I’m in San Francisco with a free day, waiting for my daughter to join me for a weekend of tourism (if the weather permits planes to leave from Boston today). So, I’m spending the morning at Technorati (see my disclosure statement), having lunch with Irina Slutsky who’s writing about blogs for Red Herring, and then I have an appointment to talk with The Eleanor Rosch, a polymath at UC Berkeley who unhorsed Aristotle. I’m thrilled about meeting Prof. Rosch and don’t know where to begin asking her questions.

Later: What a day. I didn’t have enough time at Technorati, but it was great seeing The Gang. Lots going on there and, no surprise, it feels like a startup (which is a good thing). Irina and I talked for over three hours. and I got to spend almost two hours with Prof. Rosch whose career of thought I admire deeply. My head is swimming. (You know, that’s an awfully ugly image.)

And my daughter Leah arrives in a couple of hours. I can’t wait.

Technorati’s open office

A terrible photo of Eleanor Rosch

[Technorati tags: rosch taxonomy technorati]

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Peter Daou’s Daou Report, which aggregates blogs left and right, is now under Salon’s umbrella, which is good all around. [Technorati tag: daou]

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Mitch turns weblogging back to its (arguable) origins as a commented log of sites the blogger has visited. It’s like del.icio.us with context.

This augments and does not replace — heaven forbid! — Mitch’s regulah blog.

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JD Lasica pastes Garrett the Copyright Totalitarian Ferret Who The Kids Love right in his snot-filled little nose.

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At the end of yesterday’s sessions, Nicholas Negroponte talked briefly about providing millions of $100 laptops to school kids in poor nations, and showed a prototype/mockup. I think it’s a brilliant, world-changing idea, which doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. But here’s a place where hope needs to lead the business plan.

Assume for a moment that it works. Imagine hundreds of millions of kids with networked laptops running linux and using open source applications: The outburst of creativity. The sudden change in social connection. The access via VOIP to the voices around the world. The sudden isolating of Microsoft. And, these puppies don’t come with DRM burned into their circuits.

Negroponte and his colleagues are moving the world forward. The $100 laptop is a platform for emergence. [Technorati tags: negroponte]

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Like how to fold a shirt, this promises to make you far more efficient in an ordinary task. Like how to fold a shirt, I can’t really figure out how to do it. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.)

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At the conference I’m at, the shit barrier was broken at 1:30. That’s the moment the word “shit” was first used by one of the speakers.

I have only recently begun to collect data on this phenomenon, and look forward to producing many attractive line graphs.

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Andrew took us through IBM’s Webfountain project, which crawls gigantic piles of data looking for meaning. He pointed especially to applications using it to look for the effect of marketing campaigns on Web pages, although it has other uses, of course.

Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Auutonomy project head at Ford’s training department says “Metadata is for the birds” because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging. Autonomy wants to provide systems that push info to users without requiring them to interact with it beforehand.

Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem says that we tend to believe that the future is present in the mass of data and we just need to find it. But we use existing patterns to search the data, which can’t turn up new patterns. Humans are amazing pattern-detecting machines but we’re terrible at exploring alternatives. Eric suggests selective breeding: make new combinations, look at the results, pick the most interesting results, recombine them, etc. He does a live demo that discovers a “hidden bagel” in a 50-dimensional financial data set. (I have no idea what that sentence means once it gets past the word “bagel.”) It helps not to know what you’re looking for. (He’s posted an online experiment interactive evolution.) [Disclosure: I did some consulting to Icosystem a couple of years ago.]

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I’m sitting in the audience at a TTI-Vanguard conference where I just spoke, which means a cocktail of adrenalin and self-loathing is coursing through my bloodstream.

Everyone in the audience has a microphone and is encouraged to interrupt with questions and disagreements. So, I didn’t make it all the way through my talk, which is common here. Unsurprisingly, the comments were quite trenchant: Since the Dewey Decimal system expands infinitely to the right of the decimal, it isn’t as limited as I’m making it out; Don’t we want data aggregators like Google to make some value judgments?; How does this fit with the Semantic Web? Do I know that librarians are holding some material back until they have agreement about how to tag it? I should have figured more audience-conversation time into my talk. I was well into describing tagging when the big red light flashed, and I didn’t get to the conclusions I outlined in my previous post. I’m feeling like I screwed up. [Technorati tags: tti-vanguard]

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Scott Matthews has an idea-in-progress called DRUMS. It’s a database of creative works and relevant metadata including, crucially, rights and permissions. It’d be maintained by a trusted authority, if we can ever find one of those again. Scott thinks this might provide the infrastructure required to develop a middle path between the copyright totalitarians and the free culture hippies. (Disclosure: I am a free culture hippy.)

It’s an interesting idea, well worth discussing, but we can already embed rights and permissions via Creative Commons. Why would an authorized centralized, externalized registry help? Maybe that’s the one simple feature that would precipitate welcome change in the current copyright impasse. But I’m not seeing how yet. (Patrick Ross discusses it here. JG Lasica discusses it here.) [Technorati tags: DRUMS copyright]

Scott replies, in an email (posted with his permission):

Let me address why I think an authorized, centralized registry could help…

Think of it as a common resource pool, one that you could search (say) for “works released in the last month, licensed for sharing.” And let’s also say that another site has built a recommendation engine, and that both of those sites could cross-communicate via common IDs representing the same work.

(each CC work is essentially an island — think of this as making them all one big archipelago)

In other words, by making that bit of infrastructure a public utility, all sorts of applications and services could be built on top of it.

I should add that, as far as I can tell, almost all of the Alternative Compensation Systems that I’ve seen call for just a new registry anyway — so why not start there?

What do you say, free culture hippy?

I say: Thanks, Scott. I think it makes sense as something Creative Commons could offer…

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