Stowe Boyd leads a discussion on what has to happen for business to embrace social software. What has to change? On the panel are Seth Goldstein and Kaliya Hamlin. It is an open discussion.

Because my head is 75% focused on my !@#$% broken laptop.

Interesting discussion. (Most of the people in the audience raise their hands when asked if they’ve tagged something at del.icio.us in the past week.) There is not agreement whether social software will change anything significant about business culture and operations. Some say that businesses will co-opt social software; others say that it will radicalilze them. (Sorry for the lack of detail. !@#$% laptop.)

[Tags: corante SocialSoftware CoranteSSA]

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I’m at a conference sponsored by Corante and hosted by Berkman, but I dropped my laptop and it is totally hosed. I did this about an hour before I was to present the opening talk. So I did it without my slides. But the bigger issue is that my laptop is hosed. It boots, but the System process is running 99% of the time. Also, the usb ports are dead and the IBM recovery softrware doesn’t load. This has me so upset that I’m not able to live blog. (I’m typing this on a friend’s laptop. Thanks, Jeanne.)

The irc is irc.freenode.net #corante. [Tags: corante SocialSoftware CoranteSSA]

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Jimmy Carter, our greatest ex-president, on what’s gone wrong. (Thanks to DC Stultz for the pointer.) The opening:

In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility…

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Here are two points that I had to remove from my piece in the Sunday Boston Globe due to space constraints. People have sent me email about both.

First, books are way complex. What is Hamlet? Any book of the play? The Signet edition? A reprint of the Signet edition? The Signet edition with a new preface? With errata corrected? The Signet large print edition? The German translation? The original manuscript? Hamlet in the one-volume Collected Works? This matters because when you’re looking for a copy of Hamlet, you’re acting as if that were unambiguous when in fact there are various forms of the book that will or will not satisfy you. This is the type of complexity that drives people to create ontologies. Short of that, xISBN tries to cluster books in reasonable ways. . And there’s a standard (I can’t lay my hands on it now — FRBR? — I’m slightly on the road) that lays out the various levels of abstraction.

Second, the original version of my article made the case — way too quickly — that contents are now metadata: E.g., you look up a phrase at Google Print to find out the name of the book. In fact, the only difference between metadata and data now seems to be that data is what you’re looking for and metadata is what you use to find it. (I’ve written about this before.) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous metadata taxonomy ontology]

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Scott Kirsner has a terrific column on whether and when buzz marketing goes over the line.

To me the principle is straightforward: Intentionally giving people extrinsic reasons to hawk your products frays the trust that enables conversation to proceed. It’s worse if the hawkers don’t disclose their extrinsic motivations, but even when they do, this type of buzz marketing makes life just a little bit worse.

Easy to say, but unfortunately hard to apply, as is the case with so many high and mighty principles… [Tags: marketing BuzzMarketing]

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This short piece in the Boston Globe Ideas section started out as an article about the Dewey Decimal system in the digital age, with Google Print as a hook. But the hook ate the fish. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous google GooglePrint metadata taxonomy]

Glenn Fleishman has a fascinating post about this very issue today. What a coincidence!

The question “What is a book?” just gets harder and harder the more you look at it. I’d interviewed a bunch of folks on this topic for the Globe piece, but it all got cut as my allotted length went from 1200 words to 750 due to reshuffling of ads or some such thing. (A good place to start: FRBR – Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.)

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The Washington Post reports that that the Democrats are seriously trailing the Republicans in the fund-raising race, and Howard Dean is being blamed for it.

Maybe if the Democratic Party sounded more like Candidate Dean, they’d raise more money, especially among the small donors. For example:

What is the Democratic Party’s position on the war in Iraq? Anybody know?

I went to the party’s site to find out. Holy crap, there are four major headings on the page: the blog, national, local and communities (= interest groups). The biggest issue in the country is the war in Iraq and it doesn’t even make it as a major heading in the Democrats agenda. “Dean Commemorates the Start of Yom Kippur” is on the home page, but not “Stop the war now!”

If you go to the pulldown for the small “Agenda” button at the top, the headings are: Strength at home, strength overseas, economic growth, better education…etc. “The war in Iraq” doesn’t make it into the top ten. The “strength overseas” link leads to a blog aggregator that does eventually list a few references to the war.

Here’s the closest I could come to a policy statement on the war, granted after only about five minutes of poking around: “That is why Democrats are unwavering in our commitment to pressing President Bush for a clear plan for victory in Iraq.”

So, Democrats favor “victory”? Then they bash Bush for not presenting a clear plan for it? Care to look in the mirror, fellas?

If the Democrats at this point still don’t have the courage to come out against the war, loudly, proudly and unambiguously, then to hell with them. [Tags: politics iraq democrats HowardDean]

spcoon made some of these same points, and a bunch of his own, last July. Seems like the site hasn’t hardly changed at all.

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Here’s a short short made by our daughter and her friends, all Emerson College students, as an entry in a Halloween festival. I love it, but I don’t want to say anything about so you can see it fresh. [Tags: LeahWeinberger movies halloween EmersonCollege]

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This EFF.org article by Fred von Lohmann looks at the end user license that comes with Sony CD’s. The EULA is 3,000 words long and contains such tight restrictions that almost any normal use of the CD violates the EULA. [Tags: eff DigitalRights sony]

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It’ll be easier for you to view this than for me to explain it. All I’ll say is that it’ll put your (where “your”=”my”)drawing abilities in perspective. (Caution: Transient line art nudity)

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