Oxfam, the venerable relief agency and a personal favorite, has started its first effort on American soil. [Tags: HurricaneKatrina oxfam]

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Peter Morville has started a blog about findability, the topic of his informative and highly readable book, Ambient Findability. [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous PeterMorville]

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The Berkman Center has a new rule for lunchtime sessions that are being podcast: No potato chips will be served.

Apparently, last year the sounds of bags opening and chips crunching drowned out the conversation.

What’s next? No slurpy soda drinking? No rustling from corduroy-shod thighs?

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Gary Kamiya has as a long review in Salon of what seems to be a remarkable book: Anthony Shadid’s “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War.” Shadid is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Washington Post, an Arab-American fluent in Arabic, who reports on how the war looks to a broader swath of Iraqis than we usually hear from. According to Kamiya, Shadid’s book is an attempt to understand the war from Iraqi perspectives, not a political tract, although of course it has political implications.

It sounds like an amazing book, and the review is rich in stories and insights from the book. [Tags: iraq]

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Matt Margolis and Tom Goldstein are live-blogging the Roberts Senate hearings. Mark Tapscott talks about why this matters. (Found via Memeorandum.) [Tags: politics JohnRoberts blogs]

The US Agency for International Development is funding a blog about the Gaza disengagement. USAID is an “independent federal government agency” that “supports long-term and equitable economic growth and advances U.S. foreign policy objectives,” according to its About page. The blog aims at providing “minute by minute information on Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.” (Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.) [Tags: israel palestine politics blogs]

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Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO and holder of 700 patents, is coming to Harvard to give a talk this Wednesday, at 11-12, in the Maxwell Dworkin Building (map), Lessin Auditorium (G115). At 1:45-2:30 (not 2:30 as I’d previously posted and not at 2:15 as I’d changed – airplane rescheduling has caused these changes), he’s going to come to the Berkman Center (map) for an informal discussion. I’m moderating it and I plan on asking him about his critique of the End to End architecture of the Internet. Both events are open to the public.

See you there!

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“I don’t read anymore; I just talk to people who have.” — Dr. Tom Malloy, University of Utah

That’s how Paul Hartzog begins an excellent post over at many2many.

“But the great thing about all this is that conversation gives us an incredible way of processing the world as we move into an age of relentless and omnipresent information,” he writes. Yup. It has its advantages and disadvantages, of course, but it’s what’s happening.

Conversation doesn’t just “process” information. It appropriates it — it’s how we make it our own. But in conversation we appropriate ideas mutually with another, which is exactly how a culture of individuals manages to stay a culture.

It’s also why pay-per-use is such a terrible, culture-killing way of being fair. [Tags: DigitalRights conversation PaulHartzog]

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Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO and holder of 700 patents, is coming to Harvard to give a talk this Wednesday, at 11-12, in the Maxwell Dworkin Building (map), Lessin Auditorium (G115). At 2:30 2:15, he’s going to come to the Berkman Center (map) for an informal discussion. I’m moderating it and I plan on asking him about his critique of the End to End architecture of the Internet. Both events are open to the public.

See you there!

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Dave Rogers takes issue with Doc’s famous assertion and disputes the chapter on marketing Doc and I wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Dave says that markets were always about “the sale,” not about the conversation that surrounded the sale.

Dave is right (IMO, of course) that markets have always been places where buyers and sellers have different roles and interests. But I disagree with Dave that the fact that we have the phrase “caveat emptor” means that sellers are always rapacious and untrustworthy. Quite the contrary, we only need such a maxim because sellers generally are trustworthy. People route around frauds, making fraud a bad marketing strategy.

In any case, “Markets are conversations” doesn’t mean “So take the first price quoted” or “And all conversations are among people without competing interests.” Nor does it mean that markets are nothing but conversations. What it means historically is that markets were also social places, not merely locations for the exchange of goods. And, today it means that markets are not merely demographic abstractions but are actual customers talking with one another about what they’re buying. Smart companies engage in those conversations honestly, openly and with passion.

There is, of course, also a place for frictionless transactions. The Net has many mansions, and in some of them there’s no talking allowed.

As for Dave’s claims that large groups can’t operate efficiently without a hierarchy, we either disagree about how large groups operate or we disagree over what constitutes a hierarchy. Or we may agree, although I think it’s useful to differentiate organic hierarchies from imposed ones. [Tags: cluetrain DocSearls ChristopherLocke RickLevine marketing DaveRogers]

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I made the mistake of liking one of Michael Connelly’s thrillers. Since then, I’ve picked up one after another, and like a wrong turn that reinforces itself (“Hmm. This street looks familiar. I’ll try turning onto it”), I’ve been disappointed over and over.

My latest airport mistake was to buy The Narrows. It’s a sort-of sequel to Blood Work, a book with an interesting premise, ridiculous plot turns, and crappy writing throughout. The Narrows is far worse.

First, The Narrows suffers from Thomas Harris Syndrome. Harris, author of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, is able to write about a super-smart serial killer because he understands his characters and has the confidence to write lean prose. He even has the confidence to place his baddie into a comedy (Hannibal) and expose him as a parody. But it’s a rare gift, and Harris has inspired more bad imitators than Hemingway. For example, Hannibal Lecter has eaten the brain of Kate Scarpetta.

Second, has Connelly gotten so popular that his publisher has given up on editing him? Holy Mother of Pearl, someone needs to take a buzzsaw to The Narrows! Not only is it bloated — an entire chapter about a character’s relationship with his daughter, written so mawkishly that it drops the character from 2-D to 1.7-D — but Connelly makes first-draft mistakes such as introducing a character twice within a couple of pages, as if he’d forgotten he’d just told us about him. This is a bad, bad book.

In fact, it’s so bad that it got me thinking that it would bring me pleasure to axe out the really bad portions as I read. And if I were reading this on an e-book, I could do exactly that. Then, having removed the embarrassingly bad parts, I’d be delighted to make my edits available to anyone else e-reading it. Think of the giant steps Grade B literature could make if we were allowed to group-edit it!

For my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, into which I’m now considering introducing a serial killer with the intellect of a genius but who’s covered entirely with fine brown hair, I got a volume of Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon, the topically-arranged companion to his Great Books series. If the expert-based imperialism of the series wasn’t obvious enough, the book physically embodies it: The pages are laid out in two-column format with no room in the margins for scribbling, and the paper is so thin that scribbles would show through the other side.

Physically, this book assumes we are coach potatoes. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous books MortimerAdler]

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