Salam Adil at Global Voices aggregates posts (here and here) about the death of Zarqawi. [Tags: iraq zarqawi global_voices gv]

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A video showing the world’s oddest Bellagio Fountains emulator. (BTW, I initially mistyped this sentence and wrote instead about “Bellatio” fountains, a phrase just begging for a definition.) [Tags: coke mentos video humor]

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I’ve created a versiion of this blog for viewing on mobile devices: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/johomobile.html. It’s just another Movable Type template with a whole bunch of stuff removed. Because there’s no left sidebar, the posts come to the top of the page. If you have suggestions for making it better…

By the way, the script I was using that displays a link to the posts if your screen is small works fine on large screens where it’s not needed but doesn’t work on my Blackberry; the Blackberry browser seems not to evaluate the “if (screen.width < 201 )" command. But, now I don't need it because I have the separate template.

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Here’s a 13-minute campaign video made by Spike Jonez for the 2000 Gore campaign [Part 1 | Part 2]. It looks like maybe it was intended to be shown at the Convention. And it’s clear that the aim is to show Gore without the 3-foot aluminum rod stuck up his butt.

Pretty durn good, though.

Go, Al! (Thanks to Sven Cahling for the link.) [Tags: al_gore politics]

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The publisher sent me a copy of Jeremy Blachman‘s book, Anonymous Lawyer (book|blog). It’s hilarious. In fact, it’s far better than it has any right to be: It’s told in the form of blog posts, with occasional email asides, which would seem to be a tough limitation, and it’s about a one-sided character who is the most career-focused, shallowest, nastiest person you’ve ever imagined. But Jeremy pulls it off because he is a deeply talented writer. He is also fearless. A lesser author would have tried to curry the reader’s sympathy. Nope. Not Jeremy. That takes guts. But it pays off in laughs…appalled laughs.

I don’t want to set your expectations too high, because that’s a sure way to kill a humor book. But I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

PS: In his personal blog, Jeremy reviews “Keeping Up with the Steins” and says: “The movie didn’t know what it wanted to be — a farce about the excesses of bar mitzvahs, or a tug-at-the-heartstrings family comedy. And so it floated in between, and ended up not terribly satisfying.” Anonymous Lawyer does not suffer from that problem. [Tags: anonymouslawyer jeremy_blachman books humor]

While we’re talking about the intersection of blogs and books, you might want to take a look at the site for a book in progress, Search Analytics for Your Site, by Louis Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins. Lou Rosenfeld’s new company, Rosenfeld Media, (Disclosure: yes, I’m on the board of advisors) is trying to be innovative and open about the publishing of books. They’re also publishing Card Sorting by Donna Maurer, with whom I got to bond over Eleanor Rosch at the Information Architecture Summit

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I talked with Laurie Allen yesterday during the lunch break at the Annenberg conference on hyperlinks. She works on U of Pennsylvania’s PennTags project that allows readers to tag catalogued books. Some people use tags for personal bookmarking. Others tag more socially. It’s a great way to track resources for a research project and simultaneously make the results of your forays available to future researchers. In fact, it seems just plain selfish not to do so!

By integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy), you instantaneously get the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

I didn’t talk with Laurie about this, but my guess is that the folksonomy that emerges will not change the existing taxonomy because in a miscellaneous world you don’t have to change something in order to change it. The existing taxonomy could stay exactly as it is, but the folksonomy could supplement it by providing synonyms for existing categories (e.g., a search for “recipes” could take you to the “cuisine” category of the existing taxonomy) and leaping-off-points from it into the user-created clusters of meaning (e.g., here’s the tag cloud for the node you’re browsing). Rather than disrupting, transforming or replacing the existing taxonomy, the folksonomy may just affectionately tousle its hair.

Anyway, PennTags looks like a great project.

(U of Penn’s Library Staff Blog is here. And here is the newtech category of that blog. On a quick browse, this looks like a terrific resource if you’re interested in libraries, taxonomies, folksonomies, the death of the Internet due to the venal stupidity of Congress, etc.) [Tags: penntags laurie_allen taxonomy libraries folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous tagging ]

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I’m on this panel, so can only do spotty blogging.

Eszter Hargittai, the moderator, shows a video of users go wrong with links. E.g., confusing sponsored links with what they’re actually looking for.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet talks about a survey they couldn’t do because it was too hard to figure out the purpose of a search, the credibility and origination of a link, the meaning of a link, etc. Instead he talks about four conclusions from various research. 1. People start as a skeptics when they start looking for links. If people know it’s commercial info, they become more suspicious. 2. People can be fooled. They can get lost. They can trust the wrong info. 82% of search users couldn’t always tell which results are paid and which aren’t. 3. Despite those problems, 87% of general search users say they find info most of the time. They are most successful finding commercial info, and least successful in finding political info. 4. When people are confused in a search, they ping their networks. They use links to start conversations.

Peter Morville (“Ambient Findability“) explains how he got here. He started out as a librarian. He read a paper by Marcia Bates and realized that queries are interactive and iterative: the query changes as our search continues. He became an information architect. (In fact, he’s one of the founders of the field.) How do you enable people to move between searching and browsing modes. As a librarian, he thought he could organize systems to help people find things. But usability testing showed the power of words, which then can be hyperlinks that jump people out of the browsable structure. Besides usability, there’s also desirability, credibility and accessibility. “Ambient findability” means being able to find anything from anyone, anywhere at any time.

I say (briefly) that links are little acts of generosity, which means the architecture of the Web is fundamentally moral, i.e., every link recognizes that there are other people who matter. [I’m paraphrasing.]

Seth Finkelstein points out that Google measures popularity and that not all is sweetness and light. Popularity does not distinguish between the famous and infamous, knowledge and crackpot, hateful ideas. Popular results become more popular precisely because it shows up more in the search sites. And most people don’t go past the first few returns. “When you type a search into a search engine, there’s a lot of social politics involved in the search,” and this, Seth says, needs to be discussed.

[The interactive discussion begins…] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety peter_morville seth_finkelstein lee_rainie]

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Matthew Hindman talks about mapping traffic between political websites. He shows a way cool animated graphic of traffic between sites. Mainly the cross-position traffic is name-calling. 45% of the conservative traffic goes to FreeRepublic.com because it gives lots of links to the five other largest conservative sites. Liberal site are less concentrated.

Lada Adamic breaks the male-only panelist barrier. She teaches at U of Michigan and talks about how cascades happen. The fact that nodes cluster doesn’t mean that all the power is in the hub nodes. A meme can start on a small site and spread to the hub nodes. In a “barbell distribution,” it’d be interesting to see how info flows.

Tony Conrad of Sphere.com talks about his service that seems to be the anti-Technorati. He stresses that Sphere.com does not rank purely (or mainly?) on how heavily linked a site is. For example, it gives special weight to the first post on a topic.

Matthew Hurst of BuzzMetrics shows a graphic of an overview of the Blogosphere. [Why think that the Web has a top-down view?] The social political blogs are at the center of the English-speaking Blogosphere. Geographically, LiveSpace bloggers are spread out in a way that maps roughly to the Blue States. Xanga, meanwhile, maps to Red states.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research shows his graphic display of Usenet interactions. He concludes by pointing out that we’re leaving traces behind everywhere we go.

Q: (me) The maps that show the gap between sides are used often to demean the Internet because it’s just a re-concentration. But the question is whether the Net makes us more democratic than before (as per Yochai Benkler and Mary Hodder). What do we compare those with? With how many dinnertime conversations fairly include the opposition point of view? Barroom conversations? Even articles in magazines?

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Blogs aren’t trying to be media. It’s people in conversation. How many times do Democrats hang out at Republicans meet-ups? Vice versa? But together they do make democracy.

Q: How does what you do help Microsoft’s business? [very rough paraphrase!]
A: The future of computing is social.

[Does the online Contemporary American Literature group have to have 50% of its links going to romance novel sites and medieval discussion groups or else democracy has failed on the Web?] [Tags: annenberg hyperlinkedsociety maps politics]

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Fantastic set of panelists: Jimmy Wikipedia Wales, Ethan Global Voices Zuckerman, Nicholas Debunker Carr, Martin NYT Martin Nisenholtz, moderated by Saul NYT Hansell.

Nick: Content is being atomized, fragmented. Each of the fragments has to stand on its own economically in the marketplace. But, the market works well for toasters, but not necessarily with books and articles. The cross-subsidies have provided much of what’s good in newspapers and magazines. E.g., the classified ads pay for reporters to go to Africa. In an atomized world, you lose the cross-subsidies.

Martin: About.com is actually our biggest property on the Net. Our task is to turn people who come in through a side door (e.g., Google) into regular readers who engage with us as a package (as opposed to engaging with NYT atoms).

Jimmy: We have four employees and Wikipedia has four times the reach of About.com, compared with 150 there. And we have more than enough money to pay the bills each month. Communities can build content that others want to see using an economic model far less expensive…

Ethan: A lot of the old models haven’t done a good job of covering the developing world. While I have enormous esteem for msm like the NYT, it’s worth pointing out that the system isn’t without its flaws. Writing for an interconnected world is much different than reporting for a newspaper…

Saul: Why don’t Nick and Jimmy go at it…?

Nick: It’s a myth that Wikipedia is an open collective without any centralized control that naturally gets better as the community engages. Wikipedia is evolving more and more hierarchical structures. In the history of culture, you could throw out all the collectively written stuff and never miss it. The myth sucks the air out of the market for any professionally created product.

Jimmy: I’ve been saying for years that Wikipedia is driven by a core community. That’s always been the case. The “Edit this page” link gives people the wrong impression that it’s about millions of people each writing one sentence. As far as it driving others out of business: That’s their problem. And, btw, Wikipedia is more highly read in Germany than in America, and [the German encyclopedia publisher] Brockhaus’ sales are up 30%. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia reminds people that encyclopedias are cool.

Martin: Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.

Jeff: I find it fascinating that this has turned into a panel on economics. And economics is about control. You, Nick, fear it, but the horse is out of the barn.
Ethan: Few of us want to lose the media’s ability to put a reporter on an airplane. But we do want recognition of what’s going on bottom up. [Paraphrasing!] Global Voices has 120 people around the world, but they’re bloggers, not reporters. They have a different, complementary take on what’s being reported by the msm.
Martin: We bought Blogrunner to make sure we can insinuate the Blogosphere at the article level.

Q: Nick, isn’t Wikipedia really a hybrid model in which the small group of amateurs who run it are becoming professionalized? And, Ethan, is there anything we can do to make things work better in the next five years.
Nick: You’re right. Wikipedia is moving toward a more professional structure. But there’s still a question about how good it will be. Right now, it’s mediocre with some very good entries and some very bad ones. But, because there’s no money in it, there’s no incentive for competing products, so you’re left with less choice.

Jimmy: No money means less choice? Take a look at the Blogosphere. And the fact that Wikipedia is freely licensed means people take it and do all sorts of interesting things with it.
Martin: We have over 600 editors because we’re trying to get at the best possible facts. We think the two worlds can coexist.

Ethan: There’s been a revolution in mobile phones in Africa, but not laptops. Mobile phones are relevant to people lives because it’s an economic tool: Should I bother going to a market, etc. Laptops are not relevant that way. Some of the communal tools online are developing on mobiles phones and talk radio. But that doesn’t connect globally. We found during Live 8 that there’s a disconnect that actually can be healed.

Q: Students rely on Wikipedia?
A: I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, “For God’s sake, you’re in college. Why are you citing an encyclopedia?” We tell people to be aware of what it is. It’s pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It’s generally “good enough.”

Q: How do links change society?
Ethan: At GV they let people around the world talk. When you see the next billion enter the Net, you’ll see them build this into a medium of interconnection.

Saul: Spend some time on MySpace where people are turning their lives into media spaces.
Nick: So, we’re training our children to gather information in shallow, superficial ways, and lose their ability to be contemplative.

Saul: Didn’t we lose that with TV? Aren’t we taking a half step back from TV?
Nick: I worry that understanding something will mean understanding it in how Google’s Larry Page’s algorithms understand the world.

Q: How do we help people become media literate?
Martin: Whenever we talk about professional versus non-professional, we’re getting it wrong. They’re complementary.

Saul: I think we’re going to get very savvy about media.

Q: Is Wikipedia really different from OhMyNews and the like?
Jimmy: OhMyNews is exactly what I have in mind when I talk about hybrid models. [Tags: annenberg wikipedia global_voices nytimes nicholas_carr hyperlinkedsociety]

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I’m at an Annenberg conference on “the hyperlinked society.” Subtitle: “Questioning connections in the digital age.” (Program Panelists No known stream, although apparently it’s being taped. IRC: irc.freenode.net #annenberg. Bloggers include: Jeff Jarvis Ethan Zuckerman Jay Rosen Seth Finkelstein Mary Hodder … this is a rough list. sorry if I missed you. It’s early.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing, at best.]

The first panel is led by Jay Rosen. It’s on “mainstream linking.”

Tony Gentile of Healthline talks about his site’s interest in getting people linking to it. Healthline indexes 170,000 sites it considers reliable. In one case, they contractually required a partner to link to them, although it’s usually more mutual. “Pretty much everything is driven off of the links,” including their REST-based API.

Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing, has an advertising and journalism background. Google was a turning point in the history of hyperlinks, he says. Google gave links intrinsic value [because links boost page rank]. One intended consequence: Link spam. The spamming “is beginning to erode the value” of linking “and we need to do something about it.”

Eric Picard works for the advertising side of Microsoft. His group tries to understand “the economic model of hyperlinking: connecting people to information and to businesses relevant to that information.” E.g., how do you put linked ads into a virtual world that brings value to both the user and the vendor, “or at least doesn’t piss off the user.”

Jay Rosen says that returns to Raymond Williams who says in Culture and Society: There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses. People are unique, but you can address them as a mass. The Age of Mass Media, says Jay, is about the art and science of seeing people as masses. But today all these ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart. They;’re not as effective. People don’t stand for it any more. So now we have to learn how to see people not as a mass but as a public, a community, knowledge producers. Links connect us horizontally, not just up and down. “All the professions that specialize in seeing people as masses, or as the market, are having to contend with a world where horizontal communication is so much more effective.” Often, if people can meet each other, they don’t need the mass world, says Jay. And, as a blogger, he says, through the “magic of links” he was able to talk about the press without having to go through the filter of the press. “So, for me linking has been powerfully associated with intellectual freedom.”

Q: (Jonathan Kaplan) Comments on the new telecom bill that does not have network neutrality protected?
Tim Hespos: So now we may have another variable about links: How fast it is. That’s a shame.

Tony Gentile: It’s not something people will stand for. We’ll find a way to route around it.
Eric Picard: My personal opinion is that I’d like to see things stay as they are, without tiered access fees.
Jay: I’ve often had the feeling that blogging can’t last because it’s too open and too democratic. A sense of foreboding that they won’t let us keep doing this. It’s too much fun and it’s too free. But I think people won’t stand for it.

Q: (Jeff Jarvis) Google is capturing the wisdom of the crowd. (We do need to figure out how to outsmart the spammers.) Links give power to the people and the collection of links is our collective knowledge.

Q: How does one get links?
Tony: Don’t ask for one. I need to come to know your writing first.

Q: (Me) I asked a rambling question about worrying about commercial interests in getting links, and ego interests in getting links, disrupts the semantics of the web. [Then I was too upset to be able to grasp the answers :( ]
Jay: It has to do with how we see other people, value their time, regard their own freedom. The notion that your time belongs to me because I can trick you into clicking this link…that whole idea that you belong to me because I can stimulate you is the difference between the two types of links.

Q: There’s no nuance to a link. We could put microformats into links.
Tony: Structured blogging or something like it is necessary because right now links don’t imply anything.
Jay: It’d be great to have some sort or urgency, like a triple underscore.

Q: (Consumer Reports) Are you ever approached directly by advertisers? What do they want and what do they give you? Also, it seems like there’s enthusiasm here for exchanging one set of gatekeepers for another.Tony: Advertisers don’t approach us.
Jay: It’s better to be a gatekeeper than to beg a gatekeeper. And the barriers of entry are far lower. [Tags: annenberg hyperlinks hyperlinkedsociety]

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