Umair does an excellent job putting DRM in an economic context. For example: “…the problem with DRM based on analog property rights is not that consumers won’t accept it – they might, for a while. It’s that it’s a brittle solution, which sets huge incentives for it’s own disruption.”

His approach is to create “…economic solutions which massively distribute incentives to share, by virally redistributing revenues.” (This is something Kevin Marks — the mediAgora — has also been talking about since a quarter before forever.) [Thanks for the link, AKMA!] [Technorati tags: umair drm KevinMarks]

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Andrew Rasiej will be a force for progressive values in NYC — not to mention all the free wifi you can eat — if he’s elected to the llittle-noticed office of Public Advocate. If you’re a NYC resident, the city will match any contribution up to $250 with a 4x donation — so your $250 gets the campaign $1250 — but only if you act by Monday, July 11th; by then the campaign has to have raised $125,000 to be eligible for the matching funds. Donate here. (Andrew was featured in the NYer recently.) [Technorati tags: rasiej politics nyc]

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Jonl is engaged in a very interesting conversation about “extreme democracy” at the venerable The Well. (The book Extreme Democracy, to which I contributed a chapter that I am now afraid to read is available for free here. (Since my chapter isn’t one of the numbered ones and I can’t get Acrobat working with Firefox this morning, I don’t know if my chapter is actually in the book.)) [Technorati tags: extremeDemocracy politics jonLebkowsky]

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, pegs his latest post to a description of G. Washington in McCullough’s 1776. It’s awkward for me to talk about this because I consult to Edelman PR (Richard has never even hinted that I should talk about his blog, although the company probably likes it when I do) and Richard’s post says nice things about me. Nevertheless: at his blog you can see an established PR firm honestly wrestling with the big change in context the Web is bringing about. If you’ve worked in PR – I did inside corporations for 10 years – you know that the Web excites every inappropriate PR instinct. To traditional PR folks, the Web looks like an opportunity for doing near-zero-cost one-to-one marketing, abusing the Net’s anonymity to manipulate market conversations. In that context, Richard’s current post is all the more to be appreciated, since it acknowledges important limits and scouts for new directions that don’t disrupt the Web’s ecology. [Technorati tags: pr edelmanPR ]

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Blogday is suggesting that on August 31, all bloggers link to five new blogs. How about if we link to 5 blogs from countries we don’t know enough about? (Sounds like something Global Voices would be interested in.)

I personally still want to see the blogosphere declare the first two weeks of August a global blogiday so we can all work on getting over our blog-induced carpal-tunnel syndrome…

[Technorati tags: blogday2005 blogiday blogs globalvoices]

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I’ve posted at Flickr photos from the Camp Jabberwocky part of the Fourth of July parade on Martha’s Vineyard.

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Stephen Jay Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marakech not only has an eye-opening, perfectly constructed chapter on Lamarck, he also writes compellingly about George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1708-1788), known to most of us simply as Buffon, the guy who is one “o” away from being a clown.

According to Gould, Buffon’s 44-volume Natural History proposed an alternative to Linnaeus’ system. Linnaeus (1707-1778) arranged species into clusters based primarily on the look of their sex organs. Within those clusters, species were ranked from simplest to most complex, and the clusters were themselves ranked, so it all formed a Great Chain of Being. Buffon, on the other hand, presented a more hyperlinked system (as he would certainly not have said): Bats are more like mammals in their anatomy but more like birds in their function. Since he he had to pick one and only one way of clustering the species — pages are bound into books in one and only one sequence — he did it not by finding one unique (essential) feature but by looking at their ability to interbreed.

Linnaeus’ system outlasted Buffon’s because Linnaeus’ “nested and hierarchical scheme…could be slotted into a genealogical interpretation — the arborescent tree of life….the the discovery of evolution woiuld soon impose upon any formal system of naming.” (p. 80)

So, Linnaeus’ system prevailed because its structure worked for a theory of evolution that was a hundred years away, although the actual divisions were made based on morphological relationships orthogonal (well, almost) to evolution. Buffon’s system didn’t prevail because, although he got the nature of relationship much closer to evolution’s (species = what can interbreed), it didn’t have the tree-like structure evolution requires.

Yet, Buffon’s multi-faceted system would work better than Linnaeus’ in the age of digital information since it would allow scientists to sort and organize for multiple purposes using multiple criteria. (Ranganathan was the Buffon of library science.)

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Our Social World in Cambridge, UK, Sept. 9 looks like it’s got a a great bunch of speakers. Theme: “Why don’t British businesses blog?” (Possible sub-theme: “Why are all the speakers men?”)

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In the comments, Bill K raises the prospect of the G8 coming up with a No Continent Left Behind Act. Now we’re talking!

If it follows the educational version of the act, the No Continent Left Behind Act will require continents to be tested every year to ensure accountability. Those that do not get passing grades will be given two years to get their scores up. After that, they will be shut down and the population will be dispersed to higher-achieving continents.

Problem solved!

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Loic has posted the iPod recording he made of the panel he moderated (and contributed to, of course) that consisted of Richard Edelman and me. He’s also posted my slides. (Note: it’s possible the PDF has substituted a default san serif font for my handwriting-as-truetype font.) Thanks, Loic!

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There’s something absurd about the impossibly beautiful, impossibly rich Brad Pitt saying “We have the potential to end poverty in our time; we can be that generation,” but there’s also something inspiring about it.

My generation thought we were revolutionizing consciousness. If the Pitt generation revolutionizes economics, history will judge that his generation got it right.

How ironic will it be if it turns out that, compared to the buff and perfected Pitt, the scruffy hippies turn out to be the narcissists?
[Technorati tags: live8 BradPitt]

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