Nature magazine has set up a site — Precedings — where scientists can post their papers before those papers are reviewed and accepted. This a big deal. As Nature’s Timo Hannay puts it in a broadcast email:

The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren’teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can’t formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).

Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there’s no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).

Timo goes on to acknowledge that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines.

This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal. [Tags: nature science research everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge arxiv precedings cc ]

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Microsoft has been circulating the changes it wants made to a NY State election law so that e-voting machines can continue to use Windows as their operating system. According to Bo Lipari‘s blog:

Microsoft’s proposed change to state law would effectively render our current requirements for escrow and the ability for independent review of source code in the event of disputes completely meaningless – and with it the protections the public fought so hard for.

Adding insult to injury, these changes are being slipped into a bill that may be voted on Monday or Tuesday, June 18 or 19. That bill’s stated purpose is to make “technical changes” to the recent law moving the date of New York’s presidential primary to February. Because this bill involving the new primary date must be passed next week before the Legislative session ends (New York has jumped on the bandwagon to be part of the super presidential primary in February 2008) this grave weakening of the public’s right to review software would come along part and parcel with the primary date change.

If you live in NY, now might be a good time to call your state senator and assemblyperson. Not sure who those critters are? Bo points to lookups for the senate and the assembly. [Tags: evoting microsoft democracy ny ]

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Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used “deconstruct” twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.

Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: “The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective.” I think so, too, although I’m not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.

FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning…

(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]

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Joe Andrieu has an excellent post explaining Doc‘s Vendor Relationship Management meme (vrm blog). Provocative in the best sense: Stimulating lots of thoughts and questions. For instance, how does VRM (or Joe’s vision of it) differ from federated identity schemes in which the user has control over her personal info? [Tags: vrm joe_andrieu doc_searls id ]

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Zack Exley, who knows a thing or two about Internet campaigning, has a post titled “Don’t hire an Internet person.” No, he’s not suggesting tha campaigns give up on the Internet. On the contrary. Every day, he says, he gets calls asking for recommendations for an Internet person for a campaign.

“No, don’t hire an Internet guy,” I say. “You need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they’re responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have—so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you’ll just stick in a closet anyways?”

He concludes: “Everybody knows it’s time for a changing of the guard. To stop thinking of yourself as an Internet person is one way to help make it happen.”

Of course, campaigns still need people with Internet-specific skills, from the technical to the politcal-organizational. The Internet is different and requires people who understand it deeply. But Zack’s right to insist that the Net not be treated organizationally as a silo. And that’s as true for many businesses as it is for politics. [Tags: zack_exley politics ]

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I was a guest on Dennis Prager‘s conservative radio talk show yesterday. I was supposed to be talking about Everything is Miscellaneous, but the conversation, not surprisingly, turned to whether the Net’s end run around authority is good for the left, right, or both. I thought Prager conducted a very good interview; I’m less happy with my responses.

I’m having trouble telling exactly what the permalink is for the podcast, but try here. If not, look for the June 14, 2007 show. I start at 10:20 and go to 23:36. (By the way, he introduces me as an “Internet advisor to Howard Dean.” Because time was short, I didn’t correct him to say that I was a volunteer Internet advisor to the Dean campaign, which is closer to the truth. I doubt very much that Dean would remember me.)

Supernova, a conference I’m going to and will be speaking at (debating Andrew Keen, among other things), is posting brief videos of people answering the question “What is the new network.” My response and Andrew Rasiej’s are here.

[Tags: dennis_prager supernova2007 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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David Isenberg tells a story about how a wine’s story makes it taste better. It’s a good reminder that the only products that are only products are products we don’t care much about.

Let me put that differently.

I came to like wine late in life, mainly because for most of my life I had only had really bad wine. Grape juice gone bad. Wine one pucker away from vinegar. Wine that made you appreciate the fine taste of Lavoris. Then, I had a client in the mid 1990s who wined and dined customers, ordering from the bottom of the wine list. The light bulb in the wine cellar went on. I still can’t tell identify a wine’s type without reading the bottle (although I usually can distinguish red from white), and my tastes are in the $10-$15/bottle range. But I like it. A lot. And it’s for one basic reason: The taste of wine is so damn complex. Drinking a good glass of wine is like thinking.

So, David’s story about the taste of a bottle being enhanced by the narrative around it pleases me. [Tags: wine david_isenberg everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The other day, “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine on the value of digital messiness. [Tags: npr everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy]

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AT&T is going to start policing its network to prevent the distribution of materials it considers to violate copyright. (Um, Fair Use?) It’s doing this so it can strike special deals with content companies to offer their products exclusively.

Putting a cop in the middle of the network and making available content not accessible by other networks means that if the AT&T says it’s offering Internet connectivity, it’s lying. The Internet is a set of protocols that ensure that bits will be moved across networks (inter-networking) without giving special privileges or control to the carriers.

And forget the definitional violation. This is a big step toward turning the Internet into cable TV — a proprietary network that makes money by selling its users content. [Tags: net_neutrality att berkman copyright copyleft digital_rights]

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