CYC is now available as an open source download. This is Douglas Lenat’s massive attempt to compile a database that will be able to answer the most ordinary of questions, simulating common sense, things that we humans know because we live in a contextual world: Is a kiss an appropriate way to say goodbye to a cab driver? If I run over a raccoon, which will pop, the raccoon or my tires? Which makes a better tool for cutting through the tape on a package I receive in the mail, a dime, a quarter or a CD?

CYC is so fundamentally wrong about how the mind works that it staggers me that we fall for it. Andy Clarke’s Being There brilliantly shows why. (I wrote about Clarke here.) So does Hubert Dreyfus’ stuff.

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Unfortunately, CYC (or whatever software is running the web site) isn’t smart enough to know how to put commas into long numbers; it reports the file size of the download as “39955940.” Have I ever mentioned how much this irks me?

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The Boston Globe yesterday ran a story on the front of its “Living/Arts” section about the reporter’s evening at a fire walking session. For $95 the Globe journalist was helped to find the spiritual strength within that allowed her to walk over hot coals without pain or scarring.

I’m no scientist but I’m sure someone will correct me when I say: What a load of crap! Isn’t the “miracle” of fire walking due simply to the fact that hot, ash-covered coals don’t transfer heat very quickly? I mean, I can put my hand into an oven for a few seconds without getting burned even though the air inside is 375 degrees, but if I touch the aluminum pan inside, I burn immediately because aluminum transfers heat much more quickly than air does. Same temperature but one burns and the other doesn’t. No spiritual/mystical explanation required.

The Globe ought to be ashamed of itself for spreading this type of crap.

[Alternative last line: Hey, Globe, put it in a blog!]

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Virgil Iliescu has put it in a blog.

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With some too-patient hand holding by Kevin Marks, I seem to have succeeded in getting blogger.com to wrap this blog with the appropriate RSS tags. As a result, aggregators around the globe can now ignore JOHO on purpose.

Click on the “xml” button to the left to see this blog the way it looks to a machine.

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As one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, I thought I’d pass along this outstanding example of “clueful” marketing that arrived in my inbox this morning:

From: Jenny Witherspoon [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 7:57 PM
To: 100@FREE MEMBERSHIP THIS WEEK!
Subject: hello

Hello this is Jenny Witherspoon I am one of the featured girls on www.amatureacadamys.com We are giving away 100 % FREE memberships for this week to see how people like it. Please check it out and let me know what you think! Hit me up on AOL Instant Messenger My Screen Name is JennyAmature82 If you don’t like watching XXX videos , webcams, and looking at my NUDE pictures you may not want to join.

Regards,
Jenny Witherspoon
www.amatureacadamys.com

She really seems to have read and absorbed our book! This is non-money-focused (“FREE”), acknowledging that connection is more important than shoving coins over the line. It’s all about joining with other people (“memberships”) rather than mass marketing to a faceless crowd. In fact, she even gives out her IM account number so we can make direct contact! She doesn’t put on a phony veneer of perfection — you can really hear her own voice. This doesn’t sound like it was written by a committee and then deloused by lawyers! She signs her own name. And she’s totally upfront about the fact that her product isn’t perfect, acknowledging that we may not even be interested in it. Wow! It’s great to know we’ve had this type of effect!

I’m so proud!

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Well, here’s a briarpatch of postmodern netiquette (= “nettlequette”?). If you’re reading this because AKMA sent you over here because I chided Ms. Witherspoon on her spelling while introducing my own spelling error, you will notice that my blog entry in in fact makes no reference to Ms. Witherspoon’s spelling. I had taken that line out because there is no actual misspelling in her message except of “amateur” in her domain name. But I thought I’d taken out that reference before I posted it. Apparently not. So, AKMA must have read a posting that was up for just a few minutes this morning, and I’ll be damned (actually, I will be damned, but that’s a different story) if I’m going to re-introduce the inaccurate sentence about her spelling just so AKMA’s tweak still makes sense. (I am, however, leaving in my misspelling.) As for AKMA’s main point – that I am an annoying, self-righteous twit who recognizes flaws in everyone except himself – well, yes, I assume that that’s obvious.

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Kevin Marks points us to a BBC piece about Afghan women blogging their way back into the daylight, and Halley reruns a related blog entry. It’s one of those things that makes you think this Internet stuff might actually make a difference.

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Graeme Thickins points us to a Salon review (By Andrew Leonard) of a book — Ruling the Root by Milton Mueller — about the way in which the special interests that control ICANN control the DNS and thus inhibit free speech. Sounds interesting although the review makes it sound as if the regrettable advantage the incumbent brands have in holding onto their names and variants means that the Internet is doomed. To me, the most alarming point in the review is:

“With the emergence of domain name-trademark conflicts, the WHOIS protocol took on a new function,” writes Mueller. “It became a surveillance tool for intellectual property holders…Copyright interests now view expanded WHOIS functionality as a way to identify and serve process upon the owners of allegedly infringing Web sites”

Sounds like a must-read.

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Ryan Ireland wants to start a group read of the book Empire by Hardt and Negri. If you’re interested, head on over.

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Steve Yost disagrees with my comment about why companies aren’t adopting collaborative software at the pace at which reason would seem to dictate.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke links to a very funny database of chat quotes. Be sure to see what Michael selects as his favorite. Very funny. (Kudos to Michael for having the least visible permalink on the Web. Runner up: Eric Raymond.)

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Scoop! Newspaper Ontogeny Recapitulated!

Turbulent Velvet has a fabulous piece on pseudonymity that provides a context to the modern phenomenon by looking at pseudonymity in 18th Century newspapers. Fascinating and, of course, directly relevant to what’s going on with weblogs.

It reminds me of Dan Bricklin’s terrific piece on the ways in which 18th Century pamphlets were similar to today’s home pages. Dan wrote this before weblogs were so common so it is even more relevant today since weblogs are what home pages were supposed to be.

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Hierarchy and Collaboration in the Globe

Back-to-back articles in the Boston Globe talk about the present hierarchical assumptions of business and the future of collaboration.

DC Denison pins his story on hierarchy on the intelligence failure that culminated on 9/11. He quotes Philip Evans, author of Blown to Bits, who says information hierarchies used to work because information itself was manageable.

The solution, according to Evans, is to create a system that allows for multiple, overlapping points where information can be sorted and analyzed. ”If we get better at sharing information across organizations,” he says, ”we’ll get better at processing an abundance of information effectively.”

The problem with information hierarchies isn’t that some people have more authority than others, it’s that the information flow is one-way and codified. In a non-hierarchical, web-based system, authority figures emerge, but they’re only as respected as their work entitles them to be. This is how it works with the columnists you choose to read … except now anyone can be a columnist even without being anointed as such. That’s why blogging seems like a transformative business tool to many of us.

Scott Kirsner‘s article today talks about the present and future of collaborative software, a category that has not taken off with the rapidity with which it deserves. Many of the major players are in the Boston area. including eRoom, SiteScape, Lotus and Groove Networks. But Redmond, and its $51M investment in Groove, looms over the region and the article.

Here’s the essential problem for the industry. Kirsner writes:

Simon Hayward at Gartner points out that the business world may take a bit longer before it embraces collaboration software as it has embraced e-mail. ”The technology can do a lot of great things, but the limiting factor is organizations’ interest in using it,” he says.

Yet Kirsner’s article is clear that the benefits of using collaboration software are multiple and manifest. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, although maybe you do since Lockheed Martin is the article’s lead example of a company using the stuff. So, why aren’t organizations more interested in using it?

One explanation: We are in the realm not of scientifical business management but organized religion. The issue isn’t business efficiency but the maintenance of power. Collaboration software does indeed hyperlink the hierarchy. And that’s just plain scary to The Establishment, the status quo and/or The Man. The price of admission is business’ corrupt soul.

(Notes: 1. The Globe’s window for free access to these columns is only a week or so. 2. Denison quotes me.)

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The OED and Blogging

Peterme reports that the Oxford English Dictionary is considering including the word “blog,” which Peterme coined. But the OED can only accept printed pages as sources for word coinages.

How long do you give that rule before it’s amended in a flurry of embarrassment? I presume it was originally meant to keep the OED out of arguments about oral origins: “I was the first to use the word ‘magikal’ with a K. It was in a shouting match I had in 1964.” Now it just keeps the OED out of relevancy and accuracy.

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Blogthreads at Last!

BurningBird has announced plans to build a service that will put the thread into blogthreads. If you register your blog with her new service (which is a few months away from launch), it will automatically scour it for links to other blogs so that when Tom replies to AKMA and Jeneane replies to Tom and then Tom replies to Jeneane and then Jennifer replies to AKMA, all that will be saved and will be made reference-able and link-able as a blogthread. Excellent!

This is something we really need. In fact, I hope that BurningBird’s work will be taken up by sites that are in the business of aggregating blogs — Google? DayPop? Are you interested? — so that blogthreads can be assembled from blog entries on sites that haven’t registered with BurningBird and, most of all, so that they can be indexed and returned by the search engines. Wouldn’t it be cool to search on, say, “forgiveness” and have Google and/or DayPop tell you not only that AKMA, Tom and Jeneane have blog entries about this but that there is an extensive blogthread on the topic?

I’ve written before about this and about the broader need for a threading standard; a conversation about the broader standard continues over at QuickTopic for anyone who’s interested.

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