You can see the Italian documentary about the US flattening of Fallujah, including the charge that we used white posphorus as a weapon, here in English. It’s half an hour and Gianluca, who passed me the link, warns that it’s “quite disgusting.”

You know what’s also quite disgusting? That the US did not sign the 1980 Geneva Conventions protocol banning its use. I understand that white phosphorus is good for lighting up battle scenes, but the risks — and the temptations — are too strong. Also, it makes us look like heartless warmongers. [Tags: iraq whitePhosphorus war fallujah]

10 Comments »

A couple of days ago I received an email from Michael Turk, head of the 2004 Bush e-campaign. Here, with Michael’s permission, is his email, my response, and his response. [Note: The first comment is from Joe Trippi.]

Michael’s first email:
I was bored for a minute, and doing some light ego-surfing, and came across a reference to me on your blog. Here, specifically:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003460.html

You related the following to your readers:

Last night, I wasd [sic] talking with a friend I love who said that he had been talking with Michael Turk, head of the Bush e-campaign. (Here [Live blogging of a discussion between Joe Trippi and Turk – dw] and here [A reduction of that discussion to mere punctuation, in a way that puzzled some, including Trippi – dw] on Turk.) My friend said that Turk said that the Bush blog had no commenting because they were afraid people would say things that would alienate Bush’s fundamentalist supporters.

I’d be glad to explain the reson we had no comments. I’ve done so in several publications and don’t mind repeating it.

We viewed our blog as the journal of the campaign – our way to share with supporters the story of our campaign from thoughts of senior staff to the people on the ground going door-to-door. We had hundreds of contributors to the blog. What we didn’t want to do, is create an online echo chamber where engaged activists, who we wanted to spread our message, sat in discussions with one another, rather than reaching their friends and family.

The best messenger for any campaign is the inidividual activist talking to the people closest to them. That word of mouth marketing is better than any direct mail piece, TV ad or radio spot, or paid phone call. We had no interest in corraling all of those supporters in one place, and having them reinforce each other.

We could have gone the way of other campaigns, and seen our campaign as an extension of our community. Instead, we saw our community as an extension of the campaign. It’s a significant difference.

In a December 2003 issue of the New York Times magazine, a Dean supporter said their campaign was about allowing people “to come together and tell their life stories.” As I have said in writings before and since, we saw socialization as a side effect of getting Bush elected, not the reverse.

So the reason we did not have comments was not to avoid alienating our base. The reason we did not have comments was to keep our supporters active in other arenas – family life, work life, etc. – communicating our message.

My reply:

Michael,

Thanks for the explanation. Would you mind posting it as a comment on my post so others can read it? Otherwise, do you mind if I post it as email received from you?

Your posing of this as an either/or — either supporters comment or they engage with others — I think is fundamentally mistaken. I certainly agree that an insurgent and an incumbent have to run different campaigns. But I wish our elected officials had more of a sense that we citizens are more interesting than they are, that we are the source to which they should turn first for help (e.g., Katrina), that top-down responses are a second-resort, that campaigns are actually about us, not them…

But, Dean lost. Bush won. On to 2008 ;)

Best, David W.

Michael’s reply:

I agree it’s not an absolute trade off. That’s why I pushed really hard to make sure the RNC included comments when we relaunched GOP.com. Especially in party building, the open and frank exchange of ideas is key. Campaigns, though, are more personality driven.

You’re also right about the nature of politics. Politicians get elected to serve the people. Unfortunately, in our society, we value fame as a commodity. As a result, the politicians become psuedo-celebrities. Since people tend to gravitate toward celebrities – more so than institutions – the risk of someone congregating just for the sake of “being seen” on the site is much greater. The trade off becomes tilted.

In the case of a party, if you allow comments, the conversations tend to focus on how we can further the goals of a party. On a campaign (and I am sepaking generally, not about Bush-Cheney 04), the conversations tend to move toward a “we’re in the cool clique” mode. I spent time scanning the blog comments on Presidential sites and saw a lot of people who were supporters – not opponents – of the candidate who were shunned and ignored because they didn’t spend the amount of time others did merely sitting on the site.

That’s the difficult part of a site as visible as a Presidential campaign. How do you maximize the efforts of the people online while still fostering community? We looked at the number of pro-Bush and pro-Republican blogs and decided there were plenty of places where people could gather online to discuss the campaign – and we visited them frequently to see what people were saying and ideas they had. But we wanted our site to focus on activities like organizing your own walks and phone banks.

You should feel free to post these. Especially after seeing the dead letter office at GeorgeWBush.org, I sort of expect to see contents of e-mail online, so I try not to say anything stupid. Unfortunately, I don’t always catch typos, so I’ll have to deal with those being out there… [Tags: politics MichaelTurk GeorgeBush blogs]

13 Comments »

On Nov. 15, Corante.com has put together a one-day conference on social software’s business and cultural effects. Berkman is co-hosting it. It looks like it’ll be a very interesting day. We hope to skip past the basics and get to drill down on some important questions about what a social-software-enabled world looks like. The list of speakers — we’re hoping for a relaxed, conversation-oriented style — is excellent. Since I’ve had a hand in getting Berkman involved and in brainstorming the sessions (and am doing the brief kickoff presentation), I am hereby flogging it. (That note of hesitancy is only because the conference is not even close to free.) [Tags: SocialSoftware corante berkman]

3 Comments »

[Christoph Engemann of the Graduate School of Social Sciences in Bremen and the Faculty of Media Bauhaus University in Weimar is giving a Tuesday afternoon lunch. The official topic from the Berkman site:

Engemann will describe how Germany’s transition to offering welfare services online has created new responsibilities for German citizens.

He says we can think of the state as being a media-system that’s in transition form paper to code. Newt Gingrich said “Paper kills,” meaning that it slows down the working of institution, sometimes lethally.

Germany is planning on issuing a citizens card (Bürgerkarte) in 2008 and a an “e-card” for doing authenticated transactions on the Net. A health card is being distributed to all 80M citizens. Also an identity card for doctors and pharmacists (Arztausweis), and a job card. (Every European country has similar programs “and some are quite advanced,” he says.) All these cards are interoperable: They use the same public key infrastructure.

Christoph’s thesis is that these new authentication media are new interfaces to collective resources such as public health care. E.g., instead of going to the unemployment office for help getting back into the labor force and money allocated to particular uses, now you get the card and some money you can spend how you want. In education, you will be given points you can expend on getting educational services; these are charged through the card. In health care, the card allows you to access part of your health care info, stored with intermediaries, and update it, e.g., you quit smoking, you’re going to the gym. (Q: How do medical providers know if you’re lying? A: Not sorted out yet.)

In response to a question, Christoph agrees there are two innovations here: Universal citizen identifiers and cards to authenticate that you are the citizen you say you are.

Q: Identity cards are a hot-button issue in the US. In Germany and Austria…
A: Not so much because in Germany you get something for presenting your ID card, while in the US it’s seen as a restriction. Germany hopes to export its system since they have the first authenticiation system that lets citizens be identified as such in Internet transactions.

This results, Christoph, in each citizen being her own civil servant, which he thinks is a bad idea. [Marketing hat on: Call it Do It Yourself Bureaucracy. Hmm still doesn’t sound so good.]

Q: (Colin Maclay) Sounds like the US offering to let people manage their own Social Security retirement accounts. How does this work for people who aren’t in a position to do a good job for themselves?
A: Needs to be worked out. You’ll need high computer literacy, and it’s like writing a CV all the time.

Q: Identity theft?


A: The card only holds the access key. To access all medical data, you need both the patient and doctor cards.

Christoph says it’s a fundamental role of nation states to create the possibility of authenticated transactions. He says it’s Post-Orwell because it’s not top down. “You’re writing yourself.”

There’s discussion trying to make sense of the sense in which in this system people act as public-minded citizens (citoyens) as opposed to self-interested money grubbers. Christoph ways we give up information in exchange for services. We are given an incentive to take charge of our health and become healthier. Even though we don’t consciously thinking about it, our behavior is altered, he says. [Afterwards I spoke with him and straightened out my understanding. The contrast he intends is Hegel’s: The citoyen doesn’t sacrifice his/her interests to the common good but is aware that the same rules bind everyone.]

(He mentions that in Germany the system is designed in part to eliminate people going for a second opinion … something Americans will not give up. Nor should we. Why trust one doctor? Wisdom of the medical crowd!)

Christoph is bothered deeply by all this. He thinks that our becoming our own civil servants will be a lot of work and will create stress because you don’t know that the information you provide will be used well. Plus, how long will the data really be kept in silos? It’s already been used to compile statistics about alcohol and sexual behavior in Austria, with insufficient care taken to anonymize it.

His doctoral thesis is on this topic, by the way. [Tags: berkman digitalID]

1 Comment »

I’m at a small IBM press event, “The Future of Social Networks” held in the IBM office in Cambridge. They’re talking about 1) Social Nets Analytics, a “solution” [yech, I hate that term — What product isn’t a solution? Can-opener= Your sealed can solution. Plunger = Your crap won’t go down solution] that tracks and analyzes what’s being said about you on in blogs, feeds, articles…; 2) Appliki, an “application wiki” [= JotSpot competitor, = Why aren’t we using Notes for this?]; 3) Jamalyzer, productizing what IBM uses in its “jams,” multi-day cross-company conversations; 4) dogear social bookmarking service [= del.icio.us + “authentication,” i.e. The Folksonomy Torquer]; 5) Fringe, a productiziation of IBM’s internal employee phonebook [ = Friendster without the condoms]; Web Activity Management, what seems to be a portal for tracking all your business activities and communications [ = Big Blue Brother]; 6) Blog and Wiki Central, IBM’s internal blog aggregator. (I’m on a panel on social software at the end.) [Non-disclosure: I’m not getting paid for this and have no financial relationship with IBM.]

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation leads off. He says that Web 1.0 was originally made up of content generated by institutions. [This is my biggest issued with the Web 2.0 meme overall32
: It’s solidifying the totally false idea that until Web 2.0, users weren’t on the Web. In fact, what drove the Web from the first day was the ability of users to speak and connect.] We’re now seeing the rise of collaborative knowledge, he says. KM was “incredibly boring.” Now it’s arising organically, he says.

Irving moderates a panel including Marc Andrews (strategy, content integration, search), Mike Rhodin (GM workplace, portal and collaboration) and Irene Greif (IBM fellow, collaborative user experience).

Mike recommends blogs as a way for leaders to get their messages out. [Oh, yes, I really want to absorb yet more messages from leaders.] He also recommends the Fringe demo as a way of pulling together info spread across directories. Also, real time info sharing has started to shift organizational norms; he hypes wikis as a “new publishing paradigm,” a real-time paradigm. You could open one up to employees, customers, etc. “We’re flipping the model.”

Irene: Why do some things take off and others don’t? Why do people contribute to open source? How does email change social networks? Wikis? Blogs? These are the sorts of questions her group addresses.

Marc: “Collaborative environments like blogs…accelerate the impact of public opinion on businesses.” This makes it imperative that businesses monitor the blogosphere.

Mike: At IBM, you can save an answer on a wiki into the knowledge base.

Q Judith Hurwitz: There’s a dark side. Someone could create a rich environment of misinformation.

Marc: That’s why it’s so important to monitor that.

Mike: We’ve always had this problem. It comes with every medium.

Q (eWeek): How do you balance openness with the desire to control info? E.g., Apple took down some comments reporting on the iPod Nano’s friability.

Irving: It depends. In IBM we figure we have good people around the world and we trust them to do the right thing.

Amy Wohl: At IBM there are 20,000 internal blogs but only a few hundred external bloggers. Looking at the flow of what’s being communicated internally is just as important as looking at what’s being said externally

Mike: Yup.

Next, they go through some demos

Irene: It’s all Web 2.0 stuff. [Ok, the way Web 2.0 is generally being taken up (not just by IBM) is really starting to annoy me. Blogs started in 1999. That’s 6 years ago. And even without blogs, what drove people to the Web were not institutional sites but the ability to talk. The web 2.0 meme makes sense to companies that ignored our voices for the Web’s first ten years.]

Public Image Monitoring. Omnifind-based Public Image Monitoring. Analyzes content from articles, feeds, blogs, surveys, etc. Identifies hot topics and “vocal sources.” Understands the tone and sentiment of the feedback. Monitors what’s being said about competitors and suppliers.

Demo: What are people saying about Honda and Toyota. Looked the thousand most recent blogs that mention them. What other makes and models are they talking about? What issues are arising? Are things stated as facts or opinions? The software graphs the percentage of positive mentions, which topics, etc. Drill into, say, “fuel economy,” and it shows the posts. Or check on specific models and it finds there are lots of negative comments about the hybrid Civic’s fuel economy.

Q: Does it rank blogs?

Marc: This is only the first step. We have a component that determines who is the most vocal. Not yet who is the most influential.

Application Wikis. Extensions to wikis that lets people “easily link together applications and services that are on the Web.” David Sink and Joel Farrell show the QEDWiki demo. They show a table of contacts and then turn it into a database. They do a “mash up” with Google Maps and weather data. Right now, it requires on-screen programming, but they assure us it’ll be much more user-friendly when it ships. [It’s a JotSpot competitor. (Non-disclosure: I’m on SocialText‘s board of advisors.)] It’s php-extensible. It uses AJAX. [Ajax + Google Maps: Your proof that it’s a certified Web 2.0 brand.]

Jamalyzer. IBM holds 72-hour company-wide conversations periodically. In one there were about 53,000 participants. Jamalyzer analyzes the data and shows various clusters of info. It uses their “eClassifier” technology. “The social network is embedded in this implicitly.”

dogear. Del.icio.us for inside the firewall. It’s a research prototype now available throughout IBM. David Millen demos it and shows that the suggested autocompletions for tags include the number of other people using that tag, a way of quickly driving a folksonomy [although it also encourages the downside of folksonomies: conformity]. Within IBM, there are almost 17,000 bookmarks (generated in 2-3 months), with only 10% of them private. The tags retain an association with the person who made them. It shows people who have the same tags as you, deriving a social network from a semantic one. You can import bookmarks from del.icio.us. There are group bookmarks as well, something del.icio.us is working on adding. At IBM someone did a Firefox extension so that searches in the Firefox search box first do a query against dogear bookmarks and then does the search on your choice of engines. As a result, you get the high-quality tag-based results first. [I’d like that plugin: Show me del.icio.us tags and then Google results.] [If del.icio.us were interested in the enterprise market, it should be worried about this not-yet-product.] [Note: AT IBM’s request, I have corrected “DogEar” to “dogear.”]

David also talks about Fringe, a directory crawler that looks for relationships among people. It incorporates DogEar tags.

Unified Activity Management. Dan Gruen of IBM Research talks about “activity-centered collaboration.” It’s a type of project collaboration system, similar to eRoom and Open Text. [Disclosure: I’ve consulted for both those companies and was a VP at the latter. In fact, my kids are going to college on Open Text money.] It has a set of steps for the project on the left. In the main area, it has an “activity thread” that associates documents, emails etc., with the various steps. Oooh factor: Drag and drop steps from previous projects. Beneath it is a Semantic Web idea: An ontology of task semantics expressed in RDF, with REST APIs. [Notes shows up as an example of something you can link into. And that’s it for Notes.])

The panel is pure Q&A. I’m living blogging it, which is slightly embarassing. On it are the estimable Bill Ives, Steve Sparkes (a CIO from Morgan Stanley), and me.

Steve from Morgan Stanley is a happy user. He says collaboration used to rely on the informal network, mutliple phone calls, etc. An expertise search effort failed: The data got stale and it was extra work. They’re having more luck mining people’s activities. He’s excited about what he’s seen today.

Q (Judith Hurwitz): This sounds like the evolution of the portal. How does this impact the SMB market, e.g., firms that collaborate with a Toyota or a Wal-Mart?

Bill: Positively.,

Q (Amy Wohl): Do companies use blogs as a substitute or an addition?

Bill: Both.

Me: Email replaced memos and meetings, to some extent. Wikis will replace reports to some extent. Blogs will replace home pages. (Yes, that was an exaggeration.)

Q: How do blogs fit with Sarbanes-Oxley?

Stephen: Complementary. Social networking analysis helps us meet those obligations.

Bill: “Unless you’re trying to hide something, it makes it easier.”

Q: If conversations are occurring in email, blogs, wikis, etc., doesn’t this have a chlling effect because everyone can see them?

Bill: It has the opposite effect. Because people know it’s public, they try even harder.

Stephen: We have private spaces for senior groups. You need to be able to produce sufficiently differentiate pools…

Q: How do we trust blogs?

Me: It’s a conversation. We figure it out. [I gave a longer answer. Damn live-blogging.]

Amy Wohl: You have to look at blogs by category because they’re very different, e.g., a political commentator, a researcher, etc. The blogosphere is good at sorting out trust issues.

Bill: There are many little blogospheres. With any of those, in my experience, there are usually about two dozen top ones. It’s pretty easy to filter out the interlopers and the pretenders. It’s not like you’re filtering millions. [Tags: delicious ibm SocialSoftware]

[The next day:] As commenters have pointed out, this post reads nastily. I’ve posted a comment apologizing and clarifying. What I meant to be snarky teasing may come across as relentless criticism. The morning was actually quite interesting, several of the products/technologies look promising, and it was exciting to hear IBM promoting the virtues of decentralized social software. (I’ve modified a phrase about Web 2.0 to make it clear that IBM’s use of the phrase is a common use; my testiness about it is not directed at IBM.)

24 Comments »

I’m looking for a couple of power users of del.icio.us I can use as examples in something I’m writing. I’m looking for canonical uses of del.iciou.us, not clever ones since my aim is to illustrate what del.icio.us basically is. So, if you’ve cured cancer by writing a Java app that munges del.icio.us with the human genome project, congratulations, but you don’t suit my nefarious purposes. On the other hand, if you have bookmarked lots of pages and are regularly benefiting from tag streams to which you’ve subscribed, then would you mind if we talked for ten minutes on the phone? You can reply in the comments or you can an email to me at self evident.com

Thanks! [Tags: delicious]

8 Comments »

Via David Isenberg, via Aldon Hynes: Westchester County, NY, has a proposed law that could go into effect “early next year.” According to an article at news.com:

The draft proposal offered this week would compel all “commercial businesses” with an open wireless access point to have a “network gateway server” outfitted with a software or hardware firewall . . . The proposed law has two prongs: First, “public Internet access” may not be provided without a network gateway server equipped with a firewall. Second, any business or home office that stores personal information also must install such a firewall-outfitted server even if its wireless connection is encrypted and not open to the public. All such businesses would be required to register with the county within 90 days.

Ah, yes, who better to be your network architect than the Westchester County government? [Tags: DigitalRights]

Be the first to comment »

My old friend Paul English makes it onto the front page of The Boston Globe today (yeah, I know we’re not supposed to care any more) for a service on his site: He lists how you break through the phone automation to reach the human operators at 100+ companies.

(To me the real news is that Paul is 42. Forty two! And not in any “the meaning of life” way. Wasn’t he just 28? And when Doc writes “It’s November, dammit. Wasn’t it just March or someting?,” I want to reply: “November’s not a problem, Doc. 2005 is a problem. Wasn’t it just 1983?” Ah, yes, an old fogey response…but not as olg-fogey-ish as the conversation I had with my lovely mother-in-law this summer in which we tried to remember exactly how many hip replacements she’s had.)

2 Comments »

Phenomenological ethics

Now that I have a scanner with a document feeder (a Canon MP780 multifunctional printer, which so far I like a lot) and now that I’ve stumbled across a stack of old philosophy papers, I’ve scanned in another one: Phenomenological Ethics (pdf). I wrote it in 1984 and never got it published. It was going to be my Big Idea, the one that you use to market yourself, fighting off all objections, giving no ground, and engaging in other academic truth-repellant behaviors. But then I didn’t get tenure (the quota was filled), got a job as a marketing guy at a software company, and fell in love with my john.

I actually haven’t had the guts to re-read the paper. [Tags: philosophy phenomenology ethics morality]

9 Comments »

Great news! Susan Crawford has been appointed to the ICANN board. She is a tireless fighter to keep the Internet open and free. She’s also wicked smart and wide-open hearted. I am a total scrawford groupie. [Tags: icann SusanCrawford]

Be the first to comment »