George Siemens has put his book, Knowing Knowledge, online for free:

Knowing Knowledge was developed in a non-traditional process. Instead of an extensive writing/editing/publishing process (often in excess of 18 months), I adopted a democratic, end-user controlled process. It seems a bit silly to write a book on how the context and characteristics of knowledge are changing, and then subject it to the slow, plodding process of traditional publishing. The stages of traditional publishing are valuable (peer review, editorial review, typesetting, etc.). The challenge is the pace at which a book moves through these stages. In a world where knowledge is continually being updated and rewritten, many books risk obsolescence by the date of publication.

You can download the PDF for free or purchase a paper copy at Lulu.com. It’s also available in a wiki. Practices what he preaches, does George. [Tags: knowledge george_siemens publishing lulu everything_is_miscellaneous]

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As I crawl through the jungle of black vines under my desk, I’m led to wonder: If you were able to create a standard—no folksonomies here!—for color coding the cables going into and out of a computer, what sort of scheme would you come up with? [Tags: doep puzzle taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Jose Luis has posted what looks like a useful portal into the Spanish-speaking blogosphere. [Tags: spanish blogosphere gv jose_luis]

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Tom Matrullo has posted a lovely and insightful review of AKMA’s Faithful Interpretation, along with incisive and engaged comments from The Happy Tutor. They dig deep into perhaps the central question AKMA’s book poses: If we accept the idea that interpretations are only right or wrong within a community, do we then have to embrace ideas of interpretation—say, a literal fundamentalism—that (a) dispute this interpretation of interpretation and (b) may be dangerously wrong? One of the many things I like about AKMA’s approach is the insistence that interpreting is a moral act, but the content of that morality is similarly situated within a particular community.

This is a big, big issue. If it’s taken as a criticism of AKMA’s argument, it’s important to remember that it was an issue before AKMA and before postmodernism. It is the issue of sharing a world with people with whom we seriously disagree so seriously that a failure to act is itself an act.

AKMA replies to Tom and the Tutor here, refusing to let us have a standpoint from which we can simply declare others wrong. But are there complex ways we can declare others wrong sufficiently that we may act against them?

The Berkman Center this morning has posted a 45 minute podcast of me asking AKMA about how all of this applies to the Web, since what AKMA says about Biblical interpreters—thousands of years of experience shows us that smart, wise, well-intentioned people are not going to come to agreement—applies also to our experience of the Web. [Tags: akma tom_matrullo faithful_interpretation hermeneutics berkman happy_tutor philosophy theology postmodernism podcasts]

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Betsy Devine writes:

On the last Sunday before Election Day, Republican operatives go out in force with a last-minute message to stick under windshield wipers. And mainstream media is too slow, too divided, to report on what people are being told.

But those “secret messages” won’t be secret if you and I take the time to make them public.

So, she suggests that we go to our local churches, photograph the flyers, upload them to Flilckr, and tag them Election2006. Betsy apparently only came up with the idea this morning, which means it’s not going to have time to make its way around the Net. Nevertheless, it’s a good example of where distributed journalism could help. [Tags: politics betsy_devine citizen_journalism ]

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Boy, do I not care whether Ted Haggard, the head of an evangelical association, had sex with a male prostitute or bought meth. From this we learn…nothing.

Do we learn that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice? No, we learn that only if we already knew it. Otherwise, we see simply demonstration of the temptations that are put before us and the need to keep our faith strong. Each side is confirmed in what it believes. We learn nothing.

I’m only sorry that now Haggard is going to go all the way into the closet. How sad for him. [Tags: ted_haggard evangelicals gay news media]

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Zotero (zo-TAIR-oh) is a Firefox 2.0 extension that captures Web pages (and files and PDFs), finds the citation info on those pages and puts them into standard bibliographicv form, lets you take notes, and lets you search. In future versions, it plans on letting you publish your collection and will integrate with Microsoft Word and others. It’s free and it’s Open Source.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m liking the sound of it a lot. (Here are the specs for my dream system, which I once called Notetella, but which I suppose now I’d have to call note.licio.us because, well, that’s the law.) (Thanks to Luis Villa for the link.) [Tags: zotero research bibliographic ]

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On Tuesday in America, take a (legal) photo of your polling place and contribute it to a public archive of images of democracy in action. That’s the Polling Place Photo Project. Jay Rosen has got a good post about it, as does William Drenttel. Something cool or even inspiring might emerge.