The French have developed a “code of conduct” for bloggers—a project begun in Feb. 2006 but with longer roots—that has been adopted by 200 blogs and two major political parties. It mixes netiquette (don’t use all caps), best practices (“When replying to a comment, it can be useful to quote from the original text in order to be understood”) and ethical rules (“Comments of a racist, anti-Semitic, pornographic, revisionist or sexist nature will not be accepted…”).

From my point of view, it is one possible set of guidelines. We should have lots and lots of them so that — when appropriate — bloggers can make explicit the norms already implicit on their sites.

This evening at 9pm in France, there’s going to be a Second Life discussion about the code with the person responsible for the Net campaign of Ségolène Royal. Details here. (I’ll be on a plane, so I’ll have to miss it, which is just as well given my ludicrously bad French.)

(I blogged about blogging codes here and about my own guidelines in the comments to this post.)

[Tags: blogosphere blogs codes morals cyberbullying ]

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Anyone have any recommendations for a Windows or Linux package that will let me create Flash presentations so I can stop using Powerpoint? Note that I am not trying to import Powerpoint into Flash. I want software that will make it easy-ish to create presentations in Flash, so that I can play them back at 1024×768, complete with snazzy path animation (a must) and special effects. A plain old Flash editor that has a template for presentations would be a start, but I’d like something with effects built in. I’m playing around with Swish (but can’t find a presentation template and so far don’t see how to run it as Flash instead of Shockwave, but I haven’t looked hard.)

My preferences: The editor either works in Linux or works in Linux via Wine or CrossOffice (or some other DLL-runner). And I don’t want to pay a million dollars for this, since it’s likely to be a failed experiment on my part. But if it works, I could switch to Linux on my laptop.

Any thoughts? [Tags: powerpoint flash linux presentation_software]

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The Conversations Network (a non-profit from the same folks who bring you IT Conversations) has just launched Podcorps, an all-volunteer team of “stringers” who will record the audio and sometimes the video of public events that matter to people.

Once you register, you can search for events near you that you can sign up to record. Or, if you know of an event you’d like covered, go stick it into the calendar. (The FAQ says that some stringers may want some help covering expenses, but this is intended to be an entirely non-profit enterprise.) The stringers can then publish the media where they want, although Podcorps expects most will post them at OurMedia.org and the Internet Archive where they are freely available to anyone.

I hope this takes off. More is better than less. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of the Conversations Network.) [Tags: podcasts politics events everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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From a press release about a study called Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the blogosphere [LATER: Try this pdf file if that link doesn’t work.] by researchers at Boston University and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil:

The study concludes that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not seem to correlate with the “real” popularity of the blog, and suggests that social-network-based navigation may be playing an increasingly important role in web navigation in general, and blogosphere navigation in particular. On that count the authors note that in blogspace, the popularity of a blog is more a reflection of its owner’s social attributes (e.g., celebrity status, reputation, and public image) than a reflection of the number and rank of other blogs or web pages that point to it. This highlights the need for the development of page-rank algorithms that take into consideration the social attributes of blogosphere actors (as opposed to solely on the topology of the underlying blogspace), possibly using inference techniques.

Professors Azer Bestavros (BU), Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida and the graduate students Fernando Duarte and Bernado Matos (UFMG) used an extensive set of real traces to characterize the access patterns to a popular blogosphere. The traces consist of over 32 million blog requests and about 278 thousand comment requests. These requests were made by over 4 million visitors over a period of four weeks.

I haven’t read the study — I’m about to get on a plane from Helsinki, where, by the way, I had a wonderful time but slept like a dog on a rocking chair (assuming dogs don’t sleep well on rocking chairs) — and the summary raises lots of questions that I’m sure the study itself addresses. Anyway, it sounds like an interesting study. Hence, this premature post. [Tags: blogs ]

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The Guardian has a terrific article by Jonathan Bate on how Shakespeare went from being considered one of the very best playwrights to the unique, exceptional genius of our language.

Among small points: Bates says it isn’t true that Shakespeare created more new words than anyone else in our history. That myth resulted from the Oxford English Dictionary’s frequent citation of Shakespeare as a source because “because of his ready availability when the dictionary was created at the end of the Victorian era.” [Tags: shakespeare]

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I’m still sleep-dprived, but I’ve had a day to think about what I posted yesterday about truth being a property of networks.

It would have been clearer for me to say understanding is a property of networks. Then I wouldn’t have left the impression that I think facts are a matter of majority opinion. Facts are facts. That’s pretty much their essence. Understanding, however, is plural, at least in many domains — less so in the sciences, more so in the humanities.

On the other hand, our age should be embarrassed that we’ve reduced truth to mere facts.

[Tags: truth philosphy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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It’s three in the morning in the US. I am in the Zurich airport, waiting for my flight to Helsinki. I am high on Dramamine. All of which will help explain why at the moment it seems plausible to me to say: Truth is a property of networks.

I can only guess at what I mean, starting with the obvious: Rather than thinking that truth is a relationship between the propositions we believe and the way the world is, such that the propositions represent the world, in the networked world the truth is argued for and connected via links. For all but the most mundane of truths, the network of conversations gives us more shades, nuances, and reasons to believe. Which leads me to think that if truth isn’t an emergent property of networks, then understanding is.

It is, of course, an unowned, self-contradictory, unsettled truth that is too big to be contained by any individual. It is outside of us and among us. It is gained not by trying to contain it but by traveling through it.

Of course, the fact that I’m traveling at the moment has no effect on my choice of metaphors.

And the fact that I’m dog tired has no effect on my decision to post this instead of letting it melt in the light. [Tags: truth philosophy networks wrong_in_public everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Harvard Law has approved a course I’ll be co-teaching with the Berkman Center’s John Palfrey during Spring 2008. Holy crap.

It’s called The Web Difference? Digital Media, Entertainment, and the Law. Here’s the description:

This course will examine the claim of Internet exceptionalism and the implications of this claim in the context of the law and society. Is the Web something substantially new that is changing the fundamentals of who we are and how we’re together? Or is it just the next in the communication media humans have invented? What are the problems to which these changes give rise? Which of these problems are ones that we’d like to address through reforms in the law, technology environment, markets, social norms, or other yet-to-be-discovered modes of influence? This course will cover the legal and policy issues to which changes in the news media and entertainment businesses, wrought by the web, give rise. Key doctrinal areas of inquiry include intellectual property, the First Amendment, defamation, and privacy. Students should be prepared to experiment with new technologies, including a course weblog, and to perform some coursework collaboratively. Course requirements include gro up coursework and a final paper, and no examination.

Oy. Not only haven’t I taught since 1986, the topics the course plans on covering are way beyond my reach. So, thank heaven for John Palfrey. I am totally thrilled to work with him. (I won’t go on to list JP’s virtues both because he’s modest and because he’s my boss at the Berkman Center. But you can just ask anyone.)

By the way, does anyone know what “gro up coursework” is? [Tags: harvard berkman exceptionalism john_palfrey teaching]

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