The latest in the Harvard Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous Podcasts series of interviews is up. I talk with my old friend Paul English, founder of Kayak.com (a travel site that kicks butt) about making a business out of other companies’ information. But Paul is also deeply involved in health care issues in developing nations where aggregating information can have benefits even more important than saving you $20 on your flight.

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The Sunlight Foundation has posted some cool visualizations of how Congress has dispersed the pinata of giveaways called “earmarks.”

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The Bush administration has approved revising Reagan’s presidential order 12333, instituted in 1981 to curb the abuses of civil liberties by the intelligence agencies. A friend of mine who used to be in one of those agencies says that he has never bought into the current concerns about intelligence agencies because he knew 12333 was part of the agencies’ DNA. Now, this conservative Republican (although he’s harder to categorize than that) says he’s concerned. [Tags: civil_liberties homeland_security bush 1233 reagan politics]

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John Palfrey and Erin Mishkin are leading a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center about the “digital natives” project, which “explores what it means to be born digital.” The hypothesis is that there’s a gap between those born digital and those who came to it at some point in their lives…and the gap is larger than we think.

JP acknowledges right at the beginning that many others know much more than the people on the project do about what’s goin’ on with the kids. He hopes that a formal project will emerge from the past few years of informal research and discussion. From the project he hopes will come public policy suggestions that reflect the differences. E.g., privacy laws reflect digital immigrants’ assumptions

Those who were born digital have a sense that they’re always on. (The project will involve research beyond the US, by the way.) JP now goes through some of the slides from the talk he gave at the Internet & Society 2007 on June 1. Stray points from what he says today:

– Online identities frequently are made to be different from the rw identity “because I can.”

– The most important global trend that ties natives to one another is that they’re creators. (He shows a bunch of great clips by kids and amateurs.)

– What might privacy law and policy look like if it reflected the digital native ethos? E.g., FaceBook and MySpace give a good set of controls, although they’re hard to use. But what happens if a friend posts an embarrassing photo of you? At FaceBook, you can remove it, but not at all networking sites. Or suppose a friend posts at Flickr an embarrassing photo of you and tags it with your name. You can’t get rid of it. Finally, imagine a friend posts the same photo of you, but doesn’t tag it with your name…but a face recognition system does. All these are google-able and part of your online identity. How should public policy reflect and react?

– JP’s got a book deal, with Urs Gasser, from Basic Books. It’s out in 2008, and it’s aimed at lawyers.

Now Erin talks about the project. They’ll be doing a bunch of interviews.

They had a logo contest for people under 18 and got 200 entries. A 15 year old Brit won.

There is then lively discussion about the questions the project should be asking. Too rollicking to blog well. So, I’ll blog it badly. The following points and questions were raised by various people:

If the technology is transforming the way natives “socialize, engage in the political process, and engage themselves” (which JP and Erin pose as a question, but which I’m taking as an assertion), then how can policy created by immigrants and stay-at-home reflect that? How can policy keep up with “quicksilver”?

What’s the driving force? Technology? Social norms? Policy?

The interviews may affect the natives’ attitude towards exposing too much info on social sites.

How can the project use Facebook to get natives talking about this topic?

Empirical issue: What is due to developmental issues and what is due to the tech? To sort this out, strong collaboration among this team and other teams in other areas (e.g., Project Zero) would be helpful.

Today’s digital natives are still in the childhood of the technology. It’s the next generation that will be true natives. OTOH, by the time the current natives are adults, the environment will have changed.

[“If you __________, you might be a digital native.” Could be a way to generate some interest. E.g.: If you think email should be saved for wedding invitations and pink slips, you might be a digital native. If you get bored before you can finish writing a Tweeter post, you might be a digital native. Ok, maybe not such a great idea.]

[Tags: berkman digital_natives]

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Here is David Isenberg‘s posting about the Senate’s refusal to hear from anybody representing the public interest in its hearings about whether the 700mH swath of spectrum should be sold off to the incumbents or opened up for innovation.

On Thursday the Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on how to re-purpose the 700 MHz (Analog TV) spectrum. While there are several good people testifying (most notably Phil Weiser, from University of Colorado, Paul Cosgrove, NYC’s Commissioner of IT and Telecom, and Jim Barksdale, Reed Hundt’s partner in Frontline Wireless) there will be NOBODY representing the public’s interest in putting one or two channels into Part 15 (or similar) to capitalize on what we’ve learned from the unprecedentedly awesome success of Wi-Fi.

I wrote to Senate Commerce staffer James Assey to recommend that Harold Feld testify (check his blog posting on 700 MHz), but I’d also be very happy to see J.H. Snider or Michael Calabrese from the New America Foundation, Tim Wu (Columbia Law School), David P. Reed (HP and MIT Media Lab) or any of a number of public spirited spokespeople who know a lot about the uses of spectrum. None of these people will be heard unless the agenda, announced today changes. The facts the Committee learns have already been selected.

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[HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD]………

There are two possibilities, and both worked for me.

First, their life and stories continue, too organic to wrap up, but the series ends. We sit in silence, feeling the series’ absence.

Second, as others have pointed out, last week the series replayed a clip of Bobby telling Tony that you never hear the one that gets you. That’s what we “heard” at the end.

At first I thought it was ending #1. Actually, like everyone else, at first I thought it was broadcast problem. Now I think it’s ending #2.

I might add that the more specific my predictions were, the more they were off. And if #2 is the meaning of the ending, then I was way off.

There are a bunch of comments about tonight’s episode attached to a 2004 posting I did about that season’s finaled…”

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Here’s a distributed journalism project for Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net: How many headline writers tomorrow are going to give away the ending of The Sopranos by giving articles titles such as “Carmella’s Revenge: A Sad Farewell to Tony,” “Tony Soprano Sings for His Supper,” “King Tony – Justice Foiled, Fans Delighted,” or possibly, “Tony Saved by Aquaman? Who’d a Thunk it?!” ?

So much for Tivo-ing it… :( [Tags: sopranos]

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Here’s the audio of my closing comments at the Internet & Society Conference last week, the theme of which was open access. In it, I say that the Web is revealing knowledge to us as it has always been, and urge that we not be too realistic as we address the Web’s potential. I also pay homage to Charlie Nesson ‘s vision of the university leading the fight to keep the Internet open and free. My comments were freeform, composed just a few minutes before the talk (because I was supposed to be responding to the day), and very informal. The audio is 20 minutes long. [Tags: is2k7 berkman charlie_nesson knoweldge open_access]

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[NO SPOILERS AHEAD. Just bad guesses. Although I do give away some general stuff about the old series Oz. And I do presume you’ve seen all but the last episode of The Sopranos.]

I hope The Sopranos isn’t going the way of Oz, which spent its final episodes relentlessly killing off its characters. The writers may have thought they were playing with the form in a postmodern way, but I thought it was just cheezy writing.

The Sopranos has never been cheezy. But I worry that the kiss-off by Dr. Melfi and the death of Bobby, the innocent, were meant to signal that the reality principle is about to kick in, where the proof of realism is that you kill your characters. That would be a betrayal, since the great joy of the series has been its recognition that realism is conveyed dramatically through the complexity of life, not the simple fact of death.

But I have hope. If I had to predict — and I certainly don’t have to — I’d say that the show will end tonight as the comedy that it’s always essentially been. No comeuppance! So, here’s what I think will happen…but, since the writers of The Sopranos are just a tad better at writing The Sopranos than I am, I’m likely to be way off:

– Tony’s family survives. Killing any of them would turn this into tragedy, which would be a tragedy. Besides, this season hasn’t focused on the family, except for AJ. Either AJ is being built up for a tragic and ironic offing, or (as I hope and suspect), they wrapped up his story arc last week. (One of the disappointments of this season has been the small role Carmella has played. She was all set up to confront her own bad faith, but the show left that undeveloped. Of all the characters, she’s the one I’m left most curious about.)

– Tony’s resolution is complex. We’ll be left thinking there is a story beyond the ending. That means he doesn’t get killed and he doesn’t go to jail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the FBI guys come through the door and pull Tony out. So, it’s either the federal witness protection relocation program for him, or he relocates himself. (Another possible deus ex machina: The son of the former head of Phil’s family — what’s-his-name, the guy from Miami — might turn on Phil.)

– New head of the Sopranos gang: Paulie Walnuts. Comedy reigns!

– Last scene of the series: Carmella has just received her real estate broker license wherever they’ve settled. Tony settles into his LazyBoy, turns on his down-scale TV to a documentary about WWII, and bites into some cold cuts.

Now let the showing of me wrong begin! Please! [Tags: sopranos heroes tv]

Is The Sopranos the greatest TV series ever? Of course it’s a silly question, but I’d still argue in favor. And because the series exists within its own crazy, stipulated rules, within which the characters and their behavior are real, it’s also likely to survive the decades.

Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous, I’ve posted about why I’m catching up with Heroes via torrents instead of using NBC’s video player.

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In Everything Is Miscellaneous, I use a famous quote from the famous Ted Nelson:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled. (Cited on p. 125 of EiM)

In conversation, Scott Rosenberg said he had been trying to track down the actual source of the quote. I couldn’t help him, and I noted that on the “errata” page of my book’s Web site.

Now, Frank Hecker (see comments #3, #4, and especially #5) has figured it out, which required searching through several editions of Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Machine Dreams.”

The quote I used, which has been floating, actually mixes what Nelson wrote in the original 1974 edition with a sidebar quote from the 1987 edition. The 1974 edition says “everything is deeply intertwingled” twice (p. 45). The 1987 edition says:

Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged–people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. (p. 31)

Next to that is a sidebar that quotes “Everything is deeply intertwingled” from the original edition. Note that the quote as I attributed it to Nelson does not contain the word “deeply.”

For more details, see Franks three comments on my Errata page.

Thank you, Frank! (PS: Wikipedia had the quotation wrong, too. Frank has fixed it.)

[Tags: ted_nelson intertwingularity ]

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