Here’s a video of the full session I was at at Picnic ’07. It includes Walt Mossberg’s introduction, my 40 minute keynote (very similar to the presentation that I did at Google, although with a short section on the importance and difficulty of the implicit added, and some references in anticipation of the debate to follow), and then the half hour or so of my debate with Andrew Keen, moderated by Walt M.

I haven’t watched the video beyond the first few minutes — the production quality is high — but my sense of the debate was that Andrew was on an oddly anti-intellectual track, attacking me as a “professional philosopher,” which I’m not (I was an assistant professor of philosophy 22 years ago), and even if I were, why would that be a criticism, especially coming from a guy who is out arguing for the importance of credentialed authorities? Not helpful to discussing the actual topic. Frustrating. My feeling coming out of the discussion over all was indeed frustration. I didn’t think we were able to pursue points sufficiently.

BTW, somewhere in my presentation you can see me very carefully get left and right confused. Also, I’m going to plug again my more coherent attempt to explain and evaluate Keen’s argument: Andrew Keen’s Best Case. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous picnic2007 taxonomy folksonomyk ]

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I’m at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Seminar. It’s a fantastic group of attendees. Liz Lawley does the intro, followed by Lili Cheng. We hear a little about Social Genius.

We go around the room saying who we are and what we’re interested in. There are about 60 of us here, I think.

Now Matt Biddulph of Dopplr.com is talking about how to make presence fuzzy. Dopplr lets you see which of your friends are going to be in a city. But why not be able to control the size of the range? So there’s a slider.

Tom Coates (who is hilarious on the back channel) is working on a project code-named Fire Eagle at Yahoo’s Brickhouse. He talks about presence as making you visible and comprehensible not just to other people but to software that could do yet more with it. You can tell Fire Eagle your location via SMS, other apps, etc. E.g., you could map all the Twitter tweets. You could use your phone to look for groups. You could automatically geotag your blogs posts or flickr photos. Tom now talks about protecting against abuse of this info. In addition to the opt outs, you can create “special places” that are off the map, so to speak.

Gilad Lotan talks about presence and objects. He likes to embed conective technology into objects. E.g., he built “imPulse” tha transfers heartbeats through a wall. The next version was wireless. When two of these pods are in the same room, they talk to each other. Likewise, he did a touch project for the Kotel. Ubi.ach (say it aloud) “takes email away from the screen.” It’s a doll that blinks when you get new email. A street exhibit in Jerusalem shows some of the missiles fired at Israel embedded in ordinary scenes. Another of Gilad’s projects creates Tibetan prayer wheels controlled by images from news feeds. Overall: Four points on presence: Connection through intimacy, range of immediacy, culture and context, and importance of the tangible.

danah boyd talks about social networking site as “networked publics” (in the Habermasian sense). They are spaces within which collections of people exist, through mediating tools. Hannah Arendt said that the presence of others assures of the reality of the world around us. Mobile phones create social spaces for teens — an always-on intimate community. [sorry, this is coming out far more disjointed than the actual presentation.] When you write, you write for an imagined audience, a public that your writing creates. Socnets do this for groups of friends/acquaintances. For teens, at socnets you display that you’re engaged in a relationship before you actually are; they’re ways of marking relationships. The intended audience is the social network. danah shows two photos of teenagers kissing by the juxtaposition (“juxtapokissin'”?) of the photos; this is because it’s so hard for teenagers to find real world public spaces. She points to the traces of relationships in the real world in which we can see time and the aging of the relationships. [Tags: scs2007 social_networks microsoft_research berkman ]

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Ethanz, who is in the pantheon of live bloggers, has a detailed post explaining how he does it. I think he intends to pass along the tips and tricks that will encourage others to live-blog, but it actually seems so daunting that it may have the opposite effect. And among the tools in the live bloggers kit bag that Ethan does not mention are: his rare combination of analytic and sympathetic skills, his breadth of knowledge, his awesome writing skill, and his patience.

I like live-blogging. (I do it far worse than Ethan does; you’re always better off reading Ethan’s posts than mine.) But I find it very tiring. I fairly predictably poop out after lunch.

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Ethan also writes a beautiful appreciation of our friend Henok Mehari, who has just finished up his internship at the Berkman Center. All I can add to what Ethan has said is: Amen. Henok’s story is amazing, and, most hopeful of all is that he is only really at the beginning of it. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman henok_mehari berkman liveblogging blogging]

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[supernova] Nicholas Carr and Chris Meyer

Nicholas Carr is working on a book on what all these changes mean economically. In the 19th century, factories to produce their own power. Producing it more economically could be an important competitive advantage. Then independent power suppliers supplied it far more economically. In 1910, only 40% of electricity was generated by independent utilities, and most of that went to lighting. Just 20 years later, 80% was coming from utilities. This unleashed network innovation. But the real change came when sockets were everywhere. Now there was huge innovation in the appliances that plug into them, from assembly lines to televisions to computers.

Now we can have rich computing services served over the network, services that could not be matched at the local level. When we have computer sockets the way we have power sockets, all sorts of things will change.

The challenge is to begin to break free from the Web 2.0 world and the narrow innovation we see there.

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“Organization: The Fourth Factor of Production” is Chris Meyer ‘s talk’s title. What isn’t going to change, he asks. Technology drives organizational innovation. But traditionally the response has been to create departments to manage change.In 1937, Ronald Coase wrote “The Nature of the Firm.”. What wil lbe the next answer in the information economy? Traversal of the boundaries. Web 2.0 collaborative tools. Chris recommends Neal Stephenson’s vision in The Diamond Age as a social vision for business…

In the Q&A, Nick says that the electrical network only supplied electricity, whereas the future computing network will supply services as a commodity. Chris points out that industrialization happened within one legal system, while this change is happening internationally.

Chris predicts that they’ll be a bifurcation, with some big centralized corporations, and then a swarm outside.

Q: (brad templeton) The real difference isn’t bandwidth but control…
A: (nick) Rich applications over the Net empowers the user, even if they don’t own and control it.
(Chris) You should only bother controlling things that are choice. But in Nick’s world, bandwidth is not scarce.

Q: (Shannon Clark) Your pronouns of yours and ours are inappropriate…

A: (John Hagel) What happens to competitive strategy in this world you’re sketching?
Q: (Nick) It depends on the industry.
A (chris) Strategic advantage? Who needs it. It’s for firms in the old sense. [Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 nicholars_carr chris_meyer ]

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Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? “Have a conversation.” Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don’t always do this because they fear it.

And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.

There are “potential dealbreakers” for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.

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Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it’s been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. “We get our support from a community,” Clay said, but to them it was like he’d said “We get our Thursdays from a banana.” So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn’t see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. “It’s doing fine,” but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. “No contracts are written, no money changes hands.” “We don’t often talk about love” at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters…and the fact that those two things are the same is what’s most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]

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[The next day] Nick Douglas – who is hilarious to have on a backchannel chat – video interviewed me right after Clay’s talk, so the conversation turned to love and community.

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John Palfrey of the Berkman opens the conference by looking at the digital age from the point of view of students,

Students: “It’s not about being digital. It’s about students who are born digital.” This is a profound difference, JP says. He points to four traits of students,always on and always attached.

1. Digital Identity. The natives assume they have ’em.

2. Natives arre multi-taskers “but in ways heretofore unseen.” The Socratic method changes when every student has a laptop in front of her. Everyone has multiple IM sessions going. “It’s not necessarily a good thing” but it’s the fac.
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3. Natives assume media comes in digital form, and thus is malleable. And it’s searchable. “Research now means a Google search.”

4. Natives are creators. “This is a huge shift from previous generations.” From consumers to creators.

These changes are not all good, JP says. Henry Jenkins has identified the “participation gap” (an effect of the digital divide). There are ethics challenges and transparency problems (“who created what”).

Teachers:

1. Digital identities: Should faculty members have Facebook accounts? Is your teacher your friend?

2. Emergent tools: “How do we capture this extaordinary move from consumers to creators?” Should teachers start using wikis, e.g.?

University: What about it ought to be reborn?

1. Digital ID: What does it mean for Harvard to have a digital ID? now that both students and info are born digital, how does a university understand its identity?

2. Digital info: JP points to Dan Gillmor’s Center for Digital Media as a site trying to figure out what things like accuracy and fairness mean. He also points to PLoS.

3. Open Access: One Laptop Per Child,Access to Knowledge , OpenNet Initiative and many others are responding to this need. The “Open to Harvard ID Holders Only” badge is up in front of Harvard’s digital information, and it doesn’t need to be, says JP.

Now JP raises “hard questions.”

What is the relationship between the university and say, Reed Elsevier, Google, RIAA, MPAA, Second Life? Should the U be striking exclusive deals with Google? Should the U deliver the RIAA’s cease and desist letters?

“What is the best way to invest in libraries in a digital age?”

“How do we fund and sustain the generation of digital knowledge?” Should we be looking at funders, or should we be adopting a business model like Google’s or Times Select’s?

“How does this generation of new library scientists learn?”

“What is the impact of an outdated copyright system?” Should the U be taking a leading role in improving the system? [Tags: is2k7 john_palfrey]

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I’m at The Berkman Center’s Internet and Society Conference (“Knowledge beyond Authority”). Yesterday was an an invitation-only day for about 100 people. Today is a public conference:

Stream: http://www.law.harvard.edu/media/2007/06/01/berkman.rm

Second Life

IRC: irc.freenode.net/berkman

I found portions of yesterday’s meetings a little frustrating. It was a fantastic set of people, from all over Harvard, other universities, non-profits, open access folks, and representatives of the content industries (journal publishers, entertainment industry). There were many great discussions, but with some I think I’m just out of step with the times. I thought we spent too much time trying to find “common ground” with the content industries. Especially the Hollywood folks seemed to think common ground means a tit for a tat: We turn in file sharers and they let us have more access to their copyrighted content for educational purposes. I hate that deal. Whatever you think of file sharing, it should not be tied to the ability of the university to advance knowledge, research and education. We might as well be talking about giving away the stadium’s naming rights in return for more academic freedom.

That sounds good, but in fact it’s obstructionist. In fact, at one point I was so exercised about this that I behaved badly. And not in the cute or righteous way. More in the rude asshole way. I feel terrible about that, and have apologized to the person I was rude to. I really don’t like the self-righteous me. And it gets in the way of thought.

Charlie Nesson , the conference creator, has inspired me with the idea that the university can be the leading defender of the Internet and of the needed expansion intellectual rights. I’m not ready to be realistic. And that’s a problem.

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Mary Wong is opening the conference (after Charles Ogletree ‘s welcome … subbing for Charlie Nesson who is in the hospital having something fixed (he’ll be fine)). She says the discussions yesterday focused not only on the challenges around universities using licensed material, but also around the licensing and commercialization of material generated by the university. She says there was a lot of discussion of the vagueness of Fair Use. Is there anything we can do to clarify it? And if we did, would that new understanding, intended as a floor, get taken as the ceiling, thus actually limiting Fair Use in practice?

[Tags: berkman harvard a2k copyright copyleft digital_rights education is2k7]

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Yes, it’s a self-contradictory headline. But to heck with logical formalities. I’m still flu-ish, and I’l lbe on a train most of the day because my doctor told me not to fly. I’m in DC where I got to keynote the NTEN conference…over a thousand techies working for non-profits, long may they wave. (Thanks to Katrin Verclas for the invitation, and for all the good work she does.)

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Jessica Duda blogs the Politics Online Conference. Good overview. [Tags: politics politics_online_conference jessica_duda]

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I’m at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting to give a lunchtime talk to the marketing folks.

It’s in the Ritz-Carlton in DC, which tells you something about the industry. This is a well-dressed crowd. Maybe one-third are women. I’m the only one in the audience iwth an open laptop. (The Ritz provides wifi everywhere in the hotel for $10/day.)

I come in late to the morning panel. On it are Mark Robichaux (ed., Broadcasting & Cable Magazine), Mark Coblitz (SVP of Comcast), Laureen Ong (Pres, National Geographic Channel), Joseph Sapan (Pres, Rainbow Media), Michael Wilner (CEO, Insight Comms). Unfortunately, I don’t know who is who, except for the woman, and Robichaux, who is moderating. [As always, my live blogging is deeply flawed and more unreliable the closer to quotes and details it gets. Also, in the broad themes and characterizations. Also spelling.]

Blogs

In response to a question about negative blogs, one of the panelists says that some of their operators actually have blogs. “We embrace it.” Another writes them off as a few people who like to complain. “Everyone in this room should read blogs every day about their companies,” says another. “If we’re not listening as much as we’re speaking to our constituents, we’re not doing our job.” [Then how about symmetric bandwidth up and down, hmmm?] Mark Robichaux, the moderator, says “Sometimes bloggers are canaries in the coal mine.”

Laureen Ong of National Geographic says that bloggers and others online answer questions for them in a useful way.

A la carte tv

How about a la carte TV, asks Robichaux? Josh Sapan (Rainbow Media) praises the diversity of cable offerings, all the way from BET to National Geographic. “It’s a great diversity of voice.” [Hah!] Mark Coblitz agrees that’s lots of diversity. Each person may only watch seven channels, he says, but the seven channels vary from person to person. Michael (?) says we need to argue against a la carte, just as we have to argue against Net neutrality.

Net neutrality

“What’s Net neutrality?”

“That’s easy: People should be able to go anywhere they want to, attach any device, and know what the terms of their service are.” [He’s implicitly citing the FCC’s Four Principles, which isn’t what most people mean by Net neutrality. And I left one out because I couldn’t keep up.] “Isn’t that that the Internet is all about?,” says another. “Anyone get to do anything they want,” he continues, I think sarcastically. The first says “This is all about sharing resouces so everyone gets the maximum out of them.” The task, he says, is to communicate the technical reasons why Net neutrality is bad. “People said in the year 2000 that we need to save the Internet, but we don’t want the Net of 2000. I want the Internet that’s coming,” the one that lets people do the new things they want to do.” [The one that shows Time-Warner movies and requires a company to pay for competitively fast service? Or the one where anyone can create and innovate in any way she wants, on equal footing?]

They complain that they don’t have the anti-net neutrality sound bite. “We talked about Net neutering, but that doesn’t work too well. That’s our own internal, because that’s what it does.” [Cool! “Net neutrality” works! We’re so used to complaining that the anti-NN folks beat us at marketing that it’s great to hear the same sort of whining coming from them.]

“The Internet is beginning to show the strains of its technology,” says another. “We offer 10 meg down and one meg up, which is a lot.” [Only compared to the pathetic speeds in the US, and only down, not up.] The geeks who measure it don’t always get that.” “The infrastructure can’t handle what everyone’s idea of what the Internet is unless someone starts to build it out.” People won’t be able to make the investment to enable, say, Netflix, to use the Internet effectively so that it works all the time and people have a good experience almost all the time.

Robichaux: “So the government would be handcuffing you.”

“Exactly. And it’s not just the last mile. It’s all along the way.”

Another: “Back in the lat 90s, there was a lot of fiber put in the ground. And guess what? We’re using it up.” [Most of the fiber is unused. And see Bruce Kushnick on the $200B of tax money the incumbents took to run fiber to our houses, but then forgot to.] “Net neutrality says everone should be able to go where they want and be able to pay. We don’t diagree with the four principles. But as soon as you put them down in writing, they’re open to interpretation. And that interpretation changes everything.”

“You know who’s making the money and making the NN argument? Little companies like Google.” He cites someone who said that NN would kill innovation. “If you want Net neutrality, it should be Internet neutrality for all the elements.” E.g., Google is too dominant, eBay owns its means of payment. [This is equivalent to saying that if you want free speech, you really ought to enforce all points of view in your dinner time conversation.]

Competition

Mark Robichaux: Satellite?

Ong: Brand counts. Viewers know that the facts on our channel are triple-checked.

Sapan: It’s made us better via competitive pressure. E.g., IFC hosts small films, and we let you watch it on-demand simultaneously when it’s released to the theaters

“Congress says the problem with out industry is that we don’t have competitors. But we wake up every day thinking about how we compete in the marketplace. Every business we’re in is extremely competitive on the distriution side.” [Still, most of us don’t have much of a choice.]

“We’re all losing eyeballs to the Internet, and I’d go so far as saying you can lose your phone before you lose your video, and you can lose your video before you lose your online connection. It trumps everything. The younger generation is turning TVs off. They’re on the Internet. They’re watching the same content thanks to some of our friends [sarcastic] making it available.” [Wow.]

User-generated content

Robichaux: “What’s the best idea for using the Internet as a tool for your company?”

Ong: We have a tech savvy audience so the Internet is something we use to promote back to the channel, to put programming out that they can’t see on the linear channel, and we recognize that it’s making us rethink our business because no one is going to watch a full-length documentary on the Internet. [Maybe not, at least this month. But we’ll move it onto our iPod our TV, if we’re able.]

Sapan: The area we’re messing with right now is mixing user generated content with video on demand and linear television. Not much has been done with that.

Robichaux: why is ugc important?

Sapan: The history of TV is you make something, copyright it, put it on TV and the max number of people watch it. Now each of those is violated: There is no owner, there is no copyright. There’s all these people spending all this time looking at user generated content. From a purely mercantile point of view, if there’s a lot of time spent on it, that one way or another will be translated into money. What intriques is how to connect what people are making with video on demand. In the case of indie films, we’re asking people to submit their short films. We curate them. We would like to place those films on the servers of cable companies in the geographic areas from which they come, so there could be “the best of” films in that area, and the “the best of the best of” that would make it onto the channel. [Current.tv? Why do we need the cable companies to do this for us?] This is good because it gives them the fastest Internet connection to the video, video on demand, and a linear channel. We pursuing this on IFC and We TV.

Coblitz (Comcast): We’ve woven Internet into just about everything we do.

Q&A

Robichaux: Take-aways: Be honest. Keep it simple. It’s about relationships. For example, when you’re talking to a Congressperson… [And here I thought he was talking about talking with customers!]

Questions from the floor.

Q: What are you doing about Internet safety?
A: (comcast) We provide parental controls to people who want them. Our 12 yr old said, “Dad, block anywhere you don’t want me to go…but then don’t look where I go.”

A: (Insight) It’s up to the parents, but most parents don’t use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??]
A: (Rainbow) The computers aren’t in the kids’ bedrooms.

[Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]

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