I may be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation call-in show tomorrow at 3pm EDT. The topic has to do with who you are online. (We don’t get the 3pm portion here in Boston. But it’s Webcast.) [Wednesday morning: Apparently, I’ll be on starting at about 3:40pm.] [Tags: full_of_myself tireless_self_promotion]

On the way to voting in town elections tonight – my vote didn’t register in the optical scanner so I might as well have not gone – I turned on On Point and there was danah boyd talking about who we are at MySpace. Brilliant as always. (You can listen here.)

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At Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center Lewis Hyde talks about a Fair Use conference he went to, called “The Comedies of Fair Use.” Fair Use is a “carve out” from copyright protection. He says that a Harvard lawyer told him years ago that “Fair Use is a defense, not a right.” Among the examples: A documentarian taped a scene on a street when someone’s cell phone rang, using a copyrighted ring tone. She ended up paying thousands of dollars to get the right to use that bit of the tape. Lewis passes around a pamphlet (online here) explaining Fair Use to documentarians. (The pamphlet’s guidelines suggest that the documentarian shouldn’t have paid for the ring tone.)

BTW, the Berkman Center has written up the legal rules around podcasting, in a similar manner.

Derek Bambauer says that “exclusions and omissions” insurance makes it worse. E and O insurance protects a filmmaker from suits alleging copyright violations. One results, says Derek, is that the insurance companies insist on clearing everything, Fair Use or not.

Lewis also recounts an encounter between Joy Garnett and Susan Mieselas. Mieselas took a photo in 1979. Garnett based a painting on the photo’s image. Mieselas sent a cease and desist order. Apparently, Mieselas was clearly within her legal rights, but many have sided against her. But, says Lewis, when Mieselas presented her case, it no longer seemed so simple: It was a photo of a Sandinista that she has allowed to be used widely in Nicaragua. The painting, she feels, strips it of that important context, and turns it into a mere image. [Tags: lewis_hyde fair_use copyright digital_rights]

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I’m leading another discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center tomorrow (Wednesday), 6-7:30pm. I’m going to talk about the traditional idea that a properly structured organization of knowledge is neat, and why messiness works so well in the digital age. If what I say mirrors Chapter 8 of the book I’m working on, I’ll talk about the over-simplicity of org charts, Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory, and the “smushy” conception of the Semantic Web. There will be, I hope, a lively discussion that either carefully explains why I’m wrong or entirely swerves around what I’d said.

It’s open to all. We serve pizza. (Map) The session will be webcast here. [Tags: berkman taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous rosch semweb]

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I’m interviewed (via email) about commerce, knowledge management, security and the like over at Management First. [Tags: ecommerce km security]

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Here are the lyrics to Neil Young‘s “Let’s Impeach the President”

Let’s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door He¹s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war Let¹s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government¹s protection
Or was someone just not home that day? Let’s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected Thank god he¹s racking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean Thank God

And here’s a link to an interview with Neil Young on Showbiz Tonight in which the first question is “You’ve got a song called ‘Let’s Impeach the PResident.’ What is the song about?”

The Neil Young site is still streaming the entire album. The album in some ways reminds me of John Lennon, who I still miss.

[Tags: bush impeachment neil_young]

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Dave Sifry of Technorati has posted part two of his April “State of the Blogosphere” report. [ [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s board of advisors and Dave is a friend.]

Part One said (as per Dave’s summary):

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

Part Two dives into the internationality of blogging. Dave writes:

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

It also finds that 47% of posts have an author-generated tag or category associated with it — the blogosphere is a nation of metadata monkeys! (And Lor’ bless ’em, every one.)19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

[Tags: blogosphere tagging david_sifry technorati]

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There’s lots of discussion on Salvadoran blogs about that country’s highly restrictive abortion laws and the possibility of passing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. As always, Global Voice has the scoop. The GV round-up also points to Chuck Stewart’s blog that rounds up (in English) news from and about the region.

GV also reports on the role of Lebanese bloggers in addressing tough issues and building bridges with Israeli bloggers. [Tags: global_voices gv salvador lebanon]

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