The show followed up its interview with Christopher Hitchens with one with AKMA. Support Radio Open Source! [Tags: akma christopher_hitchens radio_open_source christopher_lydon ]

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Ethan Zuckerman, one of the co-founders of Global Voices [Disclosure: Ethan is a good friend, and I am on a GV board] asks whether the Net is letting us hear voices unlike our own. He founded GV precisely so we could easily find bloggers in other nations opening up a window into their world. But now he wonders if that was “a phenomenon for a specific moment in time.” As the communities of bloggers have become available in many cultures where previously there had been only a handful, they are talking amongst themselves. “[T]hese conversations are taking place in a public medium, but I’m not part of their intended audience,” Ethan writes.

I am not arguing that bridge blogs are dying out – though there’s evidence that some, like Sandmonkey in Egypt, are – or that they’ve lost importance. My point is that when you’re one of the few people in your real world community who is online, the tendency is for you to address your thoughts to a global audience. When a larger segment of your real-world community comes online, there’s good reasons for you to start talking to that audience using the Internet, a global medium used for a local purpose.

Ethan seems wistful for a time when you could fool yourself into believing (as he says) that “a knowledge of English and a little curiosity was all you needed to explore the world of blogs.” Now it takes much more — Global Voices relies on over a hundred people putting in serious time and effort. He contrasts this with the pronouncements of the “cyberutopians” that the Net would make us all one people, engaged with one another and at peace.

But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It’s something worth fighting for.

Indeed.

The global conversation isn’t all-to-all, for the reasons Ethan cites. For one thing, the fact that no one speaks every language means that all-to-all is impossible until we discover Babel fish. The Net is not going to erase all culture. Who would want it to? We don’t need homogeneity to be at peace. We need to live with difference.

For that, we don’t need everyone talking with everyone else. But we do need more people talking with more other people. We need to hear some voices, not all voices. We need Global Voices, plus many more global voices. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman globalVoices ]

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Our new local paper, BostonNow, is taking blogs very seriously. See this post for the explanation. The paper is also tagalicious and comment-wild. Could be the start of something good for the city… [Tags: bostonnow media citizen_journalism blogs everything_is_miscellaneous hyperlocal ]

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Radio Open Source has posted the mp3 of yesterday’s show about everything being miscellaneous, with me, Karen Schneider, and Tim Spalding. Chris being Chris, he drives it more towards than the broad and philosophical than, well, anyone else on radio. And best of all, you can hear me get the name of the author of Moby-Dick wrong! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous radio_open_source christopher_lydon karen_schneider tim_spalding media taxonomy folksonomy]

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AKMA responds at some length to Rowan William’s lecture on Biblical interpretation. Having just read (and blogged) Ethan Zuckerman’s post about the history of knowledge, I’m left this morning thinking: Good G-d almighty, I love the Internet. I haven’t even finished my first cup of coffee and I’ve been given access to two brilliant, engaged minds wrestling with issues that really matter and that I would never have come across without the Linkosphere.

Now, on Akma’s response to my response to Dr. Williams (which I got to via Akma’s original recommendation)…

Williams says the Bible should be read “not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’.” As I said in my first post, understanding Scripture as more than something to be known strikes me (a Jew) as important and true. But I remain unconvinced that the Jewish more-than-that response is to see Scripture assembling a community. I may well be misinterpreting what Williams means by “community,” but I thought he meant that Scripture creates community by binding together believers listening to Scripture together. (Clearly the community goes beyond mere listening; I’m not getting the nuance right here.) I thought that was the “out of nothing” he has in mind. But (my point was), Jews aren’t Jews because of what they believe, any more than, say, Italians are. Akma’s response to me is that the Jewish “out of nothing” was the foundational event — the calling (Revelation at Sinai?) and the convenant.

This has me thinking, as Akma’s post always do. Akma’s interpretation makes the creation out of nothing an historical event. But if that’s what Williams meant, “community” is too weak a word. Jews are a people, not a community. (Of course, Jews also form communities; in fact, the religion is designed for community practice.) And, I assumed — thus making an ass out of u and med — that Williams’ reference to communities forming “out of nothing” wasn’t (just) to the historic foundational event of Christian history. but to the continuing creation of communities by hearing the Bible read in particular houses of worship at particular times.

If my interpretation of Williams is right — and I have no confidence that I’m getting any of this right, starting with what Jews believe — then Akma’s interpretation makes Williams’ lecture right for Jews but at the expense of obscuring an important difference between the two religions…a difference that comes down to the difference between being a people and being a community.

The truth is that I am spring-loaded on this topic — being ready to pounce is not a good intellectual position — because all too often, in my experience and opinion, Christians assume too much continuity with Judaism. (Akma is extraordinarily open to the possibility of difference — he defines “respect.”) So, when I read Williams, I tripped over that one little phrase of his.

In short: Let’s take the hyphen out of Judeo-Christian. [Tags: judaism christianity judeo-christian rowan_williams theology ]

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Ethanz has yet another fantastic post. This one recounts a discussion at the World Bank at which Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, talked about what knowledge looked like in the 18th century as access to it suddenly increased. Ethan also talks about the “India fallacy,” his term for the illusory belief that one’s country can become the next India economically. Jeez, you can’t open up Ethan’s blog without learning something.

(Warning: Ethan starts off by saying something gratuitously nice about my book. So, please skip the first paragraph so you won’t suspect that I’m merely reciprocating Ethan’s praise. Thank you.) [Tags: ethan_zuckerman joel_mokyr india world_bank internet ]

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Rob Faris and John Palfrey are giving a talk on “The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering,” a talk about the Open Net Initiative . The ONI is a joint project by Oxford, Cambridge, U of Toronto and Berkman. About 50 people have worked on gathering this data.The new study (coming out as a book called Access Denied) reports on forty countries that block access one way or another. Countries can’t do this on their own, he says.

Over the past five years, the states doing filtering have gone for a few to dozens. East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East are the main places that filter.

How can the ONI involve more people, John asks. How can the ONI make the data more relevant? Already you can suggest sites to test and you can submit a URL and see where it’s blocked.

Rob talks about a “taxonomy of Internet content restriction strategies.” There are many ways to limit information on line. A state can take down illegal sites, remove search results, filter content, arrest and intimidate, require registration and licensing and ID, hold ISPs responsible, and monitor. There’s no filtering in Egypt, for example, but a blogger was just imprisoned. Bahrain took down access to Google Earth just as a politically uncomfortable mashup was circulating. China blocks Wikipedia. Gay and lesbian sites are blocked in many countries. The Gulf states comprehensively block gambling sites. Thailand blocks access to the book “The King Never Smiles.” Anonymizers and The Onion Router are frequently blocked. (Rob mentions the great ONI page where you can see the search results at Google.com and Google.cn for the same term.)

To comprehensively block the Internet, countries rely on software, using automatic ways of identifying offensive material, which makes lots of mistakes. “Internet filtering is inherently flawed.” You get over-blocking, underblocking and mis-categorization. Some countries are transparent about the blocking, but many do not.

“Once you put in the infrastructure for social filtering,” says Rob, you also seem to institute political blocking.

Q: [yochai benkler] This is important work. But the most important part of it is the detail your work covers. “The level of detail that goes into the country studies suggests” a different way of presenting it. E.g., transparency. How do you do as someone who respects democracy deal with the transparent process in Saudi Arabia? The Saudis say exactly what they’re doing. They say they’re protecting a cultural discourse. They let people add to it or subtract to the list of blocked sites. Mapping these differences among countries would be very helpful.
A: [jp] We’ve spent three years collecting data. That’s been our aim. Now the challenge is how to make it useful. Do we want to give an open API to all the sites that are blocked? Do we want to give this list to everyone including the censors? And how much should we write in our country studies? The first ones were very long, with lots of context, but not many people read them. So, we’ve shifted to shorter reports, more coverage, and deep dives at times. And we’ve done a book that gives straightforward data, plus a series of contextualizing chapters. We’re trying to have it all ways. [I.e., they’re being miscellaneous. :) ] Also, we’re working with several companies on a code of conduct for international companies.

Q:[ethanz] People in filtered countries are often desperate just to get confirmation that they’re being blocked. It’s been tough to get rapid response out of ONI. Activists are writing their own tools, often not as good as ONI’s tools. And it’d be great if you had a handbook that others could use who are not as technical as you.

Q: There’s a lot of data to be gathered about how countries are changing their laws to achieve the aims of filtering.
A: We’ve started doing that. We’ve sent clinical students to countries to look into this.

Q: What do you do to help bloggers?
A: We’re not advocating, at least at this point. We’re just describing.

Q: ONI is done by a localized group. How do we get the average user to take part in checking on filtering, etc.?
A: We’re definitely thinking about this. Jonathan Zittrain wants to do a distributed app, like Seti@Home . We’ve started the design of this.

Q: As you’ve said, American high tech companies provide filtering technology. Corporate responsibility has been discussed forever…
A: For the past two days, a group has been meeting in London, drafting principles. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Vodaphone are there, as well as the ONI.

Q: How can you release the information listing the censored applications?
A: We have a tool under development that lets you see which countries block a site. We’re struggling with making it available because we are reluctant to give this information to censors. [The demo shows that Technorati is blocked in China and Iran and BoingBoing is blocked in Iran, Saudia Arabia, Sudan and Tunisia.]

Q: How has filtering changed since you started monitoring it in 2002?
A: We haven’t collected enough data. When we started we only looked at a few countries.

Q: [catherine bracy] How do you know what countries want to join the filtering club?
A: They’re debating legislation. There are a half dozen in Latin America. A bill is floating in Norway that’s breathtaking in its breadth…

Q: [ethan] Should you be helping people filter better? Thailand blocks all of YouTube to get rid of one offensive video. You could help them out…
A: [jp] I had a frank conversation with the Thai censor. Fascinating. I see us doing more of that.

A: [rob] That is remarkably close to The Google Question.

[Conclusion: Not only can the Internet be blocked, it’s way easier than we’d thought. There are so many ways to do it. And it can be done at multiple levels, from tech to legislation. Hence, is there no single way to unblock it?]

Seth Finkelstein figured out why BoingBoing got banned from Boston’s free wifi. Omigod. Censorship shouldn’t be this stupid. Unfortunately, it just about always is.

[Tags: oni censorship digital_rights berkman]

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Dave Winer writes, “I want a checkbox that tells MSNBC that I don’t want any more Virginia Tech stories.” Exactly. (He’s making a point about checkboxes, not about Virginia Tech.)

In fact, for the past few weeks, as a part of my “stump” speech, I’ ve been showing a screen capture of USA Today‘s redesigned site. It includes a button you can click on to give a Digg-like thumbs up to an article. Great, except, um, where’s the thumb down? We want to be able to say to the Britney or Justin or We-Should-Teach-Our-Students-Judo article “No no no no no no no no.” We want to tune our news. But we also want our revenge. [Tags: news media digg dave_winer everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Now that she’s finished the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling is probably wondering what to write next. With all modesty, I have an idea: She should answer her email.

I’m not kidding. Rowling’s been good about fan fiction, apparently, happy that her fans are so enthusiastic. That’s a welcome break from the brand mentality authors are encouraged to adopt by the life+70 copyright term. So, with those billion dollars in royalties in her back pocket (personally, I’d have it changed into one $500M bill and five $100,000,000’s) she could spend a few years on the Web, engaging with young readers and writers in every forum and format that she’s comfortable with.

That’d be some real magic. [Tags: jk_rowling harry_potter copyright books]

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Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous I’ve posted about the Gender Genie, a tool that guesses the authors’ sex based on her/his use of innocuous keywords. ..

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