Over at Strumpette, I’ve done a guest column on why transparency is generally a good thing, but why we also need some shadows. [Tags: marketing pr]

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I received a piece from Blue Tiger Democrats the other day, a lovely historical reflection on the idea behind the group. It actually resuscitates Tammany Hall, acknowledging how corrupt it became but pointing to its original virtue: Civic engagement. The Democratic party worked for its local constituency, making life better in tangible ways. The Blue Tigers want the party to get back to these roots.

It’s a terrific idea. The Dean campaign had a similar idea when, in its final months, it was encouraging supporters to do good works in the community, preferably while wearing a Dean t-shirt. But I think Blue Tiger has something more systematic in mind since it talks about building real world and virtual spaces. (It’d be nice if the Blue Tiger site provided a way for people to talk to it or to one another.)

It might be nice to hook up the Blue Tigers with Mitch Kapor’s notion of a space for fair arguments.

By the way, the big pamphlet — a broadside — the Blue Tigers sent presents provocative evidence that Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat was modeled on cartoons representing the noble Democratic tiger (the pre-donkey party symbol) as a corrupt Tammany Hall alley cat. [Tags: politics democrats blue_tiger_dems mitch_kapor]

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Cell phones have clocks built in. So, if their batteries are low, why can’t they figure out not to give you warning beeps if it’s the middle of the night? What are they, babies?

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From a msg from StopBadWare.org:

Google – which is one of our partners – will now present people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware. These warnings currently link to a general page on StopBadware.org, but as we finish researching sites, we’ll replace the general page with one of our individual website reports.

Very interesting. This could prevent millions of people from loading up their machines with viruses and other types of malware when they think they’re just downloading a free font or signing up for a newsletter.

<[>But I feel just a tad ambivalent. I know and trust folks at StopBadWare. It’s in part a Berkman venture. And it makes 100% sense as a plug-in. But although Google is of course technically an edge app, in the geopolitics of the Net, it’s a sort of upper-stack center (if that made any sense), so it makes me just a tad anxious when it begins dis-recommending (dreckommending?) sites. On the other hand, if Google used StopBadWare’s data to lower the page rank of malefactors, I wouldn’t feel as anxious, so I think I’m just being irrational. Overall, giving users a tool — especially one as open as StopBadWare — for avoiding tricksters and traps is a positive step. [NOTE (added the next day): I should have noted that I’m an advisor to a company (SiteAdvisor) that has a plugin that does roughly what StopBadWare does. I like both organizations and have no financial reason to shill for SiteAdvisor.] [Tags: google stopbadware malware]

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Technorati’s posted its quarterly State of the Blogosphere survey (Disclosure). There’s been a slight slowdown in the growth rate, but nevertheless there are two blogs created each second. There are 1.6M posts per day, about double last year’s volume. About 70% of the pings Technorati receives (i.e., alerts that a new post has been posted) come from known spam sources. MSM continues to dominate as the sites to which bloggers link.

Lots more in Dave Sifry’s analysis… [Tags: technorati blogosphere ]

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Gov. Mark Warner’s PAC — he’s running for president but he hasn’t uttered those particular words yet — has gone Creative Commons. This is a smart thing. Not only is it a shibboleth (in the first definition sense) for the tech community, it’s a gesture of trust to his supporters. It also makes it easier to get the PAC’s materials out into the world.

So, a tip o’ the hat to the Warner PAC. [Tags: politics copyright creative_commons mark_warner nancy_scola ]

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J aggregates some of the media coverage of the conference… [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]

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In seven minutes, Feynman — considered by many to be one of the great teachers — explains the wavy world we live in. [Tags: physics richard_feynman]

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Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch at Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) have written a paper about applying machine learning techniques to Wikipedia to improve automatic categorization of text. For example, by analyzing Wikipedia, their algorithms can figure out from the sentence “Wal-Mart supply chain goes real time” that Wal-Mart uses RFIDs to manage their inventory. More examples:

Given a very brief news title “Bernanke takes charge”, a casual observer can infer little information from it. However, using the algorithm we developed for consulting Wikipedia, we find out the following relevant concepts: BEN BERNANKE, FEDERAL RESERVE, CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE, ALAN GREENSPAN (Bernanke’s predecessor), MONETARISM (an economic theory of money supply and central banking), INFLATION and DEFLATION. As another example, consider the title “Apple patents a Tablet Mac”. Unless the reader is wellversed in the hi-tech industry and gadgets, she will likely find it hard to predict the contents of the news item. Using Wikipedia, we identify the following related concepts: MAC OS (the Macintosh operating system) LAPTOP (the general name for portable computers, of which Tablet Mac is a specific example), AQUA (the GUI of MAC OS X), IPOD (another prominent product by Apple), and APPLE NEWTON (the name of Apple’s early personal digital assistant).

Then the articles goes into the technical aspects of doing this. I’m in no position to evaluate them. But using Wikipedia as a knoweldge mine is a cool idea. (Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the link.) [Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy ai knowledge_representation]

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Joseph Reagle talks about “Is Wikipedia Neutral?” He says that question provokes scoffs from academics. He started out thinking “neutrality” was a bad term to use, but now he’s not so sure. [As always, I’m paraphrasing poorly.] For one thing, the term acts as a “heat shield,” allowing discourse to focus on writing an encyclopedia. But there are difficulties, he says. Is there a non-circular definition? Is it talking about the platform, processes, policies, people, practices or articles?

He points to the ancient practice of deciding who’s “it” by doing a “one potato, two potato” protocol. Wikipedia can learn about playing fair from this.

From policy neutrality in technical standards, we can learn to seek “plurality and impartiality, where possible” but with “a relization that this impartiality itself might have less than desirable consequences.” E.g., the PICS standard was neutral but would have helped China be even more totalitarian.

From content neutrality in speech regulation, we learn that we need an explicit justification for discrimination.

From neutrality in times of war, we can learn the value of staying engaged with all even while not participating in the war.

He provides considered definitions of objective, neutral and transparent. Objective means the claims correspond to reality, and are made within a validating framework. Neutrality means that the claims are satisfactory to the claims’ constituencies. Transparent means the claims don’t pretend to be objective nor accommodating various constituences, but “plainly represent the speaker’s bias.” (He acknowledges there are problems with all of these.)

A framework for neutrality: Sensitivity to multiple claims, a notion of impartiality and pluarlity, sporstmanlike good-faith and adherence to known rules, and a commitment to use least-onerous rules to improve.

Is “neutral” the right word to talk about Wikipedia? Yes. It’s better than “unbiased,” the original coinage of Nupedia. Wikipedia aims at countering systemic bias. It is struggling to supporting the world’s languages. And neutrality is “not understood so much as an end result, but as a process and frame of mind.” [I’ve done way too much compression…]

Q: Is it neutral to point a long set of paragraphs denying the Holocaust in the Holocaust article?
A: There are ways to handle this… [Sorry, I’m not presenting his answer adequately.]

Q: [me] Really interesting presentation. But doesn’t this just push the question of neutrality further down? The contending “constituencies” are satisfied but there’s a decision about which constituencies to take seriously.

A: Yes, this is tough. Wikipedia is practical and tries to come up with practical solutions… [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipediabetsy_devine]

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