Despite the title of Andrew Conry-Murray’s article in InformationWeek — “Why Business IT Shouldn’t Shrug Off Chrome OS” — it’s on balance quite negative about the prospects for enterprises adopting Google’s upcoming operating system. Andrew argues that enterprises are going to want hybrid systems, Microsoft is already moving into the Cloud, Windows 7 will have been out for a year before Chrome is available, and it’d take a rock larger than the moon to move enterprises off their legacy applications. All good points. (The next article in the issue, by John Foley is more positive about Chrome overall.)

A couple of days I heard a speech by Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra at the Open Government Innovations conference (#ogi to your Twitter buffs). It was fabulous. Aneesh — and he’s an informal enough speaker that I feel ok first-naming him — loves the Net and loves it for the right reasons. (“Right” of course means I agree with him.) The very first item on his list of priorities might be moon-sized when it comes to enterprise IT: Support open standards.

So, suppose the government requires contractors and employees to use applications that save content in open standards. In the document world, that means ODF. Now, ISO also approved a standard favored by (= written by) Microsoft, OOXML, that is far more complex and is highly controversial. There is an open source plug-in for Word that converts Word documents to those formats (apparently Microsoft aided in its development), but that’s not quite native support. So, imagine the following scenario (which I am totally making up): The federal government not only requires that the docs it deals with are in open standard formats, it switches to open source desktop apps in order to save money on license fees. (Vivek Kundra switched tens of thousands of DC employees to open source apps for this reason.) OOXML captures more of the details of a Word document, but ODF is a more workable standard, and it’s the format of the leading open source office apps. If the federal government were to do this, ODF stands a chance of becoming the safe choice for interchanging documents; it’s the one that will always work. And in that case, enterprises might find Word to be over-featured and insufficiently ODF-native.

Now, all of this is pure pretend. And even if ODF were to become the dominant document standard, Microsoft could support it robustly, although that might mean that some of Word’s formatting niceties wouldn’t make the transition. Would business be ok with that? For creators, probably yes; it’d be good to be relieved of the expectation that you will be a document designer. For readers, no. We’ll continue to want highly formatted documents. But, then ODF + formatting specifications can produce quite respectably formatted docs, and that capability will only get better.

So, how likely is my scenario — the feds demand ODF, driving some of the value out of Word, giving enterprises a reason to install free, lower-featured word processors, depriving Windows of one of its main claims on the enterprise’s heart and wallet? Small. But way higher than before we elected President Obama.
TAGS: [Tags: odf ooxml microsoft microsoft_office open_office open_source aneesh_chopra obama standards sgml ]

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[Note 1.5 hrs after posting this: Ethan Zuckerman has just put up a superb post on this topic. I suggest you read that instead of this.]

Jillian York of the Berkman Center explains the current confusion about the NY Times’ rather casual suggestion (in a blog post) , based on an accusation in a tweet from Omid Habibinia, that Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder) has been an agent for the Iranian government, basically ratting out pro-democracy bloggers. The NY Times has now gone meta on the accusation, saying it only reported it because it’s a sign of the discord and distrust, etc., etc. But it’s still a dangerous charge to propagate. Jillian wants to know why we’re blaming the NY Times blogger and not Habibinia.

I’ve got enough blame in my backpack for both. But I do think that since the NY Times trades on its credibility, it has a greater responsibility. When the NY Times reports a rumor, it not only amplifies the rumor, it inevitably adds credibility to it. That’s just the way it is, and, it’s also how the NY Times wants it.
Navigating fertility treatment? Let’s talk about clomid, a common medication in this journey.

clomid is typically taken orally once a day for 5 days, usually starting on day 3, 4, or 5 of your menstrual cycle. The dosage and timing can vary based on individual needs and doctor recommendations.

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(I wish I could track down the article I read today about the difficult the human brain has in unlearning bad info even after it’s been shown to be bad. The article talked about the increase in the belief that Iraq had WMDs after it was shown that it did not.)

[Tags: iran nytimes journalism media hoder ]

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TheOnion has been bought by a Chinese fish company. Hilarious. (Be sure to click on the op-ed titled “The Internet Allows for a Free Exchange of Unmitigated Information.”)

[Tags: theonion the_onion onion humor china free_internet free_speech freedom ]

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The Global Post has an interesting and brief report by Tristan McConnel (sponsored by the Pulitzer Center) on the problem in Somaliland of khat abuse. The comments raise the inevitable issues of cross-cultural understanding.

Isn’t it odd that this drug hasn’t crossed the ocean and taken root (so to speak) in the West? I can’t think of another that’s used so widely on one continent that hasn’t shown up in the West. On the other hand, my knowledge of cultural psycho-pharmacology is pretty much limited to what’s in The Encyclopedia of Things You Already Know.

[Tags: khat qat kat drugs narcotics psychedelics somaliland africa ]

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Link. (The video embeds my slides, but (1) they get more and more out of order in this YouTube; they were in the right order when I actually presented them. 2. My font got lost somewhere in the translations, and so there’s a fair bit of mis-sizing, text overflows, etc.) (I posted about one of the ideas in the talk (transparency as the new objectivity) here.)

[Tags: pdf09 transparency media politics e-democracy e-government e-gov everything_is_miscellaneous newspapers media ]

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As everyone knows, Boston is the Hub of the Universe. The fact has been well-documented in Boston tourist literature, and in the way Bostonians superciliously ignore outsiders. Super-superciliously! We couldn’t do it if we weren’t the hub!

Now Scott Kirsner has proved that Boston is also the hub of the new wave of marketing literature, and he’s built the Amazon list to prove it.

[Tags: marketing web_marketing twitter boston the_hub ]

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Brian Solis reports on Facebook’s claim of 250M souls, as well as on the social networking sites popular in various parts of the world.

Simply the map of the global distribution of Facebook users makes clear the danger of building our social nets in proprietary systems that don’t start from the premise that first they must interoperate.

[Tags: facebook social_networks ]

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A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge.

Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.

You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. The objectivity of the reporter is a stopping point for reader’s inquiry. That was part of high-end newspapers’ claimed value: You can’t believe what you read in a slanted tabloid, but our news is objective, so your inquiry can come to rest here. Credentialing systems had the same basic rhythm: You can stop your quest once you come to a credentialed authority who says, “I got this. You can believe it.” End of story.

We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success. So, during the Age of Paper, we got used to the idea that authority comes in the form of a stop sign: You’ve reached a source whose reliability requires no further inquiry.

In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.

In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

In short: Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can. [Tags: objectivity transparency journalism media knowledge epistemology jay_rosen science everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Today, for the very first time in my experience, The Encyclopedia Britannica was the #1 result at Google for a query.

It’s good to see the EB making progress with its online offering, but I’m actually puzzled in this case. The query was “horizontal hold” (without quotes), and the EB page that’s #1 is pretty much worthless. It’s a stub that gives a snippet of the article on the topic, but the snippet oddly begins with definition #4. The page then points us into actual articles in the EB, but they’re articles you have to pay for (although the EB offers a “no risk” free trial).

So, how did Google’s special sauce float this especially unhelpful page to the surface? And why isn’t there a Wikipedia page on “horizontal hold”? And does this mean that if there’s no Wikipedia page for a topic, Google gets the vapors and just doesn’t know what to recommend? Nooooo………

[Tags: google wikipedia encyclopedia_britannica britannica search horizontal_hold ]

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Like a fool, until Rebecca Tabasky told me, I didn’t realize that the Berkman Center aggregates blog posts from its fellows and friends and makes them available here.

[Tags: berkman ]

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