drags more into the light than it intended. It's thus hard to keep the above issues separate and containable. (4) We have an obligation and an opportunity to increase and preserve the unspoken. Explicitly.
The end.
I'm thinking that this talk is not ready to be presented. Too bad. I've worked hard on it. I guess I'll decide tomorrow morning. Sigh.
Posted by self at 06:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Google buys Jaiku
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 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 08, 2007
Tags needed
Why oh why aren't there tags in Google Calendar? Oh my sweet Jeebus, I want tags for events! I get so tired ot trying to find every birthday, every speech, every "maybe" event. In fact, I try to use those terms — embedded tags! — in the content itself just so I can find the events again. Please, oh great Google, give us, your unworthy supplicants, calendar tags!
Wordie started out as a joke - a site that was all tags and no content. Now it's added tags. I have to run for a train, so I don't have time to step into its infinite loop of metareference, but John McGrath explains it all here.
Posted by self at 02:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 03, 2007
Harvard moves towards Open Harvard moves towards Open Access scholarship
According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences' governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It'd be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.
Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system -- one important way ideas are vetted -- does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard's move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species' interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.
I'm actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I've just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?
Obviously, I'm also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.
But what pleasant questions to contemplate!
Posted by self at 08:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 02, 2007
Meta-radio
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 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Karen Schneider moves on from ALA blog
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 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 01, 2007
The front page is dead, but not yet quite reborn
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 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 30, 2007
Web 2.0 via Web 2.0
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 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 29, 2007
Picnic O7 presentation and (sort of) debate
Here's a video of the full session I was at at Picnic '07. It includes Walt Mossberg's introduction, my 40 minute keynote (very similar to the presentation that I did at Google, although with a short section on the importance and difficulty of the implicit added, and some references in anticipation of the debate to follow), and then the half hour or so of my debate with Andrew Keen, moderated by Walt M.
I haven't watched the video beyond the first few minutes -- the production quality is high -- but my sense of the debate was that Andrew was on an oddly anti-intellectual track, attacking me as a "professional philosopher," which I'm not (I was an assistant professor of philosophy 22 years ago), and even if I were, why would that be a criticism, especially coming from a guy who is out arguing for the importance of credentialed authorities? Not helpful to discussing the actual topic. Frustrating. My feeling coming out of the discussion over all was indeed frustration. I didn't think we were able to pursue points sufficiently.
BTW, somewhere in my presentation you can see me very carefully get left and right confused. Also, I'm going to plug again my more coherent attempt to explain and evaluate Keen's argument: Andrew Keen's Best Case.
Posted by self at 12:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 25, 2007
The future of content
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 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 20, 2007
Wines are not miscellaneous
Donna Maurer, an information architect, writes about how she organizes her wine, thereby answering the question: What is the opposite of miscellaneous? But who cares? She is not aiming at organizational purity, although her scheme has the attention to detail that purists often demand. But those details represent the information that matters to her, and her system lets her find and use that information...exactly as you would expect from a leading information architect. A folksonomic, tag-based wine cellar — while a fun concept — is not exactly called for here.
Posted by self at 06:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 15, 2007
NYTimes continues its slow climb to consciousness
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 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 13, 2007
Bin Laden word cloud
W. David Stephenson has created a word cloud of the latest bin Laden video. Interesting... [Tags: osama_bin_laden w_david_stephenson everything_is_miscellaneous visualizations ]
Posted by self at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2007
Non-mashuppable debates, no thanks to Yahoo
From TechPresident's indispensible Daily Digest, compiled by Joshua Levy:
[Tags: politics yahoo mashups everything_is_miscellaneous ]...Wired's ever-diligent Sarah Lai Stirland reports that "Yahoo has decided not to support citizen remixing of the footage — reducing the once-bold experiment to little more than a fancy online version of an on-demand cable television offering." Yahoo had originally planned to upload the raw footage from the debate to its Jumpcut service for citizens to use in their mashups. But now a spokesman told Stirland that Yahoo will only let participants choose what candidates they want to hear from, without the ability to mashup actual footage. "Bloggers will be able to embed the video into their sites, YouTube-style, but will have no easy way to repurpose it," writes Stirland. Those who want to create mashups won't be able to use the simple Jumpcut service, and will instead be forced to download individual videos and use desktop video-editing software. Not nearly as fun.
Posted by self at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2007
Berkman Lunch: Peter Galison
Peter Galison is a university professor of physics at Harvard. He's giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, getting things wrong, etc.]
Positivists tried to ground knowledge in an accumulation of observations, with a minimum of theory, Prof. Galison says. Science would come in the form of little bricks. The result would be "out of the reach of metaphysical theories." Observation-based science would get better over time.
After WWII, via Thomas Kuhn and others, there was a rebellion against the positivist view. Theory comes first, they said. Science was so framed by theory that what counted as valid observation was dictated by the framework of theory. There is no neutral observation and there's no raw perception outside of the framing provided by our theories. Various theories therefore were not continuous (as for the positivists) but were ships passing in the night...at least according to this point of view.
Example: The positivists saw special relativity as the capstone of a continuum of observation-based theories, while the Kuhnians think Einstein overthrew his predecessors and created a new whole.
Prof. Galison looks at the rhythms of the rise of theories. There are breaks in the strands of experiment, theory and instrument but the breaks don't occur at the same time. And that's to be expected because new instrumentation takes a while to yield new experiments and theories.
Doesn't this just make the Kuhnian predicament worse? Now there are three strands with discontinuities, not just the strand of theort. "How do subcultures of science coordinate? What is shared between experimentalists and theorists, or between instrument makes and theorests...or between a subculture like instrument making and the wider technical world?" When a string theorist want to talk to a biochemist, do they have to engage in radical translation as posited by the anti-positivists? No, it's more like the pidgins, jargons and creoles that build up at the real, "thick boundaries" between the natural languages. Prof. Galison wants to use linguistic anthropology to see how scientific disciplines talk. He calls the areas where these inter-languages are built up "trading zones."
(There are no pure fields, he says. Physics, for example, contains elements of craft, math, experimentation, Plato...)
He looks at the growth and change of language, its local connections to people and places, and its contextuality within the wider world. E.g., Einstein had the idea that time is nothing but properly coordinated clocks. Poincare in 1898 had to figure out how to synchronize clocks so he could figure out the longitude of places around the world. He used this to talk philosophically about what simultaneity means. In 1900, he saw that simultaneity existed in the intersection of philosophy of time, technology of time synchronization, and the electrodynamics of moving bodies. New trading zones are emerging: Nanotech (surface chem, elec eng, atomic phyics...), string theory (geometers, field theories), simulations (computer science, stat, viz display). Each of these have had to develop jargon, pidgin and then a creole.
Of course these fields are collaborative. The question is how they're able to. We should dig in to understand the shared techniques, theoretical notions, and instrumentation, and how they relate in the various intersecting fields. What exactly is the coordinative project, how does it change over time, and what does that tell us about the local knowledges?
Q: (ethanz) To what extent have people looked at languages between the engineering and business communities?
A: There's been a little work. It's a very important area for research. You can see the influence even in the architecture. When a lab is built, it reflects where ideas sit in the world. Does the lab resemble a church? A factory? Is it a place to bring VC's? "VC's don't expect to go to PS 101 circa 1956. That's not who they expect you to be."
Q: (eric von hippel): When engineers talk to others, there's often someone translating. What are the general principles?
A: There may not be a generic solution to this problem. In the coordinative process, what is characteristically coming from the different groups. E.g., in the development of radar, the engineers taught the physicists to look at the problem as that of providing a black box with voltage in and voltage out. So, look at what's relevant to the exchange — part of it is knowing what to ignore.
A: (halley suitt) If two disciplines like biology and chemistry create a whole new set
of words to describe biochemistry, per your example, is the number of
new words in a new field -- for instance all the Net jargon bursting
forth -- predictive of the importance of that new field?
A: Boundaries are always thick. "In these thick regions of exchange, a lot of the vocabularies produced by these individual fields get thrown out. There's a stripping away."
Q: (judith donath) In a consulting company, there's a different type of cooperation — it's very competitive. They're trying to use a new language to convince the clients that they have something unique to offer. It's more about jockeying for leadership than cooperating. It's intellectual scent-marking
A: Yes, complexification can sometimes be obfuscation. Cooperation and competition are closer together than we often think. Freud once said "Ambivalence is the basic emotion." I'm trying to move away from an intentional account.
Q: (me) Do these intersections simplify the concepts? Do the participants translate back into their own terms? Do the translations change the theoretical understanding of each of the fields?
A: There's a difference between simplification and regularization. We know how to talk differently to different people. The regularization doesn't mean that you're simplifying the ideas. When two famous physicists wrote a book on physics, they wrote a second volume for experimenters. All sorts of intra-theoretical connections were dropped out, but the calculations got more complicated. This was more regular but also more complex. So, is it simplification? Simple is not a simple concept. The "outspeak" becomes regularized. And does it feed back into the constitutive fields? Yes. And that's why interests me most. It's not that physics founds everything. The radar story is an example where the engineers taught the physicists. The fact of the coordinative activity begins to backform the science. I think that happens all the time, and it's really important. The top down picture not only is bad business, but it keeps you from learning things.
Q: (wendy seltzer) Attorneys are called on to speak many disciplinary languages. What's the role of formal education in differrent disciplines as opposed to learning on the job? Should law firms hire biochemists to talk to biochemists. Others hire generally interested people. I think the generally interested people are going to better at explaining it to a judge, etc.
A: People often think that's what wanted in a book about science is to make it stupider. That seems to me to be empirically wrong. Pedagogically, we need to develop ways to speak about technical-scientific ideas that are not weighed down by jargon and don't require prior knowledge, but are cognizant of the ability of people to deal with complex concepts. If you go to an art museum, it's designed for adults. If you go to a science museum, it's designed for children. You don't have to write in one-syllable words and assume the audience wants to climb on the exhibit. [You go, Dr. Pete!]
Q: (john palfrey) People argue that locking up IP discourages research. Others disagree.
A: The idea of individual development is mythopoeic, although our institutions try to recuperate it, including the Nobel Prize. It's trying to get back to an Edenic past, but it's like chasing the sunset. In science and engineering, innovation always have aspects of collectivity. Patent lawyers sometimes want the physicists to do work they don't want to do, patenting every variation on an innovation. Sometimes, though, patents can provide an incentive, and maybe makes us less interested in the classical ontological, philosophical questions. Physicists are thinking more like engineers. Patents and IP play a very complicated role in the changing ethos between science and technology.
Posted by self at 05:38 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Now that we're in the majority, could you please stop calling us consumers?
From the Center for Media Research:
[Tags: web2.0 millennials user-generated-content media everything_is_miscellaneous]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 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 09, 2007
Webby Sunday Funnie
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 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2007
Collaborative band name exchange
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 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 26, 2007
Contextualizing the news, especially when it's wrong
This morning if you search Google for "Enron," the top hit is Enron.com (the creditors' recovery page) and the second is the Wikipedia article on Enron. The first listing from NYTimes.com is about 45th and it's a TimesSelect (= pay) page that doesn't even actually reference Enron. That's an example of what's on the mind of the Times' ombudsman (um, "public editor") Clark Hoyt when he begins his column. He finds the Times' "business strategy" of getting "its articles to pop up first in Internet searches" — well, at least not at #45 — responsible for the quandary the Times finds itself in when it comes to the errors in its archive. I don't quite see it that way.
Hoyt takes as his example an article abot Allen Kraus, who "once led a welfare office praised for its efforts to uncover fraud." The Times first reported he resigned under pressure after a bribery investigation without including Kraus' side of the story and later published a more balanced follow-up. Kraus says his boss eventually publicly sided with Kraus' version. The details don't matter much, although I must say it's a relief for a change not to be talking about John Siegenthaler. The point is that Kraus is understandably upset that searches on his name turn up the Times' faulty story. If that's all you read, you'd think he's a crook.
Hoyt then considers several solutions to this problem, seeming to favor the suggestion that the Time expunge faulty articles from its archive.
Nooooooo!
In fact, the solution is already in place. If you google "allen kraus" (in quotes), the #1 hit is a Times topic page about him that lists first the corrective article and then the faulty one. Perfect! We get the context we need while preserving the record. Topic pages are in fact the Times attempt to move its content up the Google results page. They give us a single, persistent URL that aggregates everything the Times knows about a topic...including what it got wrong.
Jeez, if the Times expunged from its archive every article about Iraq Judith Miller wrote, we'd think the Times slept through the whole run-up to the war. And future researchers would never understand how culpable the Times was for getting us into that miss. Bloggers get this right-er than Hoyt when we use strikethrough font to indicate an error we've corrected. We need the full archive.
Topic pages are a great solution to the problem of providing context, as well as advancing the Times' search engine optimization desires. Removing articles from the record destroys the value of the record. You shouldn't write history by rewriting the record.
So, rather than setting "time-outs" for articles based on how important the Times' judges them, which is Hoyt's suggestion, do more topic pages. And harvest the power of the crowd to create more topic pages and more context.
Posted by self at 10:47 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 25, 2007
Victorian scholarship and the miscellaneous
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 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2007
Tagging, knowledge, and inverted clouds
Tim "LibraryThing" Spalding bought a box of copies of Everything Is Miscellaneous, Lor' bless him, and decided to hold a contest of sorts to give the remaining dozen away. So, he asked people to comment on how tagging changes knowledge. Now he's collected a sampling of the 170 replies. Great stuff.
Also, Tim now let's you see a reverse (inverse? converse?) tag cloud, which he calls a tag mirror. He says:
Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing's twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection...
Here's a for-example. I don't use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They're just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It's interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I'm more interested in gender studies than I thought.
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Flickr metadata
Dave Winer has dug up and made presentable some of the metadata for Flickr photos. Flickr knows more than you think!
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August 21, 2007
DishyMix's 1972 time capsule
DishyMix interviews me (and it's one of the odder interviews, as I recall — it was done a few weeks ago — and decides to use my 1972 college yearbook picture of me. The actual podcast is here.
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August 20, 2007
What-if
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.
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August 18, 2007
Adler, Keen and blogs
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]
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August 17, 2007
Wiki disinfectant
Wired is encouraging you to post the most egregious Wikipedia revisions here. Anonymity giveth opportunities for abuse. The crowd setteth right.
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August 16, 2007
Andrew Keen's Best Case
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 ]
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August 15, 2007
Hello, it's the crowd calling on line 3
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 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Well-trained news
Paul Graham's Y-Combinator has come up with a variation on the Digg theme. Y-Combinator was the incubator for Reddit.com, a Digg-like site that was bought by CondeNet about a year ago, and Y-Combinator has been maintaining a site focused on news about start-ups. Paul — who is a superb writer and thinker, as anyone who has read his stuff knows — is now opening up its topics to news of interest to startups and hackers, which is a much wider range.
What's most interesting (well, to me, anyway) are the changes the site is making in the social dynamics. Reddit, says Paul, became of less interest to hackers like him as it succeeded with a wider public. Since the readers determine what make it onto the site, that's the price of mainstream-ish success. To keep HackerNews focused on news of interest to hackers — and presumably, to exclude the sort of tech tabloid stories that show up at Digg that may be of interest to hackers but irrelevant to hacking &mdash a team of techies will "train" the system on what are relevant stories and what are not. (Since Paul is directly responsible for the widespread use of Bayesian spam filters, the word "training" makes me think there's an element of that here.) People who thumbs-up stories that the system thinks are relevant will gain authority within the system (their thumbs up and down will count for more), and those who thumbs-up irrelevant stories will lose authority.
In addition, the site's comments will be moderated to maintain "civility," i.e., not ad hominem arguments.
I suppose there may be purists who think this is a betrayal of the wisdom of the crowd. But there is no such thing as untouched crowdal wisdom. In every case, someone has made decisions about how to gather the crowd's input, who counts as a member of the crowd, how much authority the crowd will have, whether and how the wishes of the minority are respected, what the means of redress are, what typeface should be used to announce the crowd's decision, and a thousand more factors. No single crowd mechanism works for every issue. We need lots and lots of ways of creating collective understanding. HackerNews sounds like a very interesting experiment at the least, and quite possibly much more than that.
Posted by self at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 06, 2007
BradSucks, the remix
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 ]
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August 02, 2007
Meta FAQ
QueryCat is a new site that indexes FAQs and makes them searchable via ordinary language queries. It claims to have indexed over 4 million FAQ questions.
Cool idea. FAQs have enough predictable structure that the questions can probably be pretty cleanly separated from the answers. (For one thing, them question thingies tend to end with curly marks.) And, of course, the info in FAQs is, by definition (well, if FAQs actually compiled questions that were frequently asked) frequently requested and thus valuable.
I did a little poking around. "Where can I get a free blog?" got 664 results. " "How do I tune up a bicycle?" got 11 hits. Where can I get vegetarian omega 3?" pulled up three answers, all pretty relevant. "Should I reply to spam?" got 372 hits, some generic and some specific to particular mail programs or sites. "Does putting in a new hard drive invalidate the warranty on my thinkpad" and "What's a normal triglycerides result?" got zero hits. So did "What movies has Lily Tomlin starred in?" because that's unlikely to be asked in a FAQ.
As is common for sites that let you type in questions, "How do I tune up a bicycle" gets exactly the same results as "tune up bicycle" (all without quotes). Natural language = no stop words. Who cares, if it works? It's also not very forgiving of misspellings and variants; remove the space in "omega 3" and you get zero results. "Fix a dent in my car" gets zero hits, "Repair a dent in my car" gets six, and just "dent in my car" gets 12.
I wonder if QueryCat keeps track of the context of the questions it indexes. So, if 9 out of 10 of the Q's at the Acme TNT FAQ use the phrase "Acme TNT" in their replies, but the tenth Q&A — "Q: Does this blow up coyotes real good? A: Yup. Real good." — does not, will that tenth Q&A show up at the top of the list when some queries "Can I blow up coyotes with Acme TNT?"? Just curious.
I did run into one anomaly, or maybe I'm just confused by the site's UI. The results are listed in the usual search engine format, with a link to the URL, a description, and then some more links. But in my limited poking, the links led to the home page of the sites, even when the anchor text said it linked to the FAQ.
Anyway, it's a nice idea for a site and could quite possibly be helpful, especially when your question uses terms that would open up the floodgates of normal search engines .
[Tags: querycat faq metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 01, 2007
BBC digital initiative
At my Everything Is Miscellaneous blog I post about the BBC's Digital Media Initiative, an internal effort to enable the BBC to work digitally better, and make better use of its digital assets. [Tags: bbc metadata media everything_is_miscellaneous]
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July 29, 2007
Ed Cone on the miscellaneous
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 ]
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July 26, 2007
When did shots become a pinch?
Now before health care folks stick a needle in you, they say, "You'll feel a little pinch." That's a pretty accurate description, and especially helpful since the action that causes it doesn't seem to be much like a pinch at all.
But, it wasn't always a pinch. When I was a kid, they'd say something like, "This may hurt a little," but they didn't try to reframe the puncture as a pinch. I wonder how and when this recategorization of sensation occurred... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous needles categorization sensation]
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July 25, 2007
Tagmashes from LibraryThing
Tim Spalding at LibraryThing.com has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere...and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)
At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag 'em up good. For example, "Freakonomics" has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He's introduced "tagmashes," which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged "france" and "wwii." But the fact that you're asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.
You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don't have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.
And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I'd want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I'm the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.
LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It's definitely a site to watch.
[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]
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July 18, 2007
Me and Mr. Keen
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 ]
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July 17, 2007
Susan Mernit learns from fads
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 ]
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Big news on the library front
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 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
Classifying the universe, one galaxy at a time
GalaxyZoo is a mechanical Turk site that uses the "If everyone classifies just one galaxy..." approach. So far, they have a million done. (Thanks to Timo Hannay for the link.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous timo_hannay mechanical_turk astronomy science ]
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July 09, 2007
Andrew Keen and me at Supernova
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]
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July 05, 2007
Wikipedia and the criteria of silliness
There's a fascinating discussion at Wikipedia about whether lists of loosely associated items should be kept or deleted. in this particular case, a list of song titles that contain first names was deleted.
I don't feel I have standing to have an opinion -- this is a discussion among people who spend a good chunk of their lives building and maintaining Wikipedia -- but (nevertheless) I do tend to favor including articles rather than deleting them. Wiki is not paper. As you'll see in the discussion, there are lots of criteria at play, but some of the arguments for deleting such lists seem to me to be based on a desire to keep Wikipedia dignified. That argument I don't buy. Other criteria adduced for deleting "silly" lists are far stronger. And in the discussion you get to see Wikipedia continuing to figure itself out through a process of suggesting criteria, interpreting settled criteria, appeals to precedent, and personal persuasion. [Tags: wikipedia encyclopedias everything+is+miscellaneous lists ]
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July 03, 2007
Many genders
Pownce.com, a new social network, gives you the following choices on its "Gender" pulldown:
Guy
Girl
Dude
Chicky-poo
Bloke
Bird
Lady
Gentleman
Male
Female
Transgender
None of the above
Nice. [Tags: everything+is+miscellaneous pownce gender ]
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July 02, 2007
Professionals and experts
I continued to be impressed by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. More than impressed. Amazed. It has many, well, virtues, but you can't read it without being astounded by MacIntyre's grasp of Western philosophy (with occasional notes on Icelandic and Islamic traditions as well). The mere fact that the comments eruditely on Kierkegaard, Nietszsche and Sartre one one hand, on GE Moore and CL Stevenson on the other, the Scholastics on a third hand, and Foucaultishly (high praise!) on the Greeks from Homer through the tragedians, would be enough. Dayenu! Contemporary Western philosophy has become so fragmented that cutting across all of its branches is an achievement worth acknowledging. Just his command of languages -- does the fact that he refers to Kierkegaard's Either/Or by its Danish title mean that he reads Danish also? -- is enough to turn your head.
So, ignoring for the moment the content of the book and the nuance of its argument, I am bowled over simply by his expertise - like being amazed by Rembrandt's brushwork. We need people like MacIntyre who are able to spend a lifetime reading, learning, thinking and writing.
The point about MacIntyre is not that he is a professional. It is that he is an expert. Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur it seems to me sometimes confuses those two things. Keen is right to point out that we have a traditional "ecosystem" that enables people like MacIntyre to flourish. But that ecosystem -- in this case, the university system -- is not endangered by the new connectedness that is the Internet. The profession that enables MacIntyre to support himself through his studies is largely intact. Now, because of the Internet, we are able to benefit from experts who are amateurs or professionals. [Tags: alasdair+macintyre andrew+keen amateurs scholars ]
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June 28, 2007
Occult of the Amateur
No, the title of this post makes no sense. But it sounds clever, and that's what counts, right?
Anyway, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur , and I have been debating, once at WSJ.com and once at Supernova. But neither of those have been posted yet. But the Supernova after-debate debate is available now. It's less structured than the actual Supernova on-stage conversation, and is less detailed than our rather long WSJ.com exchange (which the WSJ is editing down). I think it's the weakest of the three encounters — we had just come off the stage — but at least it's up. (The on-stage debate should be up soon.) [Tags: cult_of_the_amateur andrew_keen supernova2007 supernova07 everything_is_miscellaneous]
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June 27, 2007
Knowledge as a conversation
Tim Spalding of LibraryThing posts the intro to a talk he gave at the ALA in which he takes on Michael Gorman's trashing of Knowledge 2.0. Tim challenges Gorman's starting point. Herewith that starting point:
"Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do."
No, says Tim, we also learn by conversation...
Tim in a footnote takes me to task for not acknowledging in Everything Is Miscellaneous that, while digitization has "kicked things up a notch," the lessons are old ones. In general, I think that's right. I do tend to believe that the Web touches us so deeply because it more clearly expresses what we've known all along. That was the point of Small Pieces Loosely Joined . [Tags: librarything tim_spalding michael_gorman ala knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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June 25, 2007
Why we still need librarians
Thomas Mann (no, not that one) has a fascinating and important article about why tagging, folksonomies, and the rest of the hip Web 2.0 stuff is inadequate to meet the needs of scholars looking for information. It is, at least informally, a response to the Calhoun Report.
His example of trying to find information about "tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War" is classic and utterly convincing: Finding what the scholar needs requires smart human guides and the smart guides that humans have created for scholars.
But, of course that doesn't scale...
More at Everything Is Miscellaneous...
Posted by self at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Our national wave of vandalism (a story of metadata)
At some point we noticed a crack in the windshield of our car. It's a single line, about 8 inches long, not the spider web fracture typical of a pebble or assassination attempt. We don't know exactly when it happened or how.
Our insurance covers it. But when I went to file the claim through SafeLight, the person on the phone insisted that I give a reason why the glass broke. The fact is that I don't know. But that is not an acceptable answer. Rain? Hail? Pebble? Collision? Branch? Vandalism? Collision? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So I said it was vandalism.
I wonder how many of our national statistics are skewed by a failure to provide an "I don't know" or "Other" box... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous statistics ]
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June 24, 2007
Me, me, me ... this time on Web 2.0
Kathleen Gilroy has posted a podcast interview with me on the topic of Web 2.0 and - guess what! - everything perhaps being in some sense miscellaneous. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 kathleen_gilroy]
Posted by self at 04:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Inside every link is a tag struggling to get out
Samuel Wantman, who works on Wikipedia's category strategy, has suggested that every hyperlinked word in every Wikipedia article be treated as a tag.
What a cool idea! It'd frequently give you so many articles that it wouldn't be worth it, but especially if we were able to do intersections of the hyperlinked words, there are times when it'd be worth its weight in bits.
Apparently, however, this would require so much processing power that the lights on the Eastern seaboard would dim every time someone used it. So, perhaps it's a project that a third party could undertake? Or refine? [Tags: wikipedia samuel_wantman tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
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June 23, 2007
Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous interview with Richard Sambrook
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]
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June 21, 2007
[supernova] Denise Caruso on anti-social software and Clay Shirky's lovefest
Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? "Have a conversation." Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don't always do this because they fear it.
And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.
There are "potential dealbreakers" for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.
Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it's been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over "solidity of edifice, not solidity of process."
Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. "We get our support from a community," Clay said, but to them it was like he'd said "We get our Thursdays from a banana." So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn't see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn't work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. "It's doing fine," but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.
Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they're doing and help one another. "No contracts are written, no money changes hands." "We don't often talk about love" at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.
There's lots of commercial opportunity. We're not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.
Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace...we will see much more of that.
Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.
We can now do big things with love.
[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters...and the fact that those two things are the same is what's most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]
[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]
[The next day] Nick Douglas - who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat - video interviewed me right after Clay's talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.
Posted by self at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 19, 2007
Internet mullet
I was just on a panel at the Endeca user conference where the co-founder, Pete Bell, asked: "Resolved, tag clouds are the mullet of the Internet." I enjoyed it, and it started a good conversation.
My view: Sure, they're sometimes used just because they're "in." But they can also serve a real purpose. Jim from Buzzillions pointed out that a tag cloud, when users understand it(as most don't, apparently) implicitly says "This is your data." And, of course, there are places where tag clouds are just plain useful.
Still, it was an amusing way of posing the question.
Posted by self at 04:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 18, 2007
Nature goes open preprint!
Nature magazine has set up a site — Precedings — where scientists can post their papers before those papers are reviewed and accepted. This a big deal. As Nature's Timo Hannay puts it in a broadcast email:
The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren'teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).
Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there's no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).
Timo goes on to acknowledge that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines.
This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal. [Tags: nature science research everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge arxiv precedings cc ]
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June 17, 2007
Dave on open social networking
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 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Deconstructing hyperlinks
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 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 15, 2007
Me me me. Sigh.
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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The other day, "All Things Considered" ran a commentary of mine on the value of digital messiness. [Tags: npr everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy]
Posted by self at 01:12 PM
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The latest in the Harvard Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous Podcasts series of interviews is up. I talk with my old friend Paul English, founder of Kayak.com (a travel site that kicks butt) about making a business out of other companies' information. But Paul is also deeply involved in health care issues in developing nations where aggregating information can have benefits even more important than saving you $20 on your flight.
Posted by self at 10:35 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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In Everything Is Miscellaneous, I use a famous quote from the famous Ted Nelson:
People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled. (Cited on p. 125 of EiM) In conversation, Scott Rosenberg said he had been trying to track down the actual source of the quote. I couldn't help him, and I noted that on the "errata" page of my book's Web site.
Now, Frank Hecker (see comments #3, #4, and especially #5) has figured it out, which required searching through several editions of Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Machine Dreams."
The quote I used, which has been floating, actually mixes what Nelson wrote in the original 1974 edition with a sidebar quote from the 1987 edition. The 1974 edition says "everything is deeply intertwingled" twice (p. 45). The 1987 edition says:
Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged–people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. (p. 31) Next to that is a sidebar that quotes "Everything is deeply intertwingled" from the original edition. Note that the quote as I attributed it to Nelson does not contain the word "deeply."
For more details, see Franks three comments on my Errata page.
Thank you, Frank! (PS: Wikipedia had the quotation wrong, too. Frank has fixed it.)
[Tags: ted_nelson intertwingularity ]
Posted by self at 05:27 PM
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Dan Gillmor points to public.resource.org, a nonprofit that encourages us to buy info from government archives and then upload it to the Internet Archive, where all can find these uncopyrighted materials for free.
Putting the public domain into the public domain. As Dan says, how subversive! [Tags: public_domain copyright internet_archive public_resource dan_gillmor everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 03:00 PM
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Last night at the Edelman/PR Week "New Media Academic Summit," Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, described how the Journal had rethought its role as a newspaper. Rather than trying to present the first view of news, the Journal assumes its readers got the news the day before on line. Instead, 80% of the articles aim at helping readers understand the news they already have.
During the Q&A I asked something like the following: Nicholas Lemann on the panel said that the NY Times was disappointed with the traffic at Times Select (i.e., its content behind the pay wall). That seems to suggest that there are plenty of people around who can help us understand, and we're willing to switch. Further (I said), I can get more focused analysis on the Web. E.g., the mailing lists I'm on about Internet regulation issues gives me far more coverage and analysis than any newspaper devotes to the topic, and the mailing lists include people with great expertise; newspapers can't compete with that.
Crovitz replied that WSJ.com subscriptions are doing really, really well. So, apparently people are indeed willing to pay for the quality of analysis they get from the Journal.
So, that's a model that works for the WSJ, and I'm glad to hear it. But, I wonder if it'll work more widely. After all, some very high percentage of those WSJ.com subscriptions are expensed.
[Disclosure: I am on retainer to Edelman PR.] [Tags: media newspapers journalism wsj ]
Speaking of which, Dan Gillmor (who I'm sitting next to right now) just had a great piece on the future of journalism published by the SF Chronicle.
Posted by self at 11:25 AM
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Intensely cool demo of PhotoSynth, at TED, shown in a 9 min video. It begins with an infinite zoom that could change the model of how we get more info from linking to a new page to just looking closer at the current page.
And then he shows how we could reconstruct "every interesting part of the earth" using random Flickr photos linked together automatically. And linking together the other information associated with them.
Mind-blowing. And an incredible tool for deriving meaning from the miscellaneous. (Thanks to Erick for the link.) [Tags: photosynth flickr photos metadata ted everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 06:01 PM
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I'll be talking with librarians online today at 2pm EDT. I think it's open to anyone (it's being held by OPAL), but first you have to download some conferencing software. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries ]
Ok, now that it's over, you can listen here.
Posted by self at 10:59 AM
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I'm at a company meeting at MeetUp.com and James Hong, founder of HotorNot is doing a speed history and demo. In his five minute talk, he makes three points of particular interest to me:
1. HotOrNot recently went from fee to free because, James says, because the Net is good at connecting people, and HotOrNot should not be putting money in the middle of that.
2. Your HotorNot photo can have keywords, AKA tags, which give people a quick sense of who you are. He says they took the tag idea from LiveJournal, before del.icio.us. But, he says, if you have too many tags, people won't read them. So, HotorNot lets you put music, movies, etc. on yor hotlist. That says something about you. (If you see an item on someone else's list that you want to add to yours, you just click the plus button.) You can also display these in some flashy widgets.
3. They added HotLists to Facebook, and hit 1M views per day in 4.5 days. Later, in his talk at the NY Tech Meetup, James said: "If I were starting from scratch today, I'd built on Facebook, not the Web." Facebook wants to be the platform. "If they can pull it off, they're the next Microsoft."
Unsurprisingly, at the Tech Meetup, there's huge interest in building on Facebook since not only is the market there, but the market is already clustered in social networks.
Robin Chase of GoLoco is giving a 15 minute demo at the same MeetUp meeting. (Robin was a co-founder of ZipCar, a success all the more impressive because it was so damn hard to start up.) It's a terrific idea: Make it easy for people to share rides. She wants it to be more than just saving money on fuel: It should be more fun to ride together than alone. She recounts a trip she took a couple of weeks ago. She posted she was driving a ZipCar from an airport to a college and got an email from someone looking for a ride. It turns out that the guy was going to the same conference, and Robin knew two of his bosses. Otherwise, she might have turned him down. As it was, they they are now friends.
She talks about some of the partnerships they're pursuing. I think the specifics are not bloggable, but some are not obvious and quite interesting.
She says "GoLoco" means you should go locally, go crazy, and go with low CO2. Clevah!
By the way, I'm glad to say that MeetUp.com is doing well, growing 10% per month. (Their only metric is how many successful meetups there are.) I love the Web, but I love faces more than screens. Also, I'm an admirer of MeetUp because it was founded to address a real social need. They are, well, good folk.
Now I'm at a NY technology meetup. Seven of us give five minute pitches, although I've been granted ten minutes to talk about my book. (Sanford Dickert did a great job liveblogging the event.)
Robin starts it off by giving the very short version of her demo. It's even cooler the second time.
ExpoTV.com is about video product reviews done by users.E.g., if you search for "Fischer Price Swing," you'll find videos of users reviewing the swing. In this case the most played is about 2 mins long. The ExpoTV person (sorry, I'm missing everyone's names) says you can tell that the person is a real mom, "not a sweaty old guy in a t-shirt." You can leave comments. You can see more about the creator. The site sells nothing, but provides links to affiliated stores.
They attach "a tremendous amount of metadata" to the videos by pulling in product info based on UPCs. They syndicate their videos out to syndication partners, e.g., a channel on Yahoo Video and AOL Video. They also use the UPCs to match up with Buy.com. You can ask to see a video on a product by, say, a research-heavy user who has contributed more than 25 reviews. [It's a great example of pulling together miscellaneous info, in part by using unique and meaningless IDs, and of profiting by becoming a meta-business.]
They have 100,000 videos and two VCs backing them.
Q: How will you screen out manufacturers pretending they're authentic? Q: Multilingual? [For products I want to see—not commodities—I definitely would check out this site.]
LiveLook.net has two products: 1. Show anytihng on your screen to anyone without downloading anything. Simpler than Webex. They charge $0.025/minute/user. 2) For online businesses, customer service reps can see your screen. That costs $50/agent/month.
They're looking to raise capital and for tech partners
AdaptiveBlue.com works off a browser tool bar, bringing contextual relevancy to you as you're browsing. It helps you "browse smarter." E.g., if you're on an Amazon page, AdaptiveBlue knows it's a page about a CD and lets you browse for reviews, find other works by the singer or by CD, find photos on Flickr of the singer, create a station on Pandora.com, etc. On a movie page, the choices reflect its movie-ness. AdaptiveBlue cover about 20 categories. The menus personalize themselves based on your browsing history.
It's Firefox only, but the "smartsLinks" menu adds relevant links inline. They make money through affiliate revenues.
Mogulus.com lets anyone launch their own own live, 24/7 video channel. It's free. It is not video on demand. It's linear. E.g., GroundReport.com, which is aiming to be the first user-created CNN. You can broadcast live or even drag in YouTubes (or from other sources), in case you're not staffed up for 24/7 broadcasting. It's all Flash based. The free version puts in an ad every ten minutes. They hope to have thousands of channels. "It's all about empowering bloggers to take the next step." It's now in beta.
Founder Max Haot does an ultra cool demo. While he's being broadcast live on GroundReport, he adds his name to the crawl, pulls in a YouTube, does some effects, etc. Ooohs and aaahs from the crowd.
Q: [me] How many channels do you have to have to consider it a success? [Very very cool and it may find a market, but I suspect that market's not going to consist of thousands of amateur 24/7 CNNs. Could it succeed if it instead got 100 channels? But if you're willing to invest the labor in being on air that much, will Mogulus provide enough functionality? Or, will this be a platform for types of programming that don't exist because they're currently too hard. E.g., might a candidate set one up for use by her supporters? The Obama Channel? Or might people build channels consisting of nothing but YouTube playlists? I dunno, but it was a great freaking demo.]
[Tags: meetup meetup goloco hotornot mogulus adaptiveblue livelook expotv demos tech media cluetrain everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:19 AM
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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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John McGrath has launched TagsAhoy.com, a site that "lets you search your personal tags across a number of tagging sites (del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, LibraryThing, Squirl and Connotea." He says he's got's plan for adding lots more, including more services and more doodads, such as tagclouds.
But being able to get all your tagged resources in one spot? Sweet! [Tags: tags tagsahoy john_mcgrath everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 05:07 PM
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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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Over at the ongoing conversation about Everything is Miscellaneous at The Well, Jamais Cascio defines "fauxsonomies" as folksonomies gamed by "metadata added with the conscious intent to confuse or obfuscate," or to weight them for spammish reasons. Great term. Very clever, Jamais!
Since nothing has ever been said on the Net just once, I googled "fauxonomy" and got 53 hits, plus eight with Jamais' spelling, including one by Tom Coates at PlasticBag.org. In fact, Tom has a fauxonomy tag at del.icio.us. (Google revealed that I'd blogged Tom's post about it in April 2005. Ah, the pleasures of having a poor memory.)
Nevertheless, I was delighted to get reacquainted with the term, this time with a definition attached. [Tags: folksonomy tagging ]
Posted by self at 02:33 PM
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Wired has posted the latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I've been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired. This one is an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. We talk about the role of rules in building knowledge socially as oppopsed to just letting things work out. How important is consistency in the rules as opposed to making decisions that are highly sensitive to the particularities of the case?
We also talk about the effect of slicing topics up into lots of linked pieces. And how Wikipedia looks from the point of view of a Muppet. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous wikipedia jimmy_wales knowledge ]
Posted by self at 10:09 PM
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My book is the subject of a discussion at the Well, with me as the interviewee.
Here's the RSS feed. The site is here, but only has the first nine posts up.
You can read it for free. Only subscribers can comment. [Tags: the_well everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging ]
Posted by self at 03:02 PM
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Harvard Business Review has started posting its "Forethought" articles — the op-ed style columns at the beginning of the issue. That means the one of mine they published this month — If You Love Your Information, Set It Free — is available online. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous hbr ]
Posted by self at 11:02 AM
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Tom Hopkins at Usable Interfaces deepens the discussion from categorization to truth. Isn't truth what's really at stake, he asks.
Certainly, traditionally the two are tied, since truth was taken to apply to propositions, and the canonical form of a proposition is X is Y. The Y, one way or another, is likely to be or imply a categorization. We've always been happy to say both that Socrates is a human and Socrates is hungry, without thinking there's a contradiction between those two, because Socrates can have more than attribute (i.e., belong in more than one category). Classically, though, we've wanted to be able to assign one category as fundamental, or "essential"...
More at Everything Is Miscellaneous...
[Tags: truth categories philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonmy episteomology]
Posted by self at 02:02 PM
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My brother and I bought a used boat this winter -- fifteen feet of leaky fiberglass, with a 90 horsepower motor that assumes that 15 of the horses in harness are dead and being dragged by the others -- so I went downtown to register it with the authorities. If you have assembled the right set of treasure hunt collectibles, including a hand-rubbing of the vehicle identification plate, it all goes smoothly. But...
One of the checkboxes on the registration form asks if I'm "retarded." I thought we were done lumping the various ways our intelligences fail us into that particular bucket, but I also wondered whether the state had minimum intelligence requirements for boat ownership. No, said the state employee on the other side of the counter. They also provide hunting licenses at the boat registration offices, and to get a permit that lets you carry a gun, the state does want to know if you're "retarded." They only have the one form, so they have collect the information for boat owners as well.
Inevitably, we read backwards from the metadata that's asked of us. Had the form asked for prior felony convictions, known allergies or political party affiliation, we would have tried to make sense of the intentions behind the form. Requests for metadata are expressive. Which is one good reason you should bother to print up separate damn forms for boat owners and hunters.
What do the two have in common anyway, except that they both show up jutting their manly jaws forward in outdoor-wear catalogs? [Tags: metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 01:06 PM
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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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It's Linnaeus' 300th birthday today, and Wired.com is celebrating with a terrific article by Kristen Philipkoski.
The article also has a sidebar I wrote about Linnaeus, as well as 4-5 pages about Linnaeus from my book [Tags: linnaeus taxonomy wired everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 06:02 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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(Disclosure: I'm on Technorati's board of advisors. I saw an advance version of the changes, but otherwise had no direct influence. Also, although at some point I conceivably could make some indeterminate amount of money from Technorati, the fact that Dave Sifry is a friend influences my judgment more.)
Technorati has just done a major re-shaping of itself, which is interesting as a response to the increasing need for both pinpoint accuracy and broad context. Dave Sifry, the ceo, blogs about it here.
Technorati is driving down both roads simultaneously, which I think makes sense. On the one hand, if you want to do an old fashioned text search through blogs, the site has improved its engine and pared down the experience. If, on the other hand, you want to see information in context (and on the Web that of course means being able to explore that context further), the site has taken several steps:
1. The default search now is for tags, not for text in blogs. Tags are expressions of what the readers think a post is about, so some types of searches should return more accurate, relevant and interesting results. Of course, we also use tags in idiosyncratic ways, so only experience will tell whether and when tag searching is more satisfying than text searching. In any case, Technorati lets you click to search through text, if that's what you want. (You can go straight to the text search page via s.technorati.com.)
2. Technorati continues to include more sources and more types of information. In fact, the home page no longer positions Technorati as a blog search engine. "Include everything" is one of the key recommendations of Everything is Miscellaneous, so I like its continuing inclusiveness :)
3. These changes seem to move Technorati towards embracing topics as a basic unit of meaning. For example, if you search for "ron paul," you are taken to a page that assembles blog posts, videos and photos about the controversial Republican. There are tabs for music and events as well, although in this case Technorati didn't find any. There's also a "WTF" post, an explanation of the topic generated and voted on by users. (It's displaying the WTF by siegheilneocon, which only got 27 votes, instead of the one by beckychr007, which got 61 votes, seeming to prefer the most recent to the most popular, which is either a bug or I'm not understanding it.)
Topics are an important way to cluster ideas. At the moment, Technorati has no concept of a topic apart from a tag, however. The infrastructure to do more is in place, because the site already displays a list of related tags. The results pages don't bring in the content from those tags, though. For example, if "john mccain" were a related tag, it might make sense to bring some of that tagged material into the "ron paul" topic page. That would give us a broader view of the topic. Conflating topics with tags can increase the precision of results — but not for highly ambiguous tags such as "shot" — but can also reduce the context and thus our understanding. Granted, figuring out algorithmically what's relevant and how it's relevant is no small challenge. (Maybe if some topic pages were marked as especially worthwhile and stable, not all of the clean up and construction would have to be done algorithmically.)
Likewise, at some point it'd be good to start relating topics, so that the system knows that "ron paul" is (in some sense) contained by "republicans" and republicans are related to "politics." This sort of information can eventually be gleaned folksonomically from the tags. Of course there'd be nothing wrong with using existing taxonomies and ontologies to help further refine the relationships among topics. It's always going to be a messy, overlapping, shifting mass of connections, but, well, so are we.
This is not a criticism of what Technorati has done. In fact, I mean it as a way of expressing my excitement about where it goes from here. [Tags: technorati folksonomy tagging search blogs everything_is_miscellaneous]
I just heard about TagAndFacet, a tool that lets you tag Web sites, Outlook messages, and Windows files for easy re-finding. It also lets you declare "facets" -- metadata categories of continuing use -- so you can do faceted, tree-like browsing. A version is available for free with a limit on how many items you can tag; a for-pay version should be available soon. (I haven't yet tried it.)
Posted by self at 07:02 AM
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The latest in my Everything Is Miscellaneous series of interviews, sponsored by the Harvard Berkman Center and Wired, has been posted. I talk with Arianna Huffington about whether the Huffington Post is what the news is going to look like as reporting itself enters the swirl of the miscellaneous. (Along the way I learn not to use the word "revenge" even in a light way with Ms. Huffington.) (Disclosure: I sometimes write for HuffingtonPost; I don't get paid for it.) [Tags: arianna_huffington huffingtonpost podcast media newspaper politics revenge]
Posted by self at 08:05 AM
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RU Sirius interviewed me about the book. I thought he asked good questions. I haven't had a chance to listen (still on the book tour), but he tells me there were some technical problems with the Skype connection :( [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ru_sirius ]
Posted by self at 08:35 PM
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At long last, and overdue, I've posted the prologue and first chapter of Everything Is Miscellaneous.
Rob Paterson has posted a thoughtful review, focusing on the the themes of power and meaning, which are indeed central to the book. Also, he says he was unable to stop reading it, which purely on writerly grounds, I love to hear. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous rob_paterson]
Posted by self at 12:32 PM
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See you at a talk and book signing at Kepler's Books, 1010 El Camino Real, in Menlo Park, CA tonight (Tuesday) at 7:30?
Posted by self at 02:05 AM
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Posted by self at 08:50 AM
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Yahoo has posted the video of my hour discussion with Bradley Horowitz about Everything is Miscellaneous. It's also available as an iPod compatible form. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous yahoo bradley_horowitz]
Posted by self at 09:23 AM
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Terry Heaton reviews Everything is Miscellaneous very favorably, especially in light of Terry's interests in the media industry.
Kermit Snelson writes about it in terms of identity and power.
Dave Rogers talks about it based ( he says) on reading a few sentences in a book store. He doesn't like it. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 08:23 AM
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The Data Mining blog maps the blogosphere into some very pretty shapes... (Thanks, Betsy, for the link.) [Tags: blogosphere maps everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 08:15 AM
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I really enjoyed the bloggers "Everything Is Miscellaneous" get-together last night. Since everyone there already had a copy of the book — we gave them away — I said I would tell them the non-marketing explanation of what the book is about: ...
More at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com...
Posted by self at 09:39 AM
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JP Rangaswami elaborates on "Filter on the way out" (one of the principles in the book). (My comments)
Tom Matrullo writes beautifully about whether my book points to a change of any real significance. (My comments)
Electronic Museum appreciates and expands on some of Cory Doctorow's ideas in the Miscellaneous Podcast interview I did with him.
Frank Paynter is enthusiastic while at the same time finding lots to disagree with.(My comments)
Weblogg-ed wishes there were more in it about education. (My comments) [Tags: tom_matrullo everything_is_miscellaneous frank_paynte jp_rangaswami electronic museum weblogg-ed]
Posted by self at 08:08 AM
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The next in the Miscellaneous Podcast interview series is up at Wired.com. I talk with Markos Moulitsas Zúniga — you know him as Kos of DailyKos, of course/. How does the site manage to be both mass and intimate? And does the structure that allows that imply a politics?
(The series is sponsored by Wired and the Berkman Center.) [Tags: markos kos dailykos politics wired berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 07:13 AM
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Betsy Devine and JP Rangaswami have both posted reviews of Everything Is Miscellaneous (both quite favorable), but I'm getting embarrassed about posting each time someone reviews the book. On the other hand, I like acknowledging the work and thought that goes into them (yes, even the negative ones). So, I've added a list of reviews in the right-hand column (below the podcast blurb), and will probably batch up reviews more.
I'll continue listing them separately at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com, where I also have a page that lists them with a little commentary.
Does this seem like a sensible approach? Or, for the sake of marketing, should I crow about each review separately?
Posted by self at 03:55 PM
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Amazon is beefing up it's RSS-ing of tags. (More at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com)
Posted by self at 03:24 PM
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Scoble's got a brief review of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which he calls "a great read."
Ed Yourdon writes up the first chapter, quite perspicaciously!
Britt Blaser reviews the talk I gave at the NY Public Library and our dinner afterwards.
Chris Locke reviews why he hasn't yet picked up his copy from the post office. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]
BTW, I'm keeping a list of all reviews - good, bad and indifferent - at the Everything Is Misc site. I'll also mention them here as well.
Posted by self at 11:31 PM
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My publishers have loaded up the next two weeks with lots of stops on a book tour. But most of them are at various company headquarters. Here are some of the events that are open to the public:
Raleigh, NC: May 8, 7pm - Quail Ridge Books (3522 Wade Ave, Ridgewood Shopping Center)
San Francisco: May 9, 6-8pm - Bloggers get-together at Brickhouse (3223 Mission St.), sponsored by Dabble and Yahoo Brickhouse (thanks!)
Sunnyvale, CA: May 11, noon Menlo Park, CA : May 15, 7:30pm - Kepler's Books (1010 El Camino Real)
I'll also be on the radio, including on "Tech Nation" on KQED, May 15, 2:30-3:30 PDT. And I'm scheduled for a wide variety of other radio interviews as well, so don't be surprised if you hear me sputtering in your ear while you jog... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 08:31 PM
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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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Cory Doctorow's review of Everything is Miscellaneous at BoingBoing is like the review I daydream about occasionally (= obsessively), except he explains my book better. Thank you, Cory. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous cory_doctorow reviews boingboing ]
Posted by self at 09:08 AM
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On Thursday, I'm doing a book talk at the NY Public Library Science, Industry and Business Library, 5:30-7pm (188 Madison Ave. at 34th St.). It's free and open to the public, of course.
See you there? [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 06:55 PM
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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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Tony Ferraro and David Stone are giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on on "Applications of Social Networking Technology to Medical Treatment." They're talking about applying social networking to victims of trauma and torture. David recommends Richard Mollica's Healing Invisible Wounds. [As always, I'm typing quickly, summarizing, missing points, getting stuff wrong...But the podcast will be available on the Berkman media site.]
There are three technology components to David's model for using social networks for victims of trauma and torture: Psiphon to build community for people in closed countries , 360Hubs, and using SecondLifeSecondLife for the victims of trauma. He starts up SecondLife and visits a genealogy island, Adam ondi Ahman. It offers lanterns to those who are grieving. "SecondLife could be a valuable tool in the treatment of trauma."
Q: How about much of the world that doesn't have access to SecondLife? Q: [me] What would a SecondLife therapeutic community for victims of torture and trauma be like? Q: Would there be therapists identified as such? Now Tony talks about 360Hubs. "The world is changing," he says. He points to OneBillionBulbs.com, an organization encouraging people to switch out ther incandenscent lightbulbs. "How can we use the Internet to impact the society in which we live."
Affinity Hubs are "specialized, web-based relationship networks where hub mumbers have a common interest or practice, i.e., a professional practice, an alumni association, or sports affiliation." 360Hubs' tools are: Web content management, knowledege management, online collaboration and social networking. "If we can connect researchers across the Web and put them in touch with victims of trauma, the inter-agency infrastructure the patient communities, social support, information...bringing them together in these Web communities..."
360Hubs typically has dealt with businesses. Now they're applying it to trauma victims. It enables a community to aggregate and focus.
Q: How do you screen out quacks? A: [tony] We can build in identity validation.We can keep people out of the community until they've been validated.
Q: Where are you in the process? What are some of your strategies for bringing together experts and users? Q: Are you trying to engage notable people in the field first? How do you build a community? A: [tony] David needs to identify exactly the needs of the infrastructure. He's refining the vision.
Q: You will inevitably be seen as validating people. A: [david] I use the Internet to supplement real life interaction.
Q: As more and more counseling services are available in SecondLife and other Web services, it enables people who don't get out never to get out. It becomes one more way to sit and get what they want without ever interacting with real humans. Q: Are you familiar with grouploop.com for kids dealing with cancer. There are therapists and various levels of privacy. Q: What's the policy for putting up information? Q: Isn't there more room for government involvement, coordinating agencies, ensuring the privacy of shared medical data, etc. Q: [me] Beyond the technology, how are you going to get people involved? Q: And the policies, affordances, etc.? A: [tony] The community will work this out. It'll change through the community. [Tags: trauma torture therapy tony_ferraro 360hubs secondlife berkman]
Posted by self at 03:19 PM
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The Berkman Center is holding a launch party for Everything Is Miscellaneous on April 30. I'll give a talk at 6pm in Pound Hall Room 335, and then there will be a reception at 7pm at the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street. (Pound Hall is a block away.)
You are invited. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]
Posted by self at 04:55 PM
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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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Yesterday I gave a talk at the Mass Technology Leadership Council's Social Media Cluster — 30 minutes followed by 90 minutes of questions and discussion. Paul Gillin, who'd suggested me to the group (thanks Paul!), and is the author of the just-published The New Influencers, made the point (relevant in context) that traditional direct mail marketers are thrilled to get a 3% return rate. "I don't know of any other case where a failure rate of 97% is considered a success."
From the front of the room Dan Bricklin responded instantly. "Sperm," Dan said. It made me laugh. But, as Dan points out, it's a common strategy in nature.
BTW, Dan's posted a podcast of the session. [Tags: nature direct_mail marketing sperm dan_bricklin paul_gillin mtlc everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:55 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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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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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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The Boston Globe has a good article by Marcella Bombardieri about colleges using students to blog to give prospective students a sense of what life is like there. About 25% of colleges do this. Some pay, some don't. Some see the blogs before they're posted, some don't. All say they have a high tolerance for negative or embarrassing posts.
Wouldn't a prospective student do better to find students who are just blogging, rather than ones who are sponsored by the school admissions department? On the other hand, have you tried to find, say, MIT blogs at Technorati? Let me give you a hint: The "related tags" listed for "mit" are "technology, und, der, zu, den, das, von, ein and auch." Who tags anything "zu" or "von," the equivalent of tagging an English-language post as "to" or "of."
(Disclosure: I'm on Technorati's board of advisors.) [Tags: college conversational_marketing marketing cluetrain blogs everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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Wendy Seltzer is a founder of ChillingEffects.org. She talks about her "run in" with the National Football League.
Wendy waits for the room to fill by running a very funny YouTube clip of the Daily Show segment about Viacom vs. YouTube. (The room is now packed.)
She was watching the Super Bowl and saw the notice: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." She took the clip off her MythTV and posted it to YouTube under the title "Super Bowl Highlights," with a caption that said: "The NFL's overreaching copyright claim." That was on Feb. 8. Five says later, she got a notification from YouTube saying that they had taken the clip down because the NFL claimed it was infringing under the DMCA .
YouTube had received a list of 158 clips the NFL claimed was infringing. It's likely that the NFL had a robot search for anything that was titled or tagged as NFL. Wendy asked to see the list and received it.
Wendy believes her clip was Fair Use of copyrighted material. That copyright doesn't protect people from giving accounts of the game or describing the game. It doesn't even prevent people from making some pictures from the telecast. Wendy's clip was Fair Use because:
My use is for nonprofit educational purposes; the copyright in the telecast is thin; the portion of football that follows the copyright warning is a minute portion of the whole, with no significant action or commentary, useful to show people what it was the NFL claimed its copyright covered; and the effect on the market for or value of the work is non-existent. At ChillingEffects, there is a counter-notification generator form that requires the claimant to get specific about why the piece is infringing. Wendy filled it in. This gives YouTube the ability to re-post the material without penalty; the poster now takes the heat if the complainant still complains. Wendy says this isn't quite an even balance because YouTube's terms of service protect it from complaints by users anyway, so while Viacom can sue YouTube for not taking a clip down, users can't really sue YouTube if it doesn't put the clips back up upon receipt of a counter-claim.
YouTube put Wendy's clip back up.
Then, on March 18, YouTube once again removed it because the NFL again complained. Wendy says that the DMCA has no explicit mention of a second take-down notice. If a company doesn't like a counter-notification, it can sue.
This time, it was clear that an individual from the NFL had actually watched the clip. But, Wendy thinks they were falling foul of 512f of the DMCA, which makes a person liable for damages (including lawyers' fees) for knowingly misrepresenting that a clip is infringing. YouTube was required to pass along Wendy's original counter-notification, so the NFL knew that Wendy was saying that the clip was for educational purposes.
Wendy sent back the same counter-notification. The Wall Street Journal blog and the Newark Star Ledger covered it, resulting in a letter from the NFL saying that Wendy clearly "doesn't understand" the DMCA. They objected to the fact that Wendy included 20 seconds of game play around the ten-second copyright notice. But, the letter said, she has their permission to use just the copyright notice. (She included the 20 seconds as context. It does not show a complete play.)
Wendy wrote back, saying that she thinks the clip in its entirety is covered under Fair Use.
They replied with an email, saying that "there is a substantial difference of opinion us on this matter that cannot be reconciled." So, the clip is still on line. But the NFL says it can offer no assurance they won't complain again.
YouTube is built on the DMCA safe harbor (512c) that says that it doesn't have to screen or filter content, or check the copyright of each piece posted. Instead, YouTube has to reply to claims of infringement. No one has alleged that YouTube has not responded. It's followed the DMCA to the letter. Instead, Viacom et al. say that it's "too hard" to send YouTube all these notices, so they want to shift the burden to YouTube. Even if YouTube could manage to do all that work, the next startup would find that too high a hurdle; it'd badly hurt innovation...a chilling effect. "I think they're trying to renege on the deal that was struck with the DMCA." Wendy would like to see the DMCA reformed "to address some of the burdens on speech" but not thrown out.
Q: (catherine bracy) Why do you think the NFL is "materially misrepresenting"? Q: (bracy) Can I take a camera into the stadium, tape it, and put it onto YouTube? Q: Could you sell it? The "knowingly misrepresents" phrase, Wendy says, was added by the entertainment industry to make it harder to sue complainants.
Q: (john palfrey) What's their strongest case against your Fair Use claim? Q: What might your damages be under 512f? Q: (gene koo) How long can this take-down and put-back dance go on? Q: (me) Someone posted an aggregation of Couric's questions of the Edwards. It was taken down. Was that fair use? And if this had been done by Jon Stewart, would it be protected the same way it was for the amateur who posted it. [Tags: berkman fair_use copyleft copyright nfl youtube dmca]
Posted by self at 01:45 PM
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The Conversations Network (a non-profit from the same folks who bring you IT Conversations) has just launched Podcorps, an all-volunteer team of "stringers" who will record the audio and sometimes the video of public events that matter to people.
Once you register, you can search for events near you that you can sign up to record. Or, if you know of an event you'd like covered, go stick it into the calendar. (The FAQ says that some stringers may want some help covering expenses, but this is intended to be an entirely non-profit enterprise.) The stringers can then publish the media where they want, although Podcorps expects most will post them at OurMedia.org and the Internet Archive where they are freely available to anyone.
I hope this takes off. More is better than less. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of the Conversations Network.) [Tags: podcasts politics events everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 09:14 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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It's three in the morning in the US. I am in the Zurich airport, waiting for my flight to Helsinki. I am high on Dramamine. All of which will help explain why at the moment it seems plausible to me to say: Truth is a property of networks.
I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn't an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.
It is, of course, an unowned, self-contradictory, unsettled truth that is too big to be contained by any individual. It is outside of us and among us. It is gained not by trying to contain it but by traveling through it.
Of course, the fact that I'm traveling at the moment has no effect on my choice of metaphors.
And the fact that I'm dog tired has no effect on my decision to post this instead of letting it melt in the light. [Tags: truth philosophy networks wrong_in_public everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 02:51 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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I just received my first copy of the final, real, tangible edition of Everything is Miscellaneous. The book goes on sale May 1.
The book is sitting on our dining room table like a mousetrap I'm afraid to check. I'm squeamish. No one likes to see a dead mouse. I dread reading it because all that it can contain for me are errors, infelicities and missed opportunities. The paper has absorbed the ink. It is irrevocable. My sentence has been pronounced.
But I'm going to have to read it because I no longer remember exactly what's in it and what I cut. I couldn't even at the drop of a hat summarize the book's argument, at least not without some throat clearing and stumbles. And it is an argument that develops over the course of chapters, which may be a problem for reviewers who expect a business book that blurts out its idea early on. But Times Books has been great about dropping hats all over, so I'm going to have to be able to recount the argument in a couple of pithy sentences...and then, if all goes well, repeat those sentences in lots of venues.
I think it's a good book. At least, when I finished it, I thought I'd done pretty much what I had wanted to do. So, don't take the fact that I've hidden the printed copy under a pile of junk mail as a judgment of the book itself. Rather, it's the done-ness that scares the bejeebus out of me. It was much less scary when it was still possible.
[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous publishing books phobias ]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM
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Matthew Burton has developed a site — ReadableLaws.org — as a thesis (under the estimable Prof. Jay Rosen) where we can translate legislation into understandable English and discuss its implications. The first bills posted include one to broaden Fair Use, one that criminalizes hiding information about video games to skirt the ratings, and an expansion of Internet monitoring to prevent child pornography.
I can see the implications pages getting bogged down because the site has no built-in way of handling disagreements, but the translation-into-understandability pages look like a great idea. (And maybe the implications pages will work out, too.)
This is all part of Jay's NewAssignment.Net project. [Tags: laws wikis media legislation matthew_burton jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 08:14 PM
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Ok, so maybe a little blogging today...live from Union Station in DC.
Tristant Louis points to JibberJobber, a site that aggregates personal info from all those other personal info sites you've logged onto, liked LinkedIn and Plaxo. It's all part of the continuous meta-oneupmanship we're seeing as we pull together the info we're dispersing like Johnny Appleseeds with holes in our seed bags. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous metadata]
Posted by self at 12:33 PM
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This video is very funny, if you're the type of Web 2.0 geek who finds "Quakr Oars" funny. (Thanks to BoingBoing.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 12:05 PM
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Harvard University Libraries held a workshop on social tagging and other such technologies last week. I blogged it here. Now the videos are up. Part I Part II. (I spoke in part I.) [Tags: tagging libraries folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 11:51 AM
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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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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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Jessica Duda blogs the Politics Online Conference. Good overview. [Tags: politics politics_online_conference jessica_duda]
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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Jon Udell suggests the government have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund (to complement the already-existing Presidential Campaign Fund) to pay for the aggregation and tagging of raw video footage of the candidates so that citizens can "slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis." Every question and every answer ought to be tagged, as Jon suggests elsewhere.
I of course like the prospect of having a huge pile of well-tagged candidate videos — it's so miscellaneous! — but I think there's zero prospect of this coming through the government. Nor should it. We've got the pile, thanks to YouTube and the candidate's own sites. If we get it tagged well enough, someone will build a site that lets us search through them and cluster them. And if someone builds a site, we'll tag 'em well enough. It could be a citizen group, a media site, or YouTube or Technorati. One way or another, this is likely to happen no check-off boxes required. [Tags: elections politics campaigns jon_udell everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 02:52 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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From Ranganathan, the founder of library science:
"Since multiplicity of helpful order among specific subjects is a fact independent of library classification - a fact to be reckoned with in arrangement - how are we to provide for it? It is a case of arranging concrete materials - books and other kindred materials - in such a way that one kind of arrangement presents itself to one person and another kind to another person. To secure this by pressing a button is obviously possible only in the world of fancy; it is not possible in the world of reality."
Ranganathan, Philosophy of Library Classification (1951) Via Tim Spalding via Jacob Glenn [Tags: ranganathan taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 09:52 AM
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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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You know you're late to the party when you're trying out a technology after the Wall Street Journal has reported on it, but I finally enrolled in Twitter.com.
For one day, it's been fun, although if I can't get it to work with IM, I can't imagine I'll remember to continue. (I still don't do SMS texting. Over the legal age limit.)
It does raise the question of how granular our self-presentation is going to be. Where does it end? Synaptic RSS feeds? "I'm extending my triceps. Vesicles filling with acethylcholine...reaching action potential...Extension achieved!..More in 0.015 seconds..." [Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 05:47 PM
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Jay Rosen's well-thought-through project in citizen journalism has posted its first assignment. Jay doesn't suggest that NewAssignment is the only way citizen journalism will proceed. Rather, it's one attempt to take advantage of one of the opportunities a networked citizenry affords. Are there stories that a crowd could cover that an individual journalist could not? (But this is a well-organized crowd, with editors, assignments and collaborative tools.)
The first assignment is a self-referential one: What's going on with crowdsourcing, and with peer production in general? If you want to participate by investigating, reporting or writing, Amanda Michel tells you how.
It'll be fascinating to see if Jay and his group have gotten the weights and balances right to enable this thing to take off. If not, they can always nudge it this way or that. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor. It's a non-profit.)
[Tags: newassignment journalism citizen_journalism media everything_is_miscellaneous jay_rosen news]
Posted by self at 09:10 AM
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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? QJune 14, 2007
Messiness cmmentary on NPR
June 13, 2007
the Harvard-Wired Miscellaneous Podcasts: Paul English of Kayak
June 10, 2007
Knowledge and realism
June 09, 2007
What Ted Nelson actually said about intertwingularity
June 08, 2007
Setting info free
Newspapers' sustainable value
June 06, 2007
Zoom 10000000.0
Everything Is Miscellaneous online chat this afternoon at 2pm EDT
Cool tech at NY Tech Meetup
A: We have an advertiser tag since ads are sought by users. We hope our community will suss out the fake stories. And we require people to declare that they're not affiliated [she said, rolling her eyes a bit].
A: We think it's quite portable internationally.
A: Thousands.
Berkman-Wired podcast interview with Craig
June 04, 2007
TagsAhoy - your tag aggregator
Ambient Intimacy
June 03, 2007
Moira Gunn's TechNation interview with me
Moira Gunn's TechNation interview with me
June 02, 2007
Fauxonomy redux
May 30, 2007
Harvard-Wired podcast interview with Jimmy Wales
Everything Is Miscellaneous at The Well
May 29, 2007
"If you love your information..."
May 28, 2007
Truth and Categories
May 25, 2007
Retarded metadata
May 24, 2007
JSTOR and open access
May 23, 2007
Happy Birthday, Linnaeus...and an excerpt from my book
Salon's "Miscellaneous" interview with me
Technorati focuses on tags 'n' topics
May 16, 2007
Misc. Podcast interview: Arianna Huffington
May 15, 2007
RU Sirius interview up
Miscellaneous samples are up
Tuesday night - Kepler's Books in Menlo Park
May 14, 2007
Yahoo interview
May 13, 2007
Video of my Yahoo interview with Bradley Horowitz
Misc. reviews
Blogosphere mapped
May 10, 2007
Bloggy party
May 09, 2007
"Miscellaneous" miscellany
Podcast interview with Kos
May 08, 2007
Aggregating review notices
Amazon's tag feeds
May 06, 2007
"Miscellaneous" reviews
May 05, 2007
Book tour schedule
11am OR Noon (time being resolved) - Yahoo, discussion with Bradley Horowitz
May 04, 2007
James Governor: Brevity Rocks. Love Twitter.
May 03, 2007
BostonNOW goes bloggy
Cory's review of Miscellaneous
May 02, 2007
Talking in NYC on Thursday
May 01, 2007
Berkman-Wired podcast interview series, starting with Cory
[berkman] Social networking and medicine
A: Psiphon allows some communication between those who have left and those left behind.
A: I've been observing SecondLife communities engage constructively to support one another. I think it's possible to intentionally create such a community.
A: There already are. Maybe someone at Berkman knows the law about licensing therapists in SecondLife...
A: [david] We're trying to empower a population that's already doing work — manage it, measure, etc. — so they can be more effective at it.
A: [david] We're just getting launched. Over the next six months, we'll be writing funding proposals.
A: The communities are already there. They just don't have the technical infrastructure/ There are maybe 60,000 people in Atlanta who have undergone torture and trauma.
A: [tony] the Internet already does that.
A: [tony] For some people, it enables people who can't deal with going out to connnect with others.
A: [tony] Our software lets you manage privacy, so can specify who has access to what you write.
A: [tony] Those are all real concerns.
A: [david] Everyone I've talked with wants to be involved, mainly people at agencies and organizations.
A: I've created self-sustaining communities before. We're just beginning to think this through for this particular application. We are beginning together a team, to go out and learn from people, etc. It's a stone soup situation: Everyone who participates brings something to it.
April 27, 2007
Book launch at the Berkman on Monday
Chris Lydon's interview posted
April 25, 2007
Dan Bricklin's 97% rule
Web of Ideas tonight, Open Source Radio tomorrow
April 24, 2007
Media revenge
Free as in kittens
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
Colleges marketing through blogs
April 17, 2007
[berkman] Wendy Seltzer on ChillingEffects and copyright take-downs
A: They know that this is non-infringing. The second notification makes it harder to claim it was a good faith mistake.
A: The guards frisk you and say that your ticket is a contract that prevents you from using a camera. You could look on from a rooftop and tape it from there.
A: There's no copyright in the game itself, so yes. But if you tape a concert you can hear from your house, there's copyright in the music itself. And "Super Bowl" is trademarked, which is why ads for, say, chips say things like "Stock up for the big game."
A: Their strongest claim against the 20 seconds of football is that I haven't transformed it or added educational material into the clip itself. They'll say the announcers describing the plays is a creative work. And there are markets for licensing virtually everything, they'll say. If they want phone companies to continue paying them to stream clips to cellphones, this is a market into which I'm intruding.
A: It's hard to quantify damages from speech. I didn't lose money from students not attending class because I couldn't talk about the clip, etc.
A: California recognizes that legal process can be used to squelch legitimate speech, so if this process continued, I might have a claim.
A: Yes, it sounds like fair use, and Stewart and the poster are protected by the same law. But there is no DMCA coverage for broadcast. I don't know if Stewart licenses his clips or just asserts they're fair use.
April 16, 2007
Podcorps Nation
April 14, 2007
Networked truth, part 2
April 13, 2007
Networked truth
April 12, 2007
Co-teaching a course at Harvard Law
April 11, 2007
Code? Nah. Codes? Maybe.
April 07, 2007
Hardened copy
This scan doesn't do the cover justice
The blue is metallic and the little circles are really
just shiny, shellacked bits. The cover, as they say, pops.April 05, 2007
Readable Laws: The Wiki
Meta-meta JibberJobber
April 03, 2007
Supermarket 2.0 the Video
Harvard Libaries Social Tagging Forum video is up
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 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 24, 2007
Politics Online Conf blogged
March 23, 2007
Tumblr is the new Twitter
March 22, 2007
Candidate tag
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.
Ranganathan's fantasy
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?
March 16, 2007
I'm all a-twitter
March 14, 2007
NewAssignment's new assignment
March 13, 2007
[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.]
