Zack Exley explains why RootsCampDC is now only accepting people—anyone—who worked on the elections this cycle. Space is limited and it was filling up with executive director types, whereas RootsCampDC is supposed to be

a place where the volunteers and precinct organizers would analyze the elections together with directors, candidates and consultants as peers. We also wanted to bring in people who worked on the elections in new ways: bloggers, guerilla ad makers, programmers and others.

I’m with Zack on this. Applying any explicit admission criteria goes against the BarCamp philosophy, but I’m more interested in having a good meeting that nudges democracy forward than in being a BarCamp purist. Diversity of experience and position matters a lot here.

I’d already signed up to attend the second day—I have a family event on the first day—although I don’t fit into any of the categories. Making get-out-the-vote phone calls for the Deval Patrick campaign doesn’t put me in the same solar system as the folks who poured their time and hearts into campaigns this year. I expect to listen a lot and learn a lot at the get-together. [Tags: politics netroots zack_exley barcamp ]

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In advance of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, a group has put together a call stop charging for access to anthropological research. From the group’s wiki:

Scholarly societies are in crisis, and the AAA is among them. Dwindling revenues from sales of AAA Journals are among the causes, and if we don’t staunch the bleeding now, we are warned, there will be nothing left to give.

How has the AAA gotten to a point where its solvency seems to be based solely on the sales of our scholarly work? Work that has already been paid for by public and private granting agencies which we pay registration fees to present at conferences organized by the scholarly society we pay membership fees to join? Why must we also charge our readers?

Recently, the AAA publicly voiced its opposition to Federal Legislation that would require federally funded research to be freely available to the people who paid for it: citizens. This public opposition is clearly not in the interest of AAA members — and the AnthroSource Steering Committee has publicly said as much, proposing a range of initiatives to make our collective work more accessible. For this criticism, the ASSC was dissolved.

Clearly, something needs to change.

1) we need a solid open access policy to make anthropological research widely available;

2) we need a more transparent financial arrangement between the association and its members;

3) we need a form of financial sustainability that does not compromise our ability to disseminate our research.

There’s more here and updates here.

Access to scientific work is a scarcity that now is artificial. It’s bad for American science and disastrous for global science…and since there all science is global, it’s just plain disastrous for science.

[Tags: open_science anthropology ]

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Technorati has introduced a promising new feature. Click on the “Blog reactions” link at the bottom of a post and you’ll be taken to a list of other blogs that have linked to that post.

This is functionally like trackbacks but instead of including only blogs that actively notify other blogs when they link, it takes advantage of the fact that Technorati is indexing so much of the blogosphere. If it sees a link to one of your posts, it adds it to the list of blog reactions.

I am on Technorati’s advisory board (disclosure) and will be advising them to let blog owners set the color of the link and to get rid of the Technorati logo. [Tags: blogs technorati trackbacks]

Later that day: The blog reactions are making my page load too slowly, at least intermittently. Or maybe I just hit a rough patch on the Information Highway. In any case, I’m removing the links until I understand better where the problem is.

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Lessig explains and weighs YouTube’s cease-and-desist message to TechCrunch that inists that TechCrunch take down some code that lets you save a YouTube video to your machine. John Palfrey adds another layer of explanation.

Notes Lessig:

For a company that was built upon the unauthorized spread of other peoples’ copyrighted work to threaten legal action against someone simply enabling people to save that work to his machine deserves at least special mention in a book by Alan Dershowitz.

To save you the mousing, the book is Chutzpah! [Tags: drm copyright lessig youtube techcrunch ]

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Fon (Disclosure: I am on their board of advisors, a compensated position) and Skype are making available a combination of a Fon router (La Fonera—a nicely designed piece of hardware that automatically creates two networks, one public and one for your private use) and a wifi phone that lets you make Skype calls wherever you can find an open wifi signal. It’s $159 (£99, €139), and it comes with a bunch of SkypeOut minutes for calling regular phones (as opposed to calling computers running Skype). Judging from the Skype accessories page, it looks like this combo is a big price break: A skype wifi phone by itself costs $219 (after a $30 rebate).

You don’t need the Fon router for the Skype phone to work, and it doesn’t work only with Fon signals. It looks like the bundle is intended to encourage those of us who rely on open wifi signals to provide free wifi signals at home, which is more or less Fon’s raison d’être. [Tags: skype fon wifi]

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Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, responds to the op-ed written by Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry of America, in response to the CEA’s Digital Freedom campaign.

Personally, I think the RIAA’s op-ed is probably correct that the right to do what you want with a recording that you’ve obtained legally—including freely moving it around your digital devices—should not be pegged onto Fair Use. But, I am not a lawyer, so maybe I’m wrong about that.

That takes care of the part where I agree with the RIAA.

I don’t see much in the Digital Freedom campaign about Fair Use, other than a passing reference by former Berkman fellow Derek Slater in a blog report. The RIAA’s Sherman goes after Fair Use because he has a better defense against that. The real issue is: We want to be able to use what we’ve bought the way we want to use it, we want to be able to share music at least as freely digitally as we do in the real world, and we absolutely do not want the government mandating technology be crippled to prop up an industry that can’t keep up with the demands of the free market.

The urgent issue is the RIAA’s current push for a lame duck “Audio Flag” bill that will mandate that technology have built into it the inability to record radio signals without the permission of the broadcaster. This would mean that you just can’t save music off the air for personal use. It would also kill TiVo for radio, an option that becomes really interesting if you’re an XM or Sirius subscriber (as I am not).

[Tags: drm riaa cea digital_freedom audio_flag eff ]

Matt McKenzie has an excellent article in Computerworld explaining how Windows Vista turns your machine into a player owned and controlled by Big Content. He doesn’t quite put it like that, but it’s hard to draw another conclusion. [Tags: vista]

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Tagedu lets users submit, tag and rank sites that might be of interest to researchers. The sites are reviewed for “appropriateness,” and then added to the collection. The idea is that researchers should be able to search by tags, not just by text.

I found this link at Library Stuff, which also points to Quotiki, a Digg-ish site for group grouping of quotations. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tagging tagedu quotiki taxonomy ]

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Yesterday, I gave a talk at a small customer seminar (um, it was the seminar that was small; the customers seemed to be of average height) for Fast, a remarkably successful search service provider. In his talk, the CEO, John Lervik, pointed in passing to ThisIsTravel.com, a travel site that aggregates customer and professional reviews from other travel sites. For example, the page about the Holiday Inn Select Opryland rates it 5 out of 10 on the basis of 25 customer reviews the site found at IgoUgo.com, TravelGuide.com, etc. It also pulls links out of Fodors.com and others. The page links back to each of those reviews. If I understand correctly, the reviews are each evaluated by hand in order to assign a numeric ranking (although the Fast engine also does automatic sentiment analysis…a tough computing task).

I find our continuing climb up the meta tree to be fascinating. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous travel metadata fastsearch thisistravel]

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I’m in NYC to talk with my publishers about their plans for marketing my book. That’s this afternoon. This morning, i’m going to be a guest participant in a grad seminar Steve Johnson teaches. (Note to self: Buy a copy of The Ghost Map so Steve can sign it…and so I can read it. I am a huge Steve Johnson fan.) So, I’ve been looking forward to today…

…Except now I’ve caught the attention of the unswerving god of Irony. Oh mighty swinger of the axe of overturned expectations, enforcer of whim, doer of random acts of randomness, gleeful splasher of cold water and placer of banana peels, oh pants ripper, invincible reminder of one’s inconsequence, interrupter of plans, thruster of the lance that finds all smugness, please forgive thy servant’s moment of happy anticipation. [Tags: steve_johnson i_am_but_a_worm do_not_smite]

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Brad of BradSucks has thrown together an RSS aggregator for himself that he calls his Temple of Ego (because he is the most self-deprecating person around). It puts out a feed of all that’s been outputing—his delicious tags, his Google shares, his Flickr photos, his blog posts. So, if you subscribe you get a stream of everything Brad, and you can be assured of continuing to get, say, his photos even if he switches from Flickr to some other photo site. (Brad says he saw the idea at Adactio.) [Tags: bradsucks rss ]

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