Earley and Associates, an information architecture firm, has bought Wordmap, according to an article in KMWorld. WordMap makes tools for constructing, viewing and navigating taxonomies, including a pattern-matching tool for automating some of the construction process. From having poked around their site, Wordmap seems to be all about the top-down side of taxonomic life, a side that we continue to need to do well even as the bottom wells up. [Tags: taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous wordmap earley information_architecture]

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This video is a beautiful piece of work. It will be a classic statement. Don’t be the very last person to see it… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Interesting stuff percolating around the question of how controlled content ought to be, where “ought” means morally, culturally, and for hard-nosed business reasons. Is the issue coming to a head?

We have Viacom sending 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube, including some videos Viacom is pulling out of the public domain without even having viewed them. Viacom’s shareholders ought to start up a suit right now. This is the stupidest marketing move in a long time. Jeff Jarvis puts it succinctly in a post that ends “Damned fools.” Terry Heaton also lays it down. And then we have Steve Jobs asking the music publishers to give up on DRM, although Job’s piece also has some special pleading that (imo) weakens it.

Could the content control bubble be about to burst?

[Tags: media viacom drm youtube everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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(See disclosure notice at the end of this post.)

Fon continues to try to build critical mass by offering wifi routers at a price waaaay below their cost. The current version of the router, La Fonera, actually is quite a nice object. Today—and I think only today—you can get one for free if you live in the US. It’s Fon’s first birthday today…

(Disclosure: I am on Fon’s board of advisors and have been granted some stock options. But I joined the board because I think Fon is a crazy idea that could help make free wifi far more widely available, including and especially in poorer parts of the world.) [Tags: fon wifi]

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The murderous astronaut story will wipe clean the news media for the next two weeks. All murderous astronaut all the time. We kidnapped an Iranian diplomat? So what? The astronaut was wearing a diaper! [Tags: news astronaut msm ]

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Steve Schultze, from MIT Comparative Media Studies , is giving a Tuesday luncheon talk at the Berkman about the Beyond Broadcasting conference, which has as its theme this year “From participatory culture to participatory democracy.”

Chris Lydon in a video clip asks, “Is the Internet the new public?” Steve plays a clip of Rebecca Mackinnon talking about Chinese repression of speech that leads to political action. Nevertheless, she says, the Web is enabling new forms of social discourse. Before the Web, she says, you couldn’t be famous in China without getting past an official gatekeeper. Steve tells of a Chinese woman, Xiang Xiang , who uploaded an MP3 that’s been downloaded a billion times—a song about a pig. There may be political echoes to the song, apparently.

The hypothesis of the conference: “Skills that emerge in the course of participating in pop culture can become powerful forces when translated into tools of citizen engagement.”

The first half of the conference will be us listening to speakers. The second half will be working groups. Steven asks us what the working groups should be. (There’s a wiki here.) [Tags: media conferences beyond_broadcast everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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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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Micah eloquently makes the case for cutting ourselves some slack. At issue is a blog trying to make a stink over some previous posts by Amanda Marcotte in her Pandagon blog now that she’s been hired by the John Edwards campaign. Says Micah, political operatives and journalists

seem to now want to play “gotcha” over whether something someone said in the past when they were a free citizen of America exercising their free speech and under the employ of no campaign is now the equivalent of an endorsement of that specific speech by a presidential candidate.

If we adopt this standard, then the internet is just going to be a tool for an even tighter straight-jacketing of politics, where no one who ever imagines they might go into politics some time in their life will be willing to ever take a position on anything controversial for fear of damaging their political viability. Yuck! Who wants to live in that world?

Right on.

(Disclosure: I’ve done a little volunteer work for the Edwards campaign.) [Tags: politics forgiveness john_edwards media micah_sifry ]

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We can already tag videos, of course. But how about being able to tag the good parts?

YourView lets users mark segments on a video using a set of icons, and also indicate the “intensity” of each. In their example, a user could tag all the serves in a tennis match, and then watch all the high-intensity ones, or could watch all the non-boring parts of a cricket match, reducing a 44 hour match to 4 seconds and the credits. More to YourView’s point, the broadcaster of the video could mark it up with icons.

This isn’t exactly tagging because the user only has access to a pre-determined set of icons (and it’s not clear from the site who determines the set). It’s also not clear whether user-based markings are public and social; I’m assuming not. So, you don’t get the social effects of tagging, e.g., find the segments of a video the most people have marked “great shot” or find all segments of all videos anyone has marked “whoops.”

It requires the use of the YourView viewer. Enable any user to do this outside of the YourView viewer, and you’d really have something. (I’m not saying it’d be easy.)

MotionBox.com has a related function that lets you select any portion of a video and tag it—real tags—with any words you want. It seems that only the person who posts the video can tag selections, though. And you have to view the video on the MotionBox site.

Still, we’re getting closer… [Tags: video motionbox yourview tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Jim Gray, a computer scientist at Microsoft, was reported missing at sea on Jan. 28th. Thanks to Google and Amazon, you can help search for him by going through some of the tens of thousands of satellite images, looking for his boat.

The search site is here. You have to register with Amazon to participate. When I did, I didn’t see the Jim Gray search in the list of available projects, but it showed up when I searched for “gray.”

The NY Times has covered this. Microsoft has an update page. There’s a FaceBook group for the project. And here’s the U of Texas image analysis site. (Thanks to Bill St. Arnaud for the links.)

(This type of effort is known as a “mechanical Turk” because, like the chess playing machine it’s named after, there are humans at the heart of it.) [Tags: gim_gray mechanical_turk google amazon collaboration emergency everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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