Radio Open Source lives, perhaps more naturally than ever, in Web-only form. Chris Lydon has been piling up some terrific interviews. Treat yourself! [Tags: christopher_lydon radio interviews podcasts ]

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I went to the Peace Prize concert last night. What a rich experience. Not unmixed, but certainly rich.

You should know two facts about me for context: 1. As I have failed to hide, I am a huge Al Gore fan. I wish he were running for president. I wish he had been allowed to take office when we elected him. 2. As far as musical tastes go, I find I’m quite binary. I can admire and respect a musician while being completely unmoved. If I’m moved at all, I’m moved to tears. Weird. In between, there’s hardly anything beyond the occasional toe tap. Also, I’m getting to be a grumpy old man.

I got to go to the concert because I spoke at a Cisco Public Services Summit in Stockholm. Cisco then put 450 of us on a couple of trains and rolled us to Oslo for the concert, of which Cisco is one of the sponsors. As a result, we were seated in the orchestra; I was about twenty rows back, seated among people who have dedicated themselves to public service.

The concert hall looks like a hockey stadium cut in half the long way, with steep seats climbing the gorge-like sides. In the long front was a curving stage with performance areas to the right and left. In center were the evening’s hosts, Kevin Spacey and Uma Thurman. Spacey — a man who looks great in a suite — was hilarious and a confident enough performer that he put the audience at ease. We didn’t have to worry if he as going to flub his lines or say something embarrassing. I am a long-time Uma fan, but let’s just say that she’s much taller than Spacey.

The truth is that I can’t make sense of the concert. It is a celebration of peace and, in this case, of environmental activism. Why this set of performers make? Some were fantastic. Some are activists. But Kylie Minogue? Did we really need to see her in her leather outfit and her skimpily clad female band? Is this what Al Gore is about? It was a tawdry and demeaning way to open the concert. And, given that you could pull in just about any of the world’s musicians, why no one from Africa? Why no classical music? I think I’m missing the point.

[Grumpy Alert:] I know I’m missing the point when it comes to musicians who clap their hands over their heads to tell you that you should clap along, and especially ones who — like Earth Wind and Fire — explicitly tell you to stand up and dance. I think all but two bands did the clapping-over-their-heads thing, and, frankly, it just irks me. If I want to clap along, I’ll decide on my own. And if I don’t want to stand when they tell me to, well, I will anyway, but I’ll resent it. Damn you and your forced funky enthusiasm, Earth, Wind and Fire!

Melissa Etheride rocked the ecosystem. She’s got all of her in her voice. And Alicia Keyes filled the hall. Yet, while admiring her voice and performance — wow! — I totally didn’t care about the songs. I was the only one who felt that way, apparently. People also loved Annie Lenox, although I’ve never liked her voice; although I admire her personally. I’m not recommending my views; I’m pointing out my inadequacy

Rajendra Pachauri and Gore came out towards the end to say a few words. Pachauri, who says people should call him “Patchy,” spoke lightly at first, and then said the expected words about the importance ofthe cause and the honor of the evening.

Gore moved me, but I’m a sucker for political rhetoric. The course of his talk was: Climate change isn’t a political problem, it’s a moral one. As a moral problem, we should consider the rest of the moral changes before us. These problems require us to respond as a united species. Therefore, we should embrace this challenge as an occasion for joy. (Yes, I choked up as he talked. I’m like that.)

After the concert, I went back to the hotel where Cisco was holding a party featuring Earth, Wind, Fire and an extended band that included Water, Smoke, Iridium, Porridge and Velour. So, when I spotted Gore going into an interview room downstairs, I left the party and stood outside until he came out, by himself, and was waiting for Pachauri. I said “Thank you,” and he shook my hand. Yes, the very hand I’m typing this with.

I went upstairs to the Cisco party for a few minutes, and who should come in to say a few words and pose for some photos than Pachauri. As he was leaving and Earth, Wind and Fire was starting up, he paused a few feet from me. I thanked him as well, and he shook my very hand.

Two Peace Prize winners in one night!! And neither one was Henry Kissinger!

The concert was a bit weird. The situation is predictably surreal. But I am very very glad to have been there.

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Mark Pilgrim does some mighty provocative juxtapositioning of then and now quotes about books and reading.

The juxtapositions certainly make the case that things are different. They certainly point to things we’re all be sorry to give up, like being able to lend a friend a book. But, of course, they don’t tell the whole story, because the whole story is not only complex, and it’s not only unwritten, but it’s the story of the coming change in norms. And a change in norms rewrites all the stories leading up to it.

Anyway, it’s a terrific piece. Totally worth getting riled up about. [Tags: ebooks amazon kindle drm copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Rebecca MacKinnon’s answer is, alas, probably yes. It is a great post from someone who knows what she’s talking about.

[Tags: china censorship rebecca_mackinnon ]

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Michael Anti was a NY Times correspondent in Beijing and was a well-known Chinese blogger until the government shut the blog down. He is now a Niemann Fellow at Harvard. He’s giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. (As always, I’m typing quickly, paraphrasing, and missing stuff. You can hear the entire talk at MediaBerkman.)

Michael speaks informally. What happens when decentralized, open blogging meets the centralized, closed Chinese society? From 2004-2005, most dissenting news of China came through blogs. After that, it comes through chat rooms. Chat rooms started in Chinese in around 1998. Now China has gone back to that — very Web 1.0, Michael says. Email and mailing lists are also important for sharing dissenting news about politics, religion, etc. “We don’t use Web 2.0. Why not?” Web 2.0 is democratizing and decentralizing. But blogs aren’t really decentralized because they need centralized servers, which make them easy for the government to control. It is much harder for the government to find chat rooms and shut them down.

Before the Internet, the media were propaganda. With the Internet, people can do the job of traditional media in providing another voice. Michael finds this a more useful way of thinking about the Internet than considering it to be new media.

Sina.com aggregates Chinese newspapers for free. In 2005, they set up their own blog service. The bloggers are VIPs: journalists, professors, celebrities. Blogging has become very mainstream. Like the HuffingtonPost, it’s invited and not really the voice of the people. Bloggers there are like traditional columnists. The bloggers don’t serve as a check on the media; the media are the bloggers.

Michael was a hotel receptionist. He began writing on the Net about the Net. He got hired in 1999 as a journalist on the basis of that. H Thousands of netizens were hired as journalists. Journalism therefore “has an Internet heart.” Journalists welcomed bloggers during the “golden years” of 2004-2005. After that, bloggers and journalists couldn’t post anything sensitive.

The Chinese blogosphere is about recruiting people into the old media, not about new media.

“The guy who censored my blog… we’re close friends.” They talk frequently. “Sorry I have to close down your blog.” “I understand. How about if this weekend we go kayaking?” It’s his job to shut down blogs, but inside he is very liberal.

If you want to find citizen journalism in China, turn to the geeks. And they have “copycats” of the services on the Web that are easier to censor. (Michael says that gmail is popular and very important to the Chinese. It’s too important to government and business to block it.)

There is a network of elite blogs and there are chat rooms. These are the two faces of the social Internet in China. The dark side is that the government has successfully controlled the Internet. Everything is free to talk about except politics.

He doesn’t see any immediate change. China is becoming Singapore, not the US. He hopes that social networking and chatrooms will eventually steer the country towards freedom.

Q: What percentage of the Chinese people are involved in social movements and social networking?
A: Only the middle class and those committed to social change. That’s why I say “elite networking.”

Q: Is most blogging urban or rural?
A: I think blogging happens only in the cities.

Q: What’s the government doing to try to monitor and control chat rooms?
A: Conservatives like chat rooms, as well as liberals do. (In 2005, the anti-Japanese movement spread via chat rooms.) Anonymity is easy in chat rooms.

Q: (doc) Is Red Flag a knockoff of RedHat?
A: Yes. The government doesn’t trust RedHat. It only uses Red Flag. Microsoft gave much of the Windows source code to the government so the government verify there are no back doors.

Q: (ethanz) What percent of Chinese people do you think are aware of the levels of restriction and censorship, and are inclined to find a way around them?
A:The personal life of Chinese is so free that the first time I came to Europe and America I found it so conservative. In China we have sex before marriage, are more tolerant of homosexuality, we have no conservative party, we have no God, it’s very easy to create new companies. The Chinese government allows the people to have so much freedom about sex and business so they’ll accept the political restrictions. The new generation accepts this exchange. Only very weird people care. At least 95% of people don’t care about censorship. I don’t see any hope to change this. In the US, the Internet is Che Guevara. In China, it’s an harmonic ship.

Q: What do you mean by making China into a “big Singapore”?
A: Happy citizens without any political ideas.

Q: (colin) What’s next?
A: Forget anything centralized. E.g., Twitter won’t work. The elites will get further networked. If the political situation changes, China will become liberal very quickly because the media is already liberal on the inside. And if there’s an organizational collapse, the social networks on the Internet will come to the fore. I’m very confident about the future of China because of the Internet.

Q: (me) If there were anonymous blogging, would more people do it?
A: No, because in China it’s all about the name. If you don’t have a recognized name, who cares what you say? Tom Freidman without that name would be no one.
Q: Pseudonyms that gain traction by getting links, etc.?
A: Sometimes a blogger will break news, but after the media picks it up, the blogger is out of the picture.

Q: (colin) Anything that international companies can do?
A: If Congress banned Google from doing business with China, what would happen to gmail? If Microsoft left China, what about Messenger? For Congress, it’s easy to be black and white. But the Chinese people depend on these tools to communicate about freedom and rights. The real cost is Chinese freedom. (Yahoo is different. It’s “a real bad thing.” It “didn’t do any good to China.”) The Chinese authorities want to embrace the Internet, to be part of the international community, not like North Korea. So we should encourage them to do more with the Internet and to continue to say that the Internet is good. The outside world should encourage as well as blame the Chinese government. The Chinese people don’t like blame and don’t like being told what to do. [Tags: michael_anti china blogs censorship berkman ]

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Gene Koo of the Berkman Center blogs about a paper by Danielle Citron titled Technological Due Process, a topic Gene has been studying for a while. Writes Gene:

Professor Citron describes how software code increasingly executes our public laws. Decision support systems, she convincingly argues, quickly become decision making systems. And invariably, the vagaries of the legislative and administrative processes leave large gaps in the specifics of how a given law should be executed. Without firmer guidance from proper governmental bodies, the programmers charged with translating legal code into software code essentially wind up creating law to fill the gaps. (I describe this as “shoving analog pegs into digital slots”). From a procedural – even a Constitutional – perspective, this is a grievously inappropriate delegation of governmental functions to the private sector, not unlike the hiring of Blackwater mercenaries to achieve military objectives. Professor Citron finds, therefore, the need for “technological due process”: safeguards to ensure that software is literally up to code.

Gene adds his own example of how letting software administer law can go wrong: the distribution of food stamps.

This is a big deal…all part of the squeezing out of human judgment and the leeway it enables in the name of efficiency.

[Tags: gene_koo danielle_citron law lawrence_lessig ]

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I just published a new issue of my free newsletter. The main article is, entirely by coincidence, about ebooks and libraries — a coincidence because Amazon just announced Kindle, its ebook hardware.

November 19, 2007

By the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous is available for Kindle. Cluetrain is not.
Also by the way, I just got a link from Urs Gasser to his contribution to a recent conference on the future of books.

[Tags: books ebooks kindle amazon libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries books_everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Here’s Alan Watts talking to IBM (1 2), probably in the early 1970s, although I’m just guessing. Very Alan Wattsian, very Sixties yet contemporary, and very enjoyable. Here’s a bite:

“But nature itself is clouds, is water, is the outline of continents, is mountains, is bilogical existences. And all of them wiggle. And wiggly things are to human consciousness a little bit of a nuisance, because we want to figure it out.”

(Thanks to Steven Kruyswijk for the link.) [Tags: alan_watts everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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From Andy Carvin’s blog:

Move over YouTube debates, now for something meatier! A coalition of blogs and news organizations is using Web 2.0 tools to create another exciting experiment in interactive presidential debates. It might even be a chance for your students to pose the perfect question to them.

This week, techpresident.com teamed up with the New York Times, MSNBC and a whole slew of blogs to launch 10Questions.com, an online presidential debate that’s a fascinating mix of video blogging, tagging and user-generated content. Joanne Colan, My colleague at the video blog Rocketboom put together this video to explain how it works:

Andy also provides a clear text-based explanation if you don’t want to watch the video.

Here’s my question:

[Tags: politics video techpresident andy_carvin edemocracy ]

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