In what sounds like one of those April Fools articles media outlets enjoy — ones with implausible premises like, oh, Karl Rove turning out to be the source for the outing of a CIA agent or George HW Bush’s ne’er-do-well son becoming president instead of Jeb — The Times of London is reporting that NTT in Japan has discovered that the human body’s electrical field is a superb conductor, suitable for downloading data:

NTT, the Japanese telecoms group, and the team of scientists that invented the Red Tacton system, envisage a future in which the human body acts as a non-stop conduit for information. Wireless networks — often hampered by intermittent service — will eventually be replaced, NTT says, by “human area networks”.

…

With Red Tacton sensors miniaturised and built into every type of device and product, the list of potential uses is endless, Hideki Sakamoto, of NTT, said during an exclusive demonstration for The Times. By simply touching an advertising poster, for example, product information and an order form could be sent to your laptop. Shake hands with a new contact, and every detail that would normally appear on a business card will leap across your arms and download itself to your mobile phone.

Oh, great, the very first example they can think of is spam. [Thanks to John Maloney for the link.] [Technorati tags: RedTacton Tacton]

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At the Thursday night Berkman blog meeting, Dave Winer is demo-ing his OPML editor, an outline editor. The room is crammed like the cheap seats on an incumbent airline. (OPML is mainly used these days as a way aggregators import/export lists of the feeds you subscribe to.) It lets you work in outline form, press the “save” button and the contents get posted to your blog. To update your blogroll, you open it in the editor, type, link and save. It has nested categories which, again, you edit using the editor. Press “Build RSS” and it does.

It’s OPML all the way through. E.g., the categories are an OPML file. Want to absorb someone else’s taxonomy? Open up her OPML file. Want to merge feed subscription lists? Drag and drop. Reorder the way you want, as if it were an outliner…because it is an outliner. You can link an entry to another OPML file and it links in the appropriate content as if it were actually part of the document. E.g., You might link the “Florida” heading to an URL that has an OPML outline of towns in Florida. When you click on the “Florida” heading, you’ll see the content of the outline of towns. [This makes it possible for an outline to contain multiple people’s expertise. Very cool.]

It’s Open Source. GPL. For Windows and Mac. Dave stresses that it’s just an application on top of an outliner framework. On the server, the OPML is turned into HTML, and that’s GPLed also. There are APIs that enable Dave’s OPML editor to work with other blogging software.

Graphically it’s very simple. At this point there are no numbers and sub numbers, no variation in typographic formatting to reflect hierarchical level, etc. But it’s open source, so if you want it, build it.

Dave says that what’s most important about this is that it’s a tool for representing the relationship between pieces of information. Its openness and its ability to link in other outlines — distributed nested knowledge — makes this more than cool.

[Technorati tags: opml DaveWiner blogs]

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On Wednesday, about 75 people crowded into a seminar room at Harvard Law to talk about H20 playlists, a Berkman project in beta that lets people build and share “lists” of online and offline resources. It grows out of projects started in 1998, including a structured forum (“Rotisserie”) for mutliple classes to discuss shared readings. (“H20” originally stood for “Harvard 2.0.” Hence, the 0 is a zero, not the letter O. [Later: Erica George in the comments says that it’s now H_2_Letter-0, like water. Sorry!]

Jonathan Zittrain says H20 mashes together iTunes (categorization, shared playlists), Amazon.com (reviews, recommendations…and “canonical links” to books, which Zittrain thinks would be better offered by a non-commercial entity), and Wikipedia.

Syllabi are the natural content for H20 playlists. The professor lists the books in her course, and now the playlist is available publicly. Molly Krause, a Berkperson who works on H20, says that the idea is to allow people to mix and remix knowledge, not necessarily attached to a course. For example, if you search for “free tools,” you’ll find a playlist someone created of sites with free tools. With a click, any item on her list can be added to yours. You can see all playlists with any particular item. You can see playlists derived from other playlists.

H20 is Web 2.0 compliant: Everything is tagged. All playlists are CreativeCommons licensed. It exports into RSS, with RDF and OPML on the way. An open API is under development. It’s open source. Just about every cut through the site is available as an RSS feed, so you could get a feed of a particular playlist, a tag, a person, etc. (At the moment, the feed runs a search and puts the highest-ranked — not the latest — items at the top, which IMO should be changed.)

There’s a reputation system built in, in part to diminish the visibility of spam.

On the plate for the next release: Collaborative playlists.

Here’s a link to a search for “anthropology”, just as an example.

Lots of interesting discussion which I have not attempted to capture.

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Hillary, I know you think you can count on my vote if you get the nomination. But you can’t, not if you keep up this relentless stream of irrelevant, pandering idiocy. [Technorati tags: HillaryClinton GTA]

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Tonight Dave Winer is coming back to the Berkman Thursday night bloggers meeting to talk about outliners ‘n’ stuff. We (= Steve Garfield) are trying out some crazy new FlashMeeting videocasting thing. You’ll be able to get the link here sometime before the 7pm meeting (to which you are of course invited to attend physically as well as virtually and spiritually)… [Technorati tags: berkman DaveWiner]

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An update from Dave Sifry of Technorati [Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the company]:

We are now tracking over 13.3 Million blogs, and there are about 80,000 new blogs created every single day. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 5 months, and posting volume has doubled in only 3 months – we are now indexing over 10 posts per second, sustained throughout the day – that’s about 900,000 posts per day. We’ve also experienced over 40% month-to-month growth in traffic for the last 4 months….

Some percentage of those 80,000 new blogs are spamblogs. And I find under a million posts per day to be oddly disappointing. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of blogs and a hell of a lot of posts. Why, that’s more than even Scoble can keep up with! (Scoble today warns Technorati that it’s being outperformed.)

(Proposed definition: scoble: 1. (v.) To scan a batch of posts. 2 (n.) 1,500 weblogs. E.g., She scobled three scobles of blogs in under 20 minutes.) [Technorati tags: technorati scoble blogs]

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Ross Mayfield at Many2Many has a terrific post about wikiHow, a project that he’s been usefully involved in. The post begins:

wikiHow is one of the more interesting cases of opening a proprietary content and community site. A couple of entrepreneurs bought eHow (editorially produced How To Guides, a dot com showcase) out of hock and appended a wiki to it. Today it may be the second fastest growing public wiki and they recently adopted Creative Commons licensing. The real story is the process of opening an asset, transitioning a community and how to be a net-enabled entrepreneur.

I poked around the site for a while. It’s got lots of potential, but could use more pages. Plus, as it takes off, will it generate the community of “wikihow-ians” required to keep the quality up? (In just a few minutes of looking, I quickly found some product-placement-style spam.) Also, there are some “how-to’s” — for example, how to deal with a child’s tantrum — that call out for listing alternatives.

Those questions aside, it’s a useful site and Ross’s article about it is very interesting and well done. [Technorati tags: wikihow RossMayfield wiki]

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“I also will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports. We’re in the midst of an ongoing investigation, and I will be more than happy to comment further once the investigation is completed.”

So said our President with Karl Rove seated four feet behind him.

I agree it’d be wrong to judge Rove based solely on media reports. So, W, here’s an idea: Turn around and ask him. [Technorati tags: KarlRove plame]

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David Isenberg — with whom I had dinner tonight — a couple of days ago blew apart FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s assertion that the US “leads the world” in broadband growth, as well as a bunch of other Happy Talk. Says Isenberg, we are #12 in broadband per capita. China’s growth rate is substantially greater than ours. Switzerland and the Netherlands have higher per capita acceptance and much faster growth. It would have been nice if the new Chairman had started out with some straight talk…

(PS: David is starting his term as a Berkman Fellow any day now.) [Technorati tags: fcc DavidIsenberg]

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Matt Cooper has served notice that he’ll report on his grand jury testimony, but only when the report can be locked inside of a future issue of Time. As Staci D. Kramer points out, “The magazine has a web site now and is no longer held hostage to weekly news cycles…”

So, what’s happened to the claim that journalism’s job is to keep America informed? [Technorati tags: MattCooper StaciKramer]

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