According to this excellent blog, Kentucky is considering a bill banning anonymous online speech. (The blog is the class blog for “The Web Difference” course I’m co-teaching, with John Palfrey, at Harvard Law.)

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And speaking of courses, I find it heartwarming that today I’m able to open our session on whether the Web has changed marketing by using some slides on “what is marketing” from John Hauser’s Spring 2005 course on marketing at MIT, which is available as open courseware. Gotta love the open courseware.

[Tags: berkman anonymity digital_rights marketing open_courseware mit ]

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Library of Congress Reference Librarian Thomas Mann has a long, detailed and fierce argument against the LC Working Group on the Future of BibliographicControl. He is quite specific about what will be lost to scholars with the Working Group’s more folksonomic approach.

Much of what I’ve read so far points to the huge amount of information contained in the existing LC Subject Headings and their cross references, and how well they can convey to a scholar a lay of the land she is researching. (I don’t know why we’d want to throw out the LCSH instead of supplementing them with yet more metadata.) I haven’t read the entire piece yet, but what I’ve seen is fascinating, learned and will, I hope, occasion a productive debate.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging library_of_congress libraries ]

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Google is almost done scanning books at Harvard. Of the 15 million books in the Harvard collections, Google is only scanning one million because it’s excluded any protected by copyright or that are too fragile, too big, or too small to be scanned.

[Tags: google libraries everything_is_miscellaneous copyright ]

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April 2-4, I’m going to TopicMaps, a conference that may be particularly interesting (to people who are particularly interested in it, of course):

The basic idea is simple: the organizing principle of information should not be where it lives or how it was created, but what it is about. Organize information by subject and it will be easier to integrate, reuse and share – and (not least) easier for users to find. The increased awareness of the importance of metadata and ontologies, the popularity of tagging, and a growing interest in semantic interoperability are part and parcel of the new trend towards subject-centric computing.

The organizers have let it be known that there’s still room… [Tags: conferences topicmaps oslo everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Rebecca on Tibet, China, blogs and tweets

Rebecca MacKinnon has a post that will knock the kneejerk right out of your response to the Chinese repression of Tibet. She points to a post on Global Voices that translates “chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us… ” But there’s lots more in Rebecca’s post… [Tags: china tibet rebecca_mackinnon globalVoices]

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Well, sort of. It’s started a “delete-o-meter” that lists the number of deleted comments, but not their content. This post explains why comments are deleted.

The TSA blog seems to be shaping up admirably. Some of it is pretty fluffy (e.g., a post on the canine squad), but some are pretty feisty (e.g., rebutting a media exposé) and some are just interesting (e.g., why MacBook Airs may have had trouble making it through the X-ray inspection). This blog is — surprisingly, frankly — turning into a posterchild for how government can be transparent and not even boring about it. [Tags: tsa blogging government edemocracy]

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Eric Lease Morgan has a good post (from a couple of weeks ago) about the Open Library project’s developers meeting. Such interesting questions… (Open Library wants to give every book its own home page to accrete metadata, and, of course, make all that info open, public and standard.

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I can’t say much makes me happier than this photo of the One Laptop Per Child laptop I donated in the hands of its owner. (I had done the “buy two, get one” program, and then donated the laptop they’d sent me. That’s the one you see here.)

Thank you, Waveplace, for doing this, and for letting me see what you do.

(I am on the road and have not yet seen either of the two videos available (1 2)). [Tags: xo olpc waveplace haiti]

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From the Berkman Center:

5/15/08-5/16/08 – Registration is now open for the culminating conference and gala of Berkman’s 10th anniversary celebration. Berkman Center faculty, fellows, staff, and the community at large will participate in conversations on the future of the Internet with Net luminaries and, we hope, you. Spots are filling up quickly, so register now!

[Tags: Berkman]

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I’ve been at Euroblog 2008 yesterday and today, and will be tomorrow as well. It’s a mix of academics and practitioners talking about marketing and public relations in the age of the Web.

The conference seems to assume that we agree that the Web has changed the marketing landscape, that customers are not mere consumers, that marketing has to change right down to its skivvies. The academics at the conference have generally backed this up with actual research. What marketing can and should be, however, is a matter of more controversy here. As it should be. [Tags: euroblog2008 marketing public_relations]

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Catharine Taylor has a new blog about social media as a marketing platform. Yes, it’s a problematic formulation — which is one of the points of Euroblog — but Catharine is skeptical about the importance of social media, albeit not yet expressing much skepticism about the propriety and effectiveness of using them for marketing.

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