Tim Anderson was at the Supreme Court hearing on the Grokster case and writes it up without too too much legalese. So does Donna Wentworth at Copyfight. Wendy “Berkperson” Seltzer has a bit at EFF, as well as a photo of her camping out on the Courthouse steps. Would we expect any less from the EFF?

Here’s the friend of the court brief prepared by three of the Berkman’s leaders:

The brief urged the Court not to modify the standard it created 20 years ago in its landmark Sony-Betamax decision, which exempted from liability the distributors of technologies – in that case the VCR – that are “capable of substantial noninfringing uses” even if they are also often used for infringing purposes.

I hang on to the legal descriptions by the skin of my teeth, so I don’t have an opinion, except that the legal folks seem to think that the uphill battle went slightly better than expect. Woo minor-key hoo! [Technorati tags: grokster berkman]

Denise notes that Aldo Castañeda is writing his legal thesis online. It’s on open standards in identity management systems and you’re welcome to participate…

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Rebecca and Ethan are leading the Tuesday lunch session at Berkman. They’re explaining Global Voices, an attempt to crack open the little shells we live in so we can hear, well, global voices.There are all sorts of issues to be resolved: Internationalized software, free anonymous hosting, and identifying “bridge-bloggers” who “have feet in two worlds.” But, it’s getting going now. They even point out that there are instances when they’re getting international news via bloggers faster than the MSM; they’re developing a network of bloggers on the ground around the world.

The Global Voices wiki is here.

If you want to tag a post as relevant to Global Voices, tag it as “globalvoices” at delicious. [Technorati tag: GlobalVoices]

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Why is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops with stickers than do PC notebook owners?

Maybe it’s because we PC owners want to be able to re-sell our notebooks while Mac owners assume they’re going to own their machines till they wear them down to the rims. [Technorati tag: macintosh]

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Ethan interviews Sokari Ekine, “a Nigerian feminist, human rights activist and scholar who blogs from her organic farm in Almeria, Spain, south of Madrid.” (She also writes an African tech blog.) Fascinating. It’s a big world. [Technorati tag: nigeria]

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Billmon has an astounding juxtaposition. [Technorati tag: schiavo]

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Berkman’s Henrick Schneider at the Tuesday morning informal get-together talks about some quick research he’s done using General Inquirer, “A computer-assisted approach for content analyses of textual data” by Philip Stone. It’s a dictionary-based approach with over 10,000 words and 180 categories. (GI has a blog.) E.g., it found a strong correlation between the optimism in the first speech given by presidential candidates and the outcome of the elections. Also, the pessimism in popular songs and newsmagazzins predicted decreased consumer optimism and economic recession.

Henrik did a quick study feeding in blogs about the Eason Jordan case, using just six blogs (or other statements) and only one text from each source, so this is more of a test of whether there’s a reason to go ahead with a statistically significant study. The content came from Eason Jordan, Rebecca MacKinnon, LaShawn Barber, Rony Abovitz, Richard Sambrook, Brian Ericksen.

Ethan points out that GI is sometimes used to note rhetorical signatures. Henrik’s mini-study shows, for example, that Jordan and Sambrook use the most “negative” terms, Abovitz is distinctively positive, and Ericksen (an Army guy) uses the most political terms.

Applied more broadly — Ethan suggests looking at the top 100 technorati-ranked bloggers — this could be quite interesting. We kicked around other ideas, e.g., looking at the deviation among US MSM, foreign media and bloggers on a particular topic. [Technorati tags: blogs berkman]

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My wife and I have been catching up on TiVo’ed West Wings and the pattern seems obvious: The ones on the campaign trail are good while the ones inside the White House suck. The cause seems just as obvious: Without the natural drama of a campaign, the writers are at a loss.

AdamAaron Sorkin’s genius was his ability to create compelling scripts out of two elements that traditionally are drama-free: a group of people who like one another and political issues/ideas. The new writers have fragmented the group and are relying on ridiculous plot twists: CJ’s elevation to chief of staff was totally arbitrary, and the national security advisor is now being given a cloak and dagger backstory that shows the producers think we viewers can’t appreciate a well-drawn character unless she’s killed someone.

I hope West Wing continues with Santos as president and with a whole new cast, except for maybe Josh and Charlie. If within a year they can’t figure out how to make the west wing of the White House interesting, then I’m switching to Joey. [Technorati tag: WestWing]

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Further evidence of the penetration of blogs into mainstream culture:

Blog Sticky Notes

Courtesy of my lovely daughter Leah.

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For months and months I’ve been ignoring the ugly horizontal bars that show up in the box at the top of my archive pages. One crosses out “An Entry from the Archives” and the other runs underneath that text. They don’t show up in Microsoft IE but they do in Firefox and Safari.

Generous reader Miles of TinyApps, a site I never tire of recommending to y’all, scouted out the html code and found the offending lines. Apparently the Style property “text-decoration: none;” renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari, although I’m sure it will turn out to have been my fault. Anyway, I’ve removed those lines and am confident that when my archives finish rebuilding — scheduled for Oscar Night 2006 — they will have been shorn of their extraneous blue lines.

Thanks, Miles!

So, of course I got Miles’ advice backwards. Here’s a snippet from an email from him:

You mentioned that the “Style property “text-decoration: none;”
renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari”. Actually,
that is the code to get RID of the lines when added to the
A HREF tag [as Miles had indicated -ed.]. Sorry if that was unclear. [It was clear. I wasn’t.- ed.]

It seems the problem was more with Internet Explorer NOT
putting the blue lines in, as the original HTML has no provision
for removing them. “text-decoration:none” needs to be in the
A HREF tag, not in the FONT tags.

And be sure to see Shelley’s comments (in the comments) on how to do this purely through CSS instead of kludging together CSS and font tags….

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Consumerpedia

Consumerpedia is Wikipedia for products. It’s in .00000001 alpha, the site says, but it seems usable, albeit empty. (I put in a review of Thinkpad X40, just to try it out.) The Help page highlights its tools for constructing a hierchical folksonomy: Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link). It explicitly has avoided creating a top-down categorization scheme.Who’s up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System (UNSPSC) Deathmatch!

How is it different from ePinions? From the About page:

Consumerpedia came out of a desire to have a user-driven consumer resource that evolved based on how people actually used it – where they were not forced into certain narrow categories and topics as an appendage of someone’s ecommerce effort, but rather a completely independent information resource that was an end in itself – one that had no conflict of interest and with the sole goal of simply making it easier to find and share helpful information

I don’t yet see how it accommodates multiple points of view, as the About page promises, but I’m sure that’ll be clear once someone posts a multiple point of view. [Technorati tags: taxonomy consumerpedia wikipedia]

Consumerpedia has posted a helpful response and explanation on their blog. To clarify: It’s for anything reviewable, not just products. And I didn’t mean to imply that it’s a wiki.

It’ll be crucial to see how they implement their karma system. And, I’m still unclear about the basic question of how it handles multiple reviews of a single item.

I hope it’s wildly successful.

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