At I’m at a meeting with NPR, along with Zadi Diaz, Jeff Jarvis, Rob Paterson, Doc Searls, and Euan Semple. Jay Rosen is on his way. We’ve been hearing about NPR’s structure and business. Fascinating. And check Jeff’s fabulous pre-post.

Just a few notes from the opening background discussion:

NPR’s structure is complex. It produces some shows, but NPR member stations run lots of stuff produced by others. So, when your local station runs “A Prairie Home Companion,” NPR doesn’t get a nickel. About ten percent of the country listens to NPR stations, but the average age is in the 50s. (The average age of PBS viewers is 60.) It has an operating budget of $140M and 750 employees, which makes it smaller than some of its stations, particularly stations with radio and tv branches.

After a while, we come to what seems to me to be the essential conflict: NPR wants to tell more stories, allow listeners to tell stories, and make those stories available to anyone at any time. But, NPR is also a creation of the member stations. If we can find and listen to those stories when and where we want, we won’t tune in to the stations. In short, podcasts peel listeners from stations.

We talked for a few hours after that about what this means for NPR going forward, and then had a group dinner. Then Doc, Jay, Jeff and I had a beer in the hotel bar, where we each declared our unending love for the Internet and threw our glasses into the fireplace.

So, I learned a lot, spent time with people I admire, and maybe get to help in some tiny way an institution I care about. Sort of a great day.

BTW, Euan has flickred a photo here. [Tags: npr media radio everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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After United Airline‘s online systems assured me as of 7pm that my 8:40 flight from Boston to DC was only 45 minutes late, I arrived at the airport to be told by the unhelpful person behind the counter that they’d actually cancelled the flight that afternoon. (I’d also checked with a living person over the telephone.)

But that’s just your usual traffic snarl. Kafka didn’t step in until I said that the subsitute flight they wanted to put me on at 2:30 tomorrow afternoon wouldn’t work, but I still wanted to fly back with my ticket on Monday. Fine, said the unhelpful telephone support person, but that will have to be repriced up as a one way fare.

Ah, yes, that’s how to develop customer loyalty! [Tags: marketing united_sucks airlines travel kafka whines]

I was supposed to join a bunch of folks I really like, talking with NPR about social media. But it looks like I may not be able to get there until late afternoon tomorrow, at which point I assume it’s not worth my going. (Disclosure: It’s pro bono consulting.) Too bad. I was looking forward to it.

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This is the “catchy” question I’m posing at a Web of Ideas session tonight at the Berkman, weather permitting. (It’s at 6pm. Details here.)

Here’s what I’m thinking of saying to kick things off.

The Internet is just technology, so, no, of course it can’t save democracy. But technology has certain possibilities, so given how the Internet works and also how we’ve been taking it up, can it help rescue democracy?

Rescue democracy from what? Does democracy need rescuing?

Yes, it does. There are, of coures, many definitions of democracy: A government that gets its authority from the will of the people, a government that lets citizens vote, a government that grants citizens certain equal rights, etc. But I want to take one particular sense of democracy: A government that is ours, where the “we” is all citizens. Our government doesn’t much feel like its ours. Frequently — usually, even — it works for us and our interests. But I venture to say that compared to the Founding generation, our democracy does not feel much like ours any more.

Why might this be?

1. In part it’s the sheer scale of the government. Yikes, it’s a big puppy! And there are so many of us.

2. Corporate lobbies that operate for their own self interest are so influential. Economics is the great unleveler.

3. Governing has become continuous campaigning, and campaigning is marketing. The language and body language of politics is demeaning. It doesn’t feel like us.

So, three questions:

1. Is the Internet well-suited to address any of these problems? How is it addressing them? How might it?

2. Since the Internet is just technology, it can be used for Good or Eeeevil. Will it become just another corrupt and alienating medium?

3. What does a leader look like in a Netty campaign and government? What does a follower look like?

[Tags: politics government berkman]

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The weather is iffy. Very iffy. I’m worried about the freezing rain making the streets unusable. So, I’m cancelling the Web of Ideas scheduled for tonight. Sorry! We’ll reschedule it soon.

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The beta of the blog for my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous (which is released on May1), is up in beta. The blog is about the ways we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits (digitally that is, not through evil Lite-Brite boards). (You can get there via www.EImisc.com, too, so don’t send me your carpal-tunnel bills!)

The site’s been up for a while in stealth beta mode. As you’ll see, some of it just doesn’t work: There are no samples yet, I’ve only started to build the bibliography (in LibraryThing.com), the forum is under-formatted, etc. And the posts are mainly cross-posts from this blog. (Thanks to BradSucks for doing the work behind the scenes to get the tech up and running.)

I’d love to have your suggestions about how I can make it better. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Wendy Seltzer, law professor and Berkman Fellow, posted the snippet of the Superbowl where they warn viewers that it’s against the law to describe the game. Wendy posted this for her law class. And, yes, the NFL has sent a take-down notice to YouTube.

Wendy is a former EFF lawyer. She’s sending a counter-notification to YouTube.

(Note: This blog post is copyrighted. You may not reuse it, link to it, describe it, talk about it, think about it, or remember it without the explicit permission of the NFL Joho. Ok, Joho says you may.) [Tags: copyright nfl youtube wendy_seltzer superbowl irony berkman]

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An hilarious medieval YouTube showing the introduction of the book… [Tags: comedy humor video technology books libraries newbies rtfm ]

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Berkman Fellow (and MacArthur genius) Lewis Hyde is giving a Tuesday lunch talk on who owns creative content. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, typing quickly, getting things wrong, leaving things out.]

I.

He begins by quoting Goethe in the 1830s about his writings as “the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe” (quoting Goethe) vs. Emerson in “Self-Reliance” writing, “Insist on yourself; never imitate…” Lewis says our protocols around “intellectual property” side with Emerson. Defending “IP” against being enclosed can be seen, Lewis says, as defending a particular way of being human.

Science, he says, is collective. He cites Benjamin Franklin’s work on electrical theory. “None of what he did was the result of a solitary genius,” Lewis says. His equipment came from friends. He worked with three other folks in his lab. Franklin worked with Leyden jars (the first capacitors) which obviously were not invented by Franklin or they would have been called Franklin jars. Franklin also depended on Newton’s Optics, especially Query 21: “Aether (like our air) may contain particles which endeavor to recede from one another,” giving Franklin the idea that electricity was a fluid [Don’t trust my paraphrase here!]. Franklin also used Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood. “Finally, it was a culture that believed in open communication.” E.g., some German scientists published work on static electricity, which was published in France and translated into English. “This is how all scientists work: All collaborative and cumulative,” says Lewis.

Yet the image of Frankilin is that of a solitary genius with the mind of a “child of nature,” i.e., someone with an immediate relation to nature.

The 18th century idea of open communication arises from their view of the nature of truth. Franklin wrote to friends that his ideas are “crude and hasty,” but (Franklin wrote) communicating scientific ideas often improves them. “Collective inquiry is less prone to error than individual inquiry,” said Franklin. “The breeding ground of the truth lies in the breeding ground of conversation.” Franklin did not defend his ideas about electricity on the ground that “If they are right. Truth and Experience will support them. If worng they ought to be refuted and rejected,” he wrote. “Disputes are apt to sour one’s Temper.” The truth arises in conversation, not in solitude, reports Lewis.

This affected Franklin’s view of the ownership of ideas. He declined a patent on the wood stove (which is not known, one might add, as the Leydon stove) because inventions come out of a community. Private interests may prompt a person to defend his ideas whether right or wrong, Franklin thought, says Lewis.

Salston in The Common Thread about the Human Genome Project says that you have to have protocols of non-ownership if you want to do science. In this he is like Franklin.

Franklin’s work was the result of a collective being that bears the name Franklin, Lewis concludes.

II.

Franklin often published anonymously, which was a gesture to indicate that the author intended to write impartially, Lewis says, speaking for the public good, not private ends. Thomas Paine explained the anonymity of Common Sense:e “Who the author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as the object for attention is the doctrine itself, not the man.”

It was believed that each individual has only a partial view: a part of the truth, and partial to one one’s own interests. Opinion (which we would call “belief” these days, says Lewis) existed between truth and falsity. It was assumed to belong to individuals. It wasn’t as certain as truth, of course. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin gave a speech saying that he had doubts about the Constitution, but he had doubts about his doubts. “I consent…to this Constitution … The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good,” Franklin said. Each must doubt his own doubt for the sake of the public good. “He asks them to give up their partial views,” Lewis says. His speech itself modeled that.

“For the 18th C., self-sacrifice is constitutive of citizenship in the public sphere. The citizen cannot own his or her ideas.” Where writers claim their writing in their own distinctive voice, it will be harder to create a lively public sphere, Lewis says. [Or the character of that public sphere changes, and certainly how it supports truth. The Internet is a lively public sphere, but it is not a selfless distilling of truth. Truth is something else on the Net.]

“Can you come up with a case in which self-erasure in public utterance enables a valued way of being?” Lewis asks himself. He answers that when judges issue opinions, they frequently plagiarize the briefs from the attorneys. But, says Lewis, plagiarism is the wrong term. Legal writing tends to be written by communities, and you can’t claim it by copyright. Having your work cut and pasted without attribution into an opinion is a sign of success and honor.

A second example. The MLK “I have a Dream” speech copyright is owned by his estate and it charges for its use. Our practices around public discourse constitute who we are, says Lewis. The King estate has moved MLK from one category to another. “It is a type of patricide,” concludes Lewis.

Overall point: The choices we make about the commons is a choice about what type of being we are. Hollywood has one view. Franklin had another.

Q: (me) That was amazing. Just to pick up one point, the 18th C view of anonymity is so different from ours, from what you say. They were anonymous in order to present a non-partial, non-individual belief whereas we tend to use anonymity to enable us to be so partial and individual that we dare not sign our names. What does that tell us about who we are and our relation to truth?
A: I’ve hidden some trap doors in this talk. E.g., you had to be somebody before you could become the nobody of anonymity. Women and slaves didn’t have enough standing to be able to erase themselves through anonymous works. So, my response to your question is to complicate the 18th C view of anonymity.

[I missed the next question, but here’s Lewis’ answer.] A lot of this goes back to the myths of how authors make a living. The myth is that you make your living out of copyrights, which is true for only a tiny handful of writers.

The Spectator was in fact a persona, says Lewis. The Spectator was everywhere observing. This is like print itself, says Lewis. Franklin began his career by ripping off The Spectator. His brother was the first to publish a newspaper “without authority.” The self was shaped by the development of a free press.

Q: You over-emphasize the social side of self.
A: Because individualism is not in danger. I think Franklin’s solution to the circle of self and group was humor. “If I had become humble, I would have been proud of my humility,” Franklin said. He was incredibly vain and a dedicated humble servant, and he managed the interface with humor.

Q: (JP ) (i) When Franklin gave up patents, he was wealthy. (ii) Do you have a normative view about mashups?
A: (i) His wealth was another trapdoor I tried to hide. His wealth repositions his argument. I’ve searched his works for every remark on patent, and I’ve found one case where he argued for granting a patent to people who wanted to immigrate from the UK with a patent for a technique used in the UK…He was simultaneously for patent and for piracy of a British patent. (ii) We’re in transition. We need to preserve a balance. I do believe in one of the original arguments for patent: To establish people apart from patronage.

Q: (me) Are you saying we should go back to the 18th C sense of self? You seem to like it. [Hmm. It sounds hostile in print. It wasn’t in person. Not at all.]
A: I’m using history as a way of exploring the self. We can’t go back to the 18th C, but it provides one way of opening up the question. It’s not 18th C to say we’re collective beings, not just private individuals.

Q: (me) But at the next level of detail of how we’re social and private and our relation to truth, are we now different?
A: It’s going to be different because it’s not a print culture any more. It will have different self formations.

Q: (doc) Has the modern corporation affected the self?
A: Michael Sandel’s Democracy and Its Discontents. [Tags: lewis_hyde commons patents benjamin_franklin copyright copyleft anonymity ]

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On Feb. 14, at 6pm, I’m holding another in the Web of Ideas series. Here’s the blurb:

I’ll probably open the discussion trying to stay as far away from facts and reality as I can. Maybe something about democracy and the meaning of what’s ours? Anyway, it’s an open discussion and open to anyone who wants to come by the Berkman Center (map..and remember, the Center moved this year and now is at 23 Everett St., around the corner). Plus, we serve pizza, the fuel of democracy.

[Tags: politics democracy ]

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Yesterday morning I visited the world headquarters of Virtual Ubiquity ‐ yes, it’s a name that brilliantly combines unpronounceability with instant forgetability ‐ an 8-person start-up that includes a few folks I worked with many years ago at Interleaf. Virtub has picked up some of the best of the best.

They’re building an online word processor that was one of the three apps shown at the Adobe conference in October that featured Apollo, the Adobe tech that integrates Flash, PDF and HTML in a single client. The VirTub product is like Writely (bought by Google) in that it runs in a browser and stores your docs on its server, but Virtub’s is a slick wysiwyg word processor while Writely (which I’ve been using and finding handy) is more like a textbox enhanced with plugins. (“Virtual Ubiquity” is the company’s name, not the product’s.)

“We wanted to build a word processor that lives on the Web, and not wrap some word processing commands around a text editor,” says founder Rick Treitman. It’s written in Flex to run on the Flash 9 player because no other cross-platform solution let them get past a non-wysiwyg editor. “We wanted full page fidelity. We wanted to be able to manipulate graphics as well as you can on a desktop app. We wanted a word processor that doesn’t make you compromise on the Web.” Rick shows off the fact that the alpha does line and page breaks in real time, bringing back memories of 1986 when that was news. Of course, then Interleaf was doing wysiwyg, realtime, text and graphics pagination on tricked out Sun workstations with complex client software.

Virtub’s word processor lets you work on a page that looks exactly like a printed page. It does not have anywhere near Microsoft Word’s 1,500 features. But it does have a cool UI “pleat”: buttons in the header that slide a ribbon of controls in. Rick shows off numbered lists (a perpetually broken feature in Word) including a “skip-the-numbering button that lets you add a second paragraph to a list item.” It gives a good level of control over list formatting, but not enough automation to enable outlining. Rick says that they recognize the importance of outlining, and because it’s an online app, they can add features at any point.

There’s drag-and-drop insert and sizing of graphics, with controls for relative placement.

Tables resize by dragging. You can add and delete columns and rows by clicking on little icons in the table itself, rather than going up to a menu. No background colors for tables at first ship, probably.

They’re experimenting with the UI for comments. The comments in this build show up as sticky notes on the side, color coded and keyed to colored text. Select one and everything but it and the relevant text are darkened.(This may change, Rick says.) Comments can hold anything a document can, including graphics and tables. You can drag from comments into the body of the document. They’re adding view-by-user, but maybe not for first ship. They keep document versions and histories “so you can crank back to an earlier version.”

The documents are “trickled” up to the server as you edit it. You’ll also have the option to save locally. The software is itself saved locally, transparently to the user. When Adobe’s Apollo ships, you’ll be able to work offline.

So, who is it for? “Our goal is to be term-paper ready when it comes out,” Rick says. The student market is big in VU’s mind, particularly post-secondary. “Kids access the Web from multiple machines.” And he says that many of their documents are collaborative, if only because they give them to teachers who return them marked. (It will have end notes in its first ship. And they’re looking into “cool ways” of doing online citations.) “We’re looking not to go after the enterprise straight away because it would mean going up against Microsoft.” The secondary market, says Rick, consists of small office, home office, retirees, volunteer groups, and others not working in enterprises.

They feel they’re competing against Google Docs, ThinkFree Office, and Word.In addition, there’s a rumor that Microsoft is doing a virtual version of Works, its defeatured Office product.

It’s going to be free on the Web, supported by advertising as well as possibly search. The ads will be “subtle, under the control of the user.” Not popups. For schools the ads can be turned off. And, no, it won’t be inserting ads into the footer of your documents.

“We’re very aware that playing nice with blogs and wikis is very important,” says Rick. It imports and exports HTML, but it’s very much modeled on word processors, not on wikis that let you build multi-page, linked sites. (I think if they added the ability to create pages just by linking to them — in the wiki fashion — and named the resulting inter-linked pages as a web site,it would change the way we think about the product, as well as giving them a feature that differentiates them from Word and its ilk.)

There also isn’t much there to enable a group to build and manage a document. They don’t know if v1.0 will support groups of users. Likewise, they’re aiming at being able to associate documents (e.g., these are 30 responses to a homework assignment, these are the 5 chapters of a book), and expect/hope to have it in release 1.0, but probably not in the first public beta, which they expect to be available in 3-4 months.

It’s a slick implementation. It doesn’t have thefull functionality people expect from a word processor, but for most uses, it’s got more than what people need. With some more collaborative tools, it could make it as a way for a group to work together on a document without feeling like they’ve been thrown into the geeky world of angle brackets and trying to remember how many equal signs create a level 2 heading.

(Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors of Socialtext, a company that might be misconstrued as competing with Virtual Ubiquity.)

They’re looking for a marketing person who can help move this through everything-but-the-enterprise. If you’re interested, send a msg to rick virtub.com. They also need a name for the product. [Tags: virtual_ubiquity word_processors wysiwyg web2.0 tools products ]

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