From the AP (via my daughter Leah):

Amy Taylor filed for divorce when she discovered her husband cheating in Second Life — an online community where players adopt personas called avatars, mingle with others and teleport themselves into a series of artificial worlds.

“I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game,” Taylor told the South West News Service press agency. “It looked really affectionate. He confessed he’d been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks, and said our marriage was over and he didn’t love me any more.”…

[Tags: second_life marriage ]

2 Comments »

Craig Newmark has dropped by the Berkman Center to chat. He begins by asking us what we want him to talk about. A voice opts for the history of CraigsList.com. [NOTE: I’m live-blogging, typing quickly, not correcting typos, getting things wrong, missing entire paragraphs, etc.]

He says that he got a better education than he needed at Case-Western. In early 1995 he wanted to give back some of what he received, he started some mailing lists, including for events, AnonSalon (a fundraiser) and others. People suggested new categories, including apartments. He was using Pine for email, but it started breaking at 240 mailing addresses. He was going to call the list “SFEvents,” but people said they already call it “CraigsList” and that it’s a brand. Craig didn’t know what a brand is, but he stuck with it.

He says he was a literal nerd in HS. He was not on the AV Squad [I was] but he was on the debating team, which led him to delusions about the effectiveness of rational discourse. He says he’s now comfortable with being a nerd.

Eventually he realized he could turn emails into HTML, an instant Web-publishing solution. Over the next few years, he refined the software. If a task took more than an hour a day, he would automate it. At the end of 1997, he hit three milestones: 1. A million page views per month (he hit a billion in 2004 and now is headed toward 13B. There are 26 people at the company). 2. Microsoft Sidewalk asked him to run banner ads. He turned them down because “I am an overpaid programmer.” 3. People volunteered to help. But it failed because he didn’t lead. So, in 1999 he turned it into a business.

He hired Jim Buckmaster “who is a full foot taller than I am.” He’s a really good manager. “I suck as a manager.” The culture there is that people make suggestions, they listen, and they decide what to act on. Also, it’s continued to try to be simple. And they decided to charge people who are already paying but for less effective ads, so they started charging people listing jobs and real estate brokers. “They asked us to charge them to cut down on certain types of spam, and on the need to post and repost.”

He’s always surprised people are willing to pay for what he does for fun. He’s generalized it to nerd values, including: once you have a comfortable living, it’s more fun to change things than to make more money. His business model: “We can do really well by treating people well and doing some good.”

He says he’s now going to half time as a customer service rep, after 14 years of fulltime. You sometimes see ugly things in customer service, he says. E.g., they saw ugly racist stuff during the campaign. “That takes something out of you.”

“I’ve only regretted giving my email address out once.” It was when he was on The View.

Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. “It has to do with the culture of trust we have.” There are bad guys but they’re a tiny percentage. “People look out for one another.” E.g., you can flag abusive ads. If enough people vote for it, it’s removed automatically. “That’s a flawed mechanism,” but it works better than not doing it. As Jon Stewart says, (Craig says) you do hear from extremists, but that’s because moderates have stuff to do. You should treat people the way you want to be treated. Corollaries: Live and let live, and give the other person a break. Nothing profound, he says, but it’s hard to follow through. “We’re trying to listen to people still.” “We decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them.” (567 cities now.) Novel ideas are rare. Most of what’s on the site is based on community feedback, although the child care section was Craig’s idea.

“I have no vision at all, but I know how to keep things simple, and I listen some.”

“We’re a good example of how people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad.” On his way to One Web Day he realized, “I’m a community organizer. I’m more of a meta-organizer.”

Nothing about CraigsList is, in his view, altruistic. It’s just people giving another person a break. “I figured I should extend this to other areas.” E.g., “I help people smarter than me help figure out the future of journalism.” E.g., Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.

He’s also interested in grassroots democracy. Face to face is a better way of communicating but it doesn’t scale. On the Net, we get millions of people working together to make stuff happens. “This changes the nature of our democracy,” so that grassroots democracy can address the traditional problems with representative democracy. Craig thanks Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. Now we have this big grassroots infrastructure. What do we do with it? “2008 is the new 1776.”

All sorts of things are happening. “It used to be that the guys with money, power and guns got to write the history and our narratives about ourselves. With Wikipedia, everyone has a shot at doing that…It changes the whole course of human history.” We are at a “singularity,” he says. We’re living in a time like 1776. It’s happening faster because the Internet accelerates everything. “I’m trying to play a microscopic part in it.”

He’s involved with the SunlightFoundation.org. He’s working with ConsumerReports. He was involved a little bit in SF’s 311 number. “Mundane, but it’s part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government.” A bunch of this is in the Obama platform, he says, and we could see some of it next year.

Veterans have been treated badly by the White House, he says, so he’s on the IAVA.org board. To screen claims faster, maybe they shouldn’t care about fraud so much, since veterans and their families are suffering as they wait for their claims to be processed.

As a nerd, it’s a “crime against nature” to be involved in promotion or communication. But he does it anyway. For one thing, he likes the idea of more people getting involved in service. “I do have one message for the kids: Stay off of my lawn.” :)

“The Constitution will be restored on January 20.”

He says focuses on people who can get things done. He lacks patience for those who can’t get things done.

Q: Are there any ways Craigslist has gone in directions you couldn’t have imagined?
A: I never tried to foresee them so it’s hard to answer. I had to have my arms twisted to create personals. They’ve done much more good than problems. Like “missed connections.” I’ve been asked to perform marriages. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise. I have no vision. I’ve only responded to feedback. It’s all very surreal, but that’s life now.

Q: Why did CL succeed in the early days, as opposed to doing it over newsgroups?
A: Part of it was that everyone understood mail and Web browsers, while newsgroups were hard to used. And newsgroups were ad-spammed badly.We have a problem with spam, and last week we announced a suit against a company that sells ad-spam software. We aren’t litigious but we thought that was a good way to do it.

Q: Has it been a problem keeping CL simple?
A: Keeping it simple is a habit. There are times when we have to debate whether there should be a specific category, or should people have to register with a valid email on the message boards, but I don’t know how to do things except simply.

Q: What about the deal with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.. How consensual was the deal?
A: Jim knows the details. He felt strongly about it. There was genuine abuse of our site involving minors. We’re not law enforcement professionals, so we got advice from the real experts. There is that sort of abuse and we have to help out. We just started charging for erotic services and we’ll contribute all that to philanthropies. And how do you manage anonymity? Sometimes you need it, for whistleblowers. We tend to the anonymity side. But congresspeople want to know that an email comes from a constituent rather than a mass spammed email. We’re talking about ways to balance anonymity and authentication, but we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against an oppressive government.

Q: Does your exposure to some of the uglier aspects has led you to see a more expansive role for government?
A: I have become more balanced, but mainly because I’ve been doing customer service. The best label I can figure is “moderate Libertarian.” I’m looking for a better label. I’m increasing interested in private-public partnerships since I’ve seen market solutions don’t always work, like for health insurance. I’m in the Net neutrality debate and see people misrepresenting it on purpose. (He adds that most lobbyists are ok, and a small number are predatory.)

Q: You’re in many cities but it still seems to be geared towards regional breakdowns. On purpose?
A: Initially we just followed our gut. CL is like a flea market. People get together to do commerce, but really just to socialize. Penelope Green talked about our site being a market in the ancient sense: chaotic and vividly human.

[me] Why doesn’t your company have meetings?

A: We have some. But we minimize them. A meeting of more than six people is already going to be dysfunctional (small group comms theory). Effective communication is a meeting is tough. This also reflects my impatience, a flaw as a human being.

What will be the future of the Communications Decency Act?
A: This is the part of law that says that a site isn’t responsible for what people say on the site, so long as they take some reasonable measures. I think it will stay and possibly be improved.

Q: Have you had any negative interactions with the police?
A: Not really. Once the FBI called asking if we knew there was an ad for plutonium on our site. The result was that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The police just want to be treated decently and not jerked around. That’s our customer service idea.

Q: Why can’t people search for subsections?
A: Mysql chews up server time doing these searches. We have some ideas for how to do this, but there are bigger things they’re working on.

[Tags: craiglist craig_newmark customer_service community_organizer cluetrain berkman ]

2 Comments »

From a post by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Christopher Soghoian at the Open Net Initiative site:

Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of country’s most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona.

Wow. Argentinian celebrities either have a different view of celebrity or of the Web, or both.

The post (which contains much more detail) notes that Yahoo was not notifying searchers that their search results were being blocked, a violation of the Global Net Initiative ethical guidelines that Yahoo, Google, and others recently promulgated. But, Chris Soghoian in an email notes that yesterday Yahoo fixed the transparency problem.

[Tags: berkman oni open_net_initiative argentina celebrities censorship filtering google yahoo global_net_initiative gni ]

1 Comment »

I’m going to be on the radio news show Here and Now tomorrow to talk about Google.org’s ability to track outbreaks of flu by charting search terms (“flu symptoms”), time, and presumed IP location. I plan on talking about it as an example of the power of having enormous amounts of data, and of putting to use information generated for some other purpose.

Any ideas about how else this sort of technique could be used or is being used? (Amazon’s personalization is a different sort of example.) Any concerns (other than the how-not-to-do-it example from AOL)? [Tags: google flu crowd_sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd privacy ]

11 Comments »

Bryan Kirschner (Dir of Open Source Strategy) and Mario Madden (Open Source Licensing Counsel) at Microsoft are giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk on Open Source and Microsoft. [NOTE: I am live-blogging, typing too fast, missing things, getting things wrong, etc.]

They start with three framing positions: 1. Open source has changed the info-communications landscape. It’s “neither a fad nor a magic bullet” [missed the attribution] 2. It brings an opportunity for Microsoft, open source developers, and ICT customers. 3. It’s not any harder or easier to realize this potential, compared to other opportunities (e.g., cloud computing).

In 2004, Msft submitted two licenses to the Open Source Initiative. Now there are 500. There are at least 80,000 Open Source apps that run on Windows. Microsoft is virtualizing Linux on Windows and vice versa, and Silverlight is becoming Moonlight (= a Linux version).

Why is Msft doing this?

1. Motivation. What motivates OS developers? (From Karim Lakhani, who is in the room.) They’re motivated by creativity and learning, economic opportunity, and solving a problem.

2. Commercialization. Some of OS is money-driven, while some is community-driven. “At the end of the day, it’s about value-for-cost and solving a customer’s problem.”

There’s a “world of choice” these days. You use the best tool for the job. Mix and match. E.g., they want Windows to be a great platform for OS apps, including for PHP. So, Windows is working with Zen (commercial PHP company) and the PHP community. If your company wants single-sign-on; Msft has Active Directory that does that, including for php aps. Then, if you want to use cloud computing (Windows Azure), you can use it and it works with Active Directory. Then you could have OpenID and Ruby apps running on Linux. Then you might want to use virtualization to rapidly move apps across hardware, and you could then use OpenPegasus to do cross-platform systems management, contributing back to the Pegasus project. “At the application layer, it really makes sense to strive for openness.”

There’s a human relationship and emotions in the OS community, Bryan says. It’s inspirational. Microsoft wants to comingle, cooperate and co-exist.

Q: You touted collaboration with Novell. Many are not happy with that deal. Some people at Novell quit. The Linux kernel community would be a tougher community. They haven’t been happy about joining forces with you. Do you have any plans to bury the hatchet? E.g., Linus Torvalds is unhappy with Msft’s stance on patents…
A: I wouldn’t hold up Novell as a great example. Our customers, especially our large customers, like it a lot, though. It makes commercial sense, although it doesn’t necessarily make everyone feel happy.
A: [mario] The legal team’s job is to help the team navigate the shoals. We did the best we could in the Novell deal.
A: [bryan] We have an active partnership with Samba. Both sides are happy about this.

Q: I’m a European lawyer. Microsoft’s reaction to the European Court’s decision showed no sign of openness? How do you address the abuse that was found and the open attitude you’re expressing today?
A: [bryan] I’m not a lawyer. The question for me is how do you meet the needs of your customers? The overwhelming body of evidence leads you to openness. We will continue to develop .Net. But it’s not zero sum. We also have support php. The Windows media team wrote a plugin so Windows Media Player would work on Firefox. There have been 6 million downloads, so that’s great.
A: [karim] There’s a lag between court decisions and how the company thinks about it.
Q: My point was that you might have saved 500M euros if you had been more open…

Q: Once sw is fully developed, you’re half done. It still needs quality assurance. How do you assure open source software is of high quality? And how do you know it wasn’t stolen from an open source app?
A: [mario] When code is brought in, it’s up to the engineering groups to do the QA. Legally, OS software is just third party code. We brought in 500M lines of code last year. We scan it. A lot of it was Open Source.
A: [karim] Two studies have compared the quality of code from Open Source vs. commercial and found no difference, except perhaps OS is slightly higher quality because the QA is continuous.
A: [bryan] We’re a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation. They have overhead. It makes it easier to deal with them if they’re not under terrible financial stress.
A: [mario] When it comes to OS, we’re driven by business purposes. Can we decrease development costs?

Q: [me] What’s the business case that you see for contributing to OS, as well as enabling Windows to work well with OS? How much are you contributing?
A: [bryan] We contribute in three ways. 1. Product strategy. E.g., contribute to php to make it work better with SQL Server. 2. Does it actually make sense for your product to take an OS or hybrid strategy? E.g., Class server is curriculum management system. It competes with OS. It didn’t make sense to compete, so now it’s an OS product. 3. Having more developers creating more code is a good thing. It’s pie-expanding. E.g., we have XNA libraries for developing games. There are hundreds of XNA projects that are open source now.
Q: [me] Are 500 contributions a lot? Compared to the number of patents? Products?
A: We’ll measure success when every product group considers open source.
Q: [karim] IBM says they have 1,000 developers working on Linux, etc. Do you have any number you can point to that’s similar?
A: No.

Q: Has OS affected how stuff gets done inside?
A: Inside the company, we are not the Borg. Every product group has a lot of autonomy. Agile groups. You also have some 3-year-product-plan projects. Increasingly you’ll see a more blended model.
A: [mario] We have 30,000 developers. It’s hard to know, on the IP, what everyone is doing.
A: [bryan] You’ll see a company-wide statement from the company that we understand the world is heterogeneous, we respect the contributions open source has made, and we’re committed to greater openness. I’ll quote Heidegger: Fear is not knowing what to do. The Windows-Linux oppositional framework in 1998 took the public imagination. We formally responded with a site in 2007, so no one will accuse us of acting precipitously :)

Q: When will Steve Ballmer start putting out the OS msg? He has a reputation for being confrontational.
A: [bryan] He’s a strong, opinionated leader. But you’ve already seen Steve talk about the benefits of supporting open source. Inside Msft, the open source group always talks in terms of what makes sense for business.

Q: This has implications for DC policy positions. I.e., very strict IP enforcement.
A: [mario] We may disagree about strict IP; we support patent reform, for example. But we see our business as about IP. We’ll always support IP and IP rights.

Q: Chances are we’ll find out that the new Redmond Congressperson will be a former Microsoft manager. Since Msft employees have funded about a third of her campaign, when your lobbyists are calling her up, will you be asking to support Open Source?
A: [mario] Fascinating question, and I’m sure not going to comment :)
A: [bryan] We don’t want anyone fighting Open Source. We don’t think it makes business sense.

Q: [karim] If we’re back to big iron — Google is a server farm company — how do we think about the role of open source?
A: [bryan] It changes the dynamics. Clouds and server farms open up a lot more space.

[me[ What about OOXML vs. ODF? Why did you push OOXML as a doc format after we already had adopted ODF? Is that typical of what you mean by openness?
A: [bryan] Open doc formats are really important. I don’t see doc standards as a zero sum game. So being able to understand the doc through a published set of docs doesn’t seem exclusive to me.

Karim concludes the session by pointing out how contentious this topic would have been just five years. “The presence of Mario and Bryan here is a sign of success.” [Tags: berkman microsoft open_source ]

5 Comments »

Obama has posted his tech policy.

It’s like someone who understands and values technology and the Internet was elected president.

By the way, the Change.gov site welcomes our comments.

[Tags: obama net_neutrality e-politics democracy technology ]

10 Comments »

This video pretends to be from YouTube’s origins in 1985. Cute.

[Tags: youtube humor ]

Be the first to comment »

Google has reached a settlement agreement in the lawsuit brought by publishers who were afraid that awareness of the existence of the publishers’ books might leak out onto the Internet. (Non-biased translation: Google has settled with the publishers suing over its books.google.com book search service.)

As far as I can tell from Google’s plain-English explanation (which, overall, is exceptionally clear), the default for out-of-print books that are still under copyright will be that they are available through Google Book Search. You’ll be able to not only see snippets (as now) but will be able to purchase them, with the money being distributed through a new, independent, book rights registry. In addition, libraries and universities will be able to purchase site licenses for all the books Google’s scanned.

For books currently in print and under copyright, it sounds like not much has changed. Google says publishers can “turn on” the purchase and preview options. Couldn’t they before?

Once this settlement is agreed on, we will have what sounds like a reasonable program for working within the bounds of copyright. Much will depend, of course, on what the pricing is.

Now we have to work on fixing copyright so that it serves its original purpose — providing an incentive sufficient to bring authors to write — rather than being used to create an artificial scarcity to serve the economic interests of an industry entrenched in a ditch carved into paper.

[Tags: books google copyright copyleft kindle ]

Wendy Seltzer worries that Google will now become iTunes for books …

3 Comments »

Jose Antonio Vargas has an interesting article in the Washington Post about watching global blogs watch the US election. He focuses on Voices without Votes, an offshoot of Global Voices. Why, did you know that six local candidates in Brazil added “Obama” to their names?

[Tags: politics globalvoices blogs ]

Be the first to comment »

Just a reminder: MyFairElection.com is asking people to sign up to report on the conditions they find at their local polling place so that the site can create a “weather map” of electoral fairness.

[Tags: elections democracy crowdsourcing e-democracy ]

Be the first to comment »