The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, is now available in full online. It’s an anthology of essays about hyperlinks and society by a great collection of folks. (And then there’s my contribution, which argues that the Internet is good — what a surprise! — because the hyperlinked architecture of the Web mirrors the architecture of morality itself.)

[Tags: hyperlinks morality philosophy ]

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Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Im reading Julian Warners “From Writing to Computers,” published in 1994. In a wonderful chapter he looks at the senses in which the Western tradition thought documents contained or were intelligent — written documents “appear to understand what they are saying,” Plato says. Warner looks carefully at Platos Phaedrus, a seminal text for those concerned with the transition from oral to written cultures. Thats the one where Plato worries that the onset of written documents will ruin human memory: Those who acquire the skill of writing “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.”

Plato has another complaint: Writings cant respond to questions: “writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence.” Ive taken these quotes from Plato from Warner pp. 58-59.

Makes you wonder what Plato would have made of chat, IM, and SMS.

Tags: plato julian_warner chat sms im

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I’m enjoying my Amazon Kindle ebook reader, albeit while accidentally pressing the “next page” button as often as everyone else (did they beta test this thing all on the thumbless?), and whining about the rest of the annoyances about which you should not even get me started. Nevertheless, it works fine for pleasure reading and I like carrying a whole bunch of books among which I can switch rapidly. And despite its ugly DRM heart, you can upload books from the Net in PRC, MOBI, or text formats.

But, when it comes to books I read for research, it’s about as effective as it would be as a boat anchor.

First, the note-taking and highlighting are jokes.

Second, it (usefully) lets you repaginate on the fly, but (annoyingly) doesn’t know the original page numbering. How am I supposed to cite a page in a reference? It should let us ask nicely about which physical page the current text came from.

Third, there’s no bibliographic tool.

Obviously, Kindle was not designed for researchers. I understand that, and I would have made the same marketing decision. But for Kindle 2.0, it’d just take some software. (Well, and a change to the Kindle book format to capture the original page numbers.)

There’s a bunch of skeptical Kindle links here.

[Tags: ]

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Zachary McCune, who is at the Berkman Center, became an “ambassador” for One Web Day. To rev up for it, he did an anthropological study on himself by going without the Net for one day. He’s blogged his odyssey.

As an example, here’s what Zack wrote at 12:22:

I decide it’s high time I got my daily intake of news. I imagine my fingers crawling over the keyboard to open up nytimes.com, wired.com, boingboing.net, and boston.com in different tabs. I imagine opening up facebook to “friend” Barack Obama. Does he (or one of his nameless intern/aides) check out your profile before he friends you? I will need to wait to find out.

I remember that I am going to interview the “Plain White T’s” tomorrow. I note that I would be wikipediaing “plain white t’s” at about this time.

I realize that every time I use wikipedia, I end up clicking through to an average of three other articles. So for every wikipedia entry I don’t read today, I am actually not reading four wikipedia articles.

A single tear falls down my cheek.

And at 1:20, amidst all the urges to google this or click on that, he has a quieter moment:

I begin to realize that the internet shapes my sense of self, in that I may be directed by ads, emails, stumbles, or traditional hyperlinks, but I am still an arbiter of what I consume.

The internet suddenly seems to not be a space I inhabit but rather a (re)structuring of my self as a sort of data flaneur.

Oh, just read the whole thing yourself! It’s wonderful.

[Tags: berkman zachary_mccune onewebday ]

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You can now pre-order BradSucks’ new album. And why wouldn’t you? (You can answer that question by giving it a listen…) [Tags: bradsucks music ]

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Jyri Engestrom, whose company, Jaiku, was bought by Google, is talking about “Nodal Points: The emerging real-time social Web.” About four years ago, I heard Jyri talk about “social objects:” at Reboot, a talk that really stuck with me. Now Jyri works on social tools at Google.

Nodal Points is an homage to William Gibson, he says, and especially to a character who can predict the future by seeing patterns in human amounts of data.

Jyri says that social networks don’t explain why people are connected socially. He talks about the importance of social objects — objects that connect people in a social network. “Good web services allow people to create social objects that add value.” Mobile devices can help because they provide sensors that let us capture more data. This will be increasingly true.

Then we need to think about the verbs that people perform on objects. E.g., Flickr’s aggregation of what people have done with your photos. We should be surfacing the available actions.

“Social peripheral vision” lets you see what’s next. If you are unaware of other people’s intentions, you can’t make plans. “Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.” Not just “boring update feeds.” Innovate, especially on mobiles. We will see this stuff in the next 24 months. Some examples: Maps: Where my friends are. Phonebook: what are people up to. Email: prioritized. Photos: Face recognition.

Structurally, there are “object lockers” and on top of that a set of “activity aggregators.” “What’s key is filtering out what’s irrelevant.” Pattern recognition matters … hence, nodal points. “It’s not that different from Web search,” except the query is constant and consists of contextual parameters, e.g., who is copresent in the space, what’s in the calendar. “Imagine it’s all funneled into one big query” that runs constantly.

Detecting nodal points: “What should I be aware of that’s happening around me? Was what just happened significant to someone on the network.” And then deliver it to people at just the right time, perhaps via push. “Discovery is becoming social.” “It is the end of the era of search,” i.e., of querying for stuff. From browser to search to share (citing former ceo of paypal). From pagerank to “facerank” where what counts is friends in common, physical proximity, shared taste, shared objects.

He points to OpenID (identity), OAuth (authorization), and OpenSocial (interoperability).

Whe you develop a social service, your questions shoudl be: What is your object? Whare are your verbs? What are your nodal points?

Are we creating echo chambes?
An empirical question. Still open. In my own experience, no. We can build into the software the ability to prompt you with what would be interesting to you even though you would never have thought so. [heavily paraphrased]

[Great talk. And undoubtedly giving insight into Google’s plans for socializing its software.] [Tags: reboot10 reboot jyri_engstrom social_networks google ]

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Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and Ned Gulley of MathWorksMathLab are giving a Berkman talk called “The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse.”

Karim begins by looking at research by Meyer on the airplane’s hidden collaborative history: It didn’t spring whole cloth from the brow of the Wright brothers. E.g., Chanute served as a hub for pre-Wright research and innovation. The Wright brothers actively corresponded with him. Once the Wright brothers patented their inventions, innovation moved to Europe (which is why so many of our aviation terms are French … l’fusilage, anyone?).

Ned talks about the contest MathLab (where he works) runs every six months– sixteen times so far — designed to encourage the free flow of ideas. It’s a week-long open collaborative competition for MATLAB programmers. Entries are displayed, scored, and ranked immediately. Anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own. The leader is determined objectively by putting it through some hidden tests that judge its efficiency. (They don’t make the optimization suite public because they don’t want people to “game” it.) The prize is a t-shirt or baseball cap, although the real prize is reputation.

Ned shows a graph of entries and processing times. It’s quite a dramatic set of cliffs. On the other hand, there are lots of dots representing people who make “improvements” that aren’t improvements. This may be people with bad ideas or people whose ideas happen not to work the way MATLAB prefers.

The winning entries on average have contributions from 30 people. Ned says that when some code leaps ahead, you’ll see “splash” as tweakers try to improve it marginally, often making it marginally worse.

Q: In the commercial realm, what happens when an early innovator patents it?
You don’t get collaborative innovation.

People name their entries, and sometimes sell social signals with them: “Tweakfest” or “I wish I knew how this works.”

Ned says that if a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, then a hacker is only code’s way of making more code.

Karim talks about some statistical analysis of entries into the contest. He looks at how many lines an entrant borrows and how many times the entry’s reused. There is a power law distribution: A few lines are used thousands of times, but most are used zero to three times. His analysis shows that when it comes to entries that become leaders, borrowing pays off more than novelty.

Q: Have coders evolved in these games?
Yes. More collaborative. And more sophisticated in their gaming of the contest.

Topcoder.com uses this model to develop code solving practical problems. [Tags: berkman Karim_Lakhani ned_gulley collaboration ]

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Nicole Simone interviewed me about what I’ll be talking about at ReBoot. It’s posted here.

[Tags: reboot nicole_simon babbage infohist ]

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Stowe Boyd, responding to Nick Carr’s provocation in The Atlantic that argues that “Google is making us stupid,” anticipates some of a piece I’ve been thinking about writing for a few months: The sort of long-form argument that some say the Web is killing is vastly over-rated. It’s actually difficult to find books that are long arguments (not multiple illustrations of one point, but an argument that develops over the course of multiple chapters) that don’t go off the rails relatively quickly. And, yes, I include Immanuel Kant in this. Darwin’s Descent of Man is an exception.

I meant to get around to writing about this. I still do.

[Tags: stowe_boyd nick_carr ]

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