The project with Doc that I mentioned is a new set of clues, following on The Cluetrain Manifesto from 16 years ago.

The clues are designed as an open source publishing project: The text is in the public domain, and we’re making the clues available at Github in various computer-friendly formats, including JSON, OPML and XML.

We launched this morning and a happy hell has broken loose. So I’m just going to posts some links for now. In fact, I’m copying and pasting from an email by Doc:

• @DaveWiner’s listicle version of New Clues (at listicle.io, one of his many creations).
• Dave’s blog post on New Clues, and working with Doc and me.
• New Clues on Medium’s Backchannel (courtesy of @StevenLevy).
• @Cluetrain on Twitter. Also @dweinberger and @dsearls
• The New Clues group page on Facebook
• Halley Suitt’s interview with Doc and me at the Globe’s BetaBoston
• Doc’s blog.

Gotta run…

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(This is cross-posted at Medium.)

Dave Winer recalls a post of his from 2007 about an API that he’s now revived:

“Because Twitter has a public API that allows anyone to add a feature, and because the NY Times offers its content as a set of feeds, I was able to whip up a connection between the two in a few hours. That’s the power of open APIs.”

Ah, the power of APIs! They’re a deep magic that draws upon five skills of the Web as Mage:

First, an API matters typically because some organization has decided to flip the default: it assumes data should be public unless there’s a reason to keep it private.

Second, an API works because it provides a standard, or at least well-documented, way for an application to request that data.

Third, open APIs tend to be “RESTful,” which means that they work using the normal Web way of proceeding (i.e., Web protocols). All you or your program have to do is go to the API’s site using a standard URL of the sort you enter in a browser. The site comes back not with a Web page but with data. For example, click on this URL (or paste it into your browser) and you’ll get data from Wikipedia’s API: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=San_Francisco&prop=images&imlimit=20&format=jsonfm. (This is from the Wikipedia API tutorial.)

Fourth, you need people anywhere on the planet who have ideas about how that data can be made more useful or delightful. (cf. Dave Winer.)

Fifth, you need a worldwide access system that makes the results of that work available to everyone on the Internet.

In short, API’s show the power of a connective infrastructure populated by ingenuity and generosity.

In shorter shortnesss: API’s embody the very best of the Web.

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I went to see To Be Takei last night, and George himself was there for an interview afterwards. It occurred to me that I’d like him to autograph his book Oh Myyy, but I only have a copy on my Kindle.

So, here’s a proposal for the Kindle, the Nook, and for any other DRM-ed ebook reader: Allow us to embed one and only one photo into our copy of an ebook. That photo can never be replaced. It can be deleted, but then the slot is gone forever. This could be implemented as a special one-time-only annotation, and it would be managed by your fearsome machinery of control.

That way, I could take a selfie with George, post it into my Kindle copy of his book, and have the digital equivalent of an autographed copy.

I don’t see a way of doing this for open access e-books. Stupid open access e-books what with their “Oooh look everyone can read me!” smirks and their “Now everyone can learn and participate in culture” attitudes.

PS: To Be Takei was really enjoyable. Totally worth seeing, especially with an appreciative crowd.

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A few days ago, when Apple pushed the latest from U2 into everyone’s iTunes library, you could hear the Internet pause as it suddenly realized that Apple is its parents’ age.

Now in the ad-promotion succubus occupying the body of what used to be Time Magazine, you can see U2 desperate to do exactly the wrong thing: insisting that it wasn’t a gift at all. You can learn more about this in the hilariously titled cover article of Time: “The veteran rock band faces the future.” This a future in which tracks we don’t like are bundled with tracks we do (the return of the CD format) and people who share with their fans are ruining it for U2, boohoo.

Or, as Bono recently said, “We were paid” for the Apple downloads, adding, “I don’t believe in free music. Music is a sacrament.” And as everyone knows, sacraments need to be purchased at a fair market value, the results of which Bono, as a deeply spiritual artist, secures in sacred off-shore accounts.

In my head I hear Bono, enraged by the increasingly bad publicity, composing a message that he posts without first running it through his phalanx of PR folks:

Dear fans:

You have recently received a copy of our latest album, Songs of Innocence, in your iTunes library. U2 understands you may be confused or even upset by this. So, let me clarify once and for all the most important point about this — if I may humbly say so — eternal masterpiece. It was not our intention to cause you stress or to wonder if you have the musical sensitivity to full grasp (if I may, humbly say) the greatness of our work. But most important, it is essential above all that you understand that it was not our intention to give you a gift. No freaking way.

We understand your mistake. You are, after all, just fans, and you don’t play in the Jetstream world of global music. As I said to my dear friend Nelson Mandela (friend is too weak a word; I was his mentor) shortly before he passed, music is a sacrament, just like tickets to movies, especially ones with major stars working for scale, or like the bill at a restaurant where you and any two of the Clintons (Chelsea, you are a star! Give yourself that!) are plotting goodness.

To tell you the truth, I’m disappointed in you. No, worse. I’m hurt. Personally hurt. How dare you think this was a gift! After all these years, is that all U2 is worth to you? Nothing? Our music has all the value of a CrackerJacks trinket or a lower-end Rolex in an awards show gift bag? Do you not understand that Apple paid us for every copy they distributed? We were paid for it, sheeple! Massive numbers of dollars were transferred into our bank accounts! More dollars than you could count, you whiny little “Ooh look at me I’m sharing” wankers! We’re U2 dammit! We don’t need you! You need us! MONEY IS LOVE! EXTRA-ORDINARY LOVE!!!!!!

Have a beautiful day.

Meanwhile, as always, Amanda Palmer expresses the open-hearted truth about this issue. It almost makes me regret making fun of Bono. Almost.

>

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The Shorenstein Center is part of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The rest of the Center’s name — “On Media, Politics, and Public Policy” — tells more about its focus. Generally, its fellows are journalists or other media folk who are taking a semester to work on some topic in a community of colleagues.

To my surprise, I’m going to spend the spring there. I’m thrilled.

I lied. I’m *\\*THRILLED*//*.

The Shorenstein Center is an amazing place. It is a residential program so that a community will develop, so I expect to learn a tremendous amount and in general to be over-stimulated.

The topic I’ll be working on has to do with the effect of open data platforms on journalism. There are a few angles to this, but I’m particularly interested in ways open platforms may be shaping our expectations for how news should be made accessible and delivered. But I’ll tell you more about this once I understand more.

I’ll have some other news about a part-time teaching engagement in this Spring, but I think I’d better make sure it’s ok with the school to say so.

I also probably should point out that as of last week I left the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. I’ll get around to explaining that eventually.

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Despite the claims of some — and unfortunately some of these some run the companies that provide the US with Internet access — there are n reasons why we need truly high-speed, high-capacity Internet access, where n = everything we haven’t invented yet.

For example…

If we had truly high-speed, high-capacity Internet access, protesters in Ferguson might have each worn a GoPro video camera, or even just all pressed “Record” on their smartphones, and those of us not in Ferguson could have dialed among them to see what’s happening. In fact, it’s pretty likely someone would have written an app that treats co-located video streams as a single source to be made sense of, giving us fish-eye, fly-eye perspectives anywhere we want to focus: a panopticon for social good.

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Dan Brickley points to this incredibly prescient article by Tim Berners-Lee from 1992. The World Wide Web he gets the bulk of the credit for inventing was thriving at CERN where he worked. Scientists were linking to one another’s articles without making anyone type in a squirrely Internet address. Why, over a thousand articles were hyperlinked.

And on this slim basis, Tim outlines the fundamental challenges we’re now living through. Much of the world has yet to catch up with insights he derived from the slightest of experience.

May the rest of us have even a sliver of his genius and a heaping plateful of his generosity.

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I have an op-ed/column up at CNN about the Facebook experiment. [The next day: The op-ed led to 4 mins on the Jake Tapper show. Oh what the heck. Here’s the video.]

All I’ll say here is how struck I am again (as always) about the need to leave out most of everything when writing goes from web-shaped to rectangular.

Just as a quick example, I’m not convinced that the Facebook experiment was as egregious as the headlines would have us believe. But I made a conscious decision not to address that point in my column because I wanted to make a more general point. The rectangle for an op-ed is only so big.

Before I wrote the column, I’d observed, and lightly participated in, some amazing discussion threads among people who bring many different sorts of expertise to the party. Disagreements that were not just civil but highly constructive. Evidence based on research and experience experience. Civic concern. Emotional connections. Just amazing.

I learned so much from those discussions. What I produced in my op-ed is so impoverished compared to the richness in that tangle of linked differences. That’s where the real knowledge lives.

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I’m at the Israeli Wikimedia conference. The chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, Jan-Bart De Vreede, is being interviewed by Shizaf Rafaeli.

Jan introduces himself. Besides being the chair, in the Netherlands he works on open educational resources at Kinnesnent. He says that the Wikimedia Foundation is quite small compared to other organizations like it. Five members are elected by the community (anyone with enough edits can vote), there are four appointed members, and Jimmy Wales.

Q: The Foundation is based on volunteers, and it has a budget. What are the components of the future for Wikipedia?

A: We have to make sure we get the technology to the place where we’re prepared for the future. And how we can enable the volunteers to do whatever they want to achieve our mission of being the sum of all knowledge, which is a high bar? Enabling volunteers is the highest impact thing that we can do.

Q: Students just did a presentation here based on the idea that Wikipedia already has too much information.

A: It’s not up to us to decide how the info is consumed. We should make sure that the data is available to be presented any way people want to. We are moving toward WikiData: structured data and the relationship among that data. How can we make it easier for people to add data to WikiData without necessarily requiring people to edit pages? How can we enable people to tag data? Can we use that to learn what people find relevant?

Q: What’s most important?

A: WikiData. Then Wikipedia Zero, making WP access available in developing parts of the globe. We’re asking telecoms to provide free access to Wikipedia on mobile phones.

Q: You’re talking with the Israeli Minister of Education tomorrow. About what?

A: We have a project of Wikipedia for children, written by children. Children can have an educational experience — e.g., interview a Holocaust survivor — and share it so all benefit from it.

Q: Any interesting projects?

A: Wiki Monuments [link ?]. Wiki Air. So many ideas. So much more to do. The visual editor will help people make edits. But we also have to make sure that new editors are welcomed and are treated kindly. Someone once told Jan that she “just helps new editors,” and he replied that that scale smuch better than creating your own edits.

A: I’m surprised you didn’t mention reliability…

Q: Books feel trustworthy. The Net automatically brings a measure of distrust, and rightly so. Wikipedia over the years has come to feel trustworthy, but that requires lots of people looking at it and fixing it when its wrong.

Q: 15,000 Europeans have applied to have their history erased on Google. The Israeli Supreme Court has made a judgment along the same lines. What’s Wikipedia’s stance on this?

A: As we understand it, the right to be forgotten applies to search engines, not to source articles about you. Encyclopedia articles are about what’s public.

Q: How much does the neutral point of view count?

A: It’s the most important thing, along with being written by volunteers. Some Silicon Valley types have refused to contributed money because, they say, we have a business model that we choose not to use: advertising. We decided it’d be more important to get many small contributions than corrode NPOV by taking money.

A: How about paid editing so that we get more content?

Q: It’s a tricky thing. There are public and governmental institutions that pay employees to provide Open Access content to Wikipedia and Wiki Commons. On the other hand, there are organizations that take money to remove negative information about their clients. We have to make sure that there’s a way to protect the work of genuine volunteers from this. But even when we make a policy about, the local Wikipedia units can override it.

Q: What did you think of our recent survey?

A: The Arab population was much more interested in editing Wikipedia than the Israeli population. How do you enable that? It didn’t surprise me that women are more interested in editing. We have to work against our systemic bias.

Q: Other diversity dimensions we should pay more attention to?

A: Our concept of encyclopedia itself is very Western. Our idea of citations is very Western and academic. Many cultures have oral citations. Wikipedia doesn’t know how to work with that. How can we accommodate knowledge that’s been passed down through generations?

Q&A

Q: Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research. Shouldn’t there be an open access magazine for new scientific research?

A: There are a lot of OA efforts. If more are needed, they should start with volunteers.

Q: Academics and Wikipedia have a touchy relationship. Wikipedia has won that battle. Isn’t it time to gear up for the next battle, i.e., creating open access journals?

A: There are others doing this. You can always upload and publish articles, if you want [at Wiki Commons?].

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I’m at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. A large cavern is full of entrepreneurs and Web marketing folks, mainly young. (From my end of the bell curve, most crowds are young.) 2,500 attendees. The pening music is overwhelming loud; I can feel the bass as extra beat in my heart, which from my end of the bell curve is not a good feeling. But the message is of Web empowerment, so I’ll stop my whinging.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten recaps the conference’s 30-hour hackathon. 28 apps. One plays music the tempo of which is based upon how fast you’re driving.

First up is Brewster Kahle [twitter: brewster_kahle], founder of the Internet Archive. [I am a huge Brewster fan, of course.]

Brewster 2011

Brewster begins by saying that the tech world is in a position to redefine how the economy works.

We are now in position to talk about all of things. We can talk about all species, or all books, etc. Can we make universal access to all knowledge? “That’s the Internet dream I signed on for.” A lot of material isn’t on the Internet yet. Internet Archive is a non-profit “but it’s probably the most successful business I’ve run.” IA has all programs for the Apple II, the Atarai, Commodore, etc. IA has 1.5M physical books. “Libraries are starting to throw away books at a velocity.” They’re aiming for 10M books. They have about 1.5M moving images online. “A lot of the issues are working through the rights issues and keeping everyone calm.” 2M auio recordings, mainly live music collections, not CD’s that have been sold. Since 2000 they’ve been recording live tv, 24×7, multiple channels, international. 3m hours of television. They’re making US TV news searcable. “We want to enable everyone to be a Jon Sewart research department.” 3.7M ebooks — 1,500/day. When they digitize a copy that is under copyright, they lend it to one person at a time. “And everyone’s stayed calm.” Brewster thinks 20th century wbooks will never be widely available. And 400B pages available through the Wayback Macine.

So for knowledge, “We’re getting there.”

“We have an opportunity to build on earlier ideas in the software area to build societies that work better.” E.g., the 0.1% in the US sees its wealth grows but it’s flat for everyone else. Our political and economic systems aren’t working for most people. So, we have to “invent around it.” We have “over-propertized” (via Pam Samuelson). National parks pull back from this. The Nature Conservancy is a private effort to protect lande from over-propertization. The NC has more acres than the National Park system.

Brewster wants to show us how to build on free and open software. Brewster worked with Richard Stallman on the LISP Machine. “People didn’t even sign code. That was considered arrogant.” In 1976 Congress made copyright opt out rather than opt in: everything written became copyrighted for life + 50. “These community projects suddenly became property.” MIT therefore sold the LISP Machine to Symbolics, forking the code. Stahlman tried to keep the open code feature-compatible, but it couldn’t be done. Instead, he created the Free Software GNU system. It was a community license, a distributed system that anyone could participate in just be declaring their code to be free software. “I don’t think has happened before. It’s building law structure based on licenses. It’s licenses rather than law.”

It was a huge win, but where do we go from there? Corporate fanaticism about patents, copyright, etc., locked down everything. Open Source doesn’t work well there. We ended up with high tech non-profits supporting the new sharing infrastructure. The first were about administrating free software: E.g., Free Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, LibreOffice, Apache. Then there were advocacy organizations, e.g., EFF. Now we’re seeing these high=tech non=profits going operational, e.g., Wikipedia ($50M), Mozilla ($300M), Internet Archive ($12M), PLoS ($45M). This model works. They give away their product, and they use a community structure under 501c(3) so that it can’t be bought.

This works. They’ve lasted for more than 20 years, wherars even successful tech companies get mashed and mangled if they last 20 years. So, can we build a free and open ecosystem that work better than the current one? Can we define new rules within it?

At Internet ARchive, the $12M goes largely to people. The people at IA spend most of their salaries on housing, up to 60%. Housing costs so much because of debt: 2/3s of the rent you pay goes to pay off the mortgage of the owner. So, how can we make debt-free housing? Then IA wouldn’t have to raise as much money. So, they’ve made a non-proift that owns an apartment building to provide affordable housing for non-profit workers. The housing has a community license so it the building can’t be sold again. “It pulls it out of the market, like stamping software as Open Source.”

Now he’s trying it for banking. About 40% of profits in corporations in the US goes to financial services. So, they built the Internet Credit Union, a non-profit credit union. They opened bitcoins and were immediately threatened by the government. The crdit union closed those accounts but the government is still auditing them every month. The Internet Credit Union is non-profit, member-run, it helps foundation housing, and its not acquirable.

In sum: We can use communities that last via licenes rater than the law.

Q&A

Boris: If you’re a startup, how do you apply this?

A: Many software companies push hard against the status quo. The days are gone when you can just write code and sell it. You have to hack the system. Think about doing non-profit structures. They’ll trust you more.

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