Someone asked me the other day if I still think the Web has not been hyped enough. Damn straight. This thing is bigger than all of us put together. We’ve only just begun to figure out how to take advantage of our new connectedness of ideas and people. It’s worth a little celebrating, don’t you think?

That’s what One Web Day is about. And it’s coming up on September 22, which means it’s time to start organizing something in your community.

As with Earth Day, it’s up to each community — real-world or online — to decide how to celebrate OWD, but you’re encouraged to do something that will add value to the Web. Bring the Net to some people who don’t yet have it. Post works that tell local stories or that encourage others to be creative. Support politically what you consider to be the core values of the Web. (OWD is non-partisan.)

Woohoo! The Web! Woohoo! One Web Day!

[Tags: one_web_day owd ]

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The Microsoft Internet Explorer team sent a nice cake yesterday to the Mozilla Firefox team, congratulating them on the shipping of version 3.0, as they did when Firefox 2.0 shipped. Nice. Seriously.

Here’s an idea from one of the comments that’s funny but would be unnecessarily not-nice to actually do:

I reiterate what someone said when the last cake appeared – Mozilla should send a cake back, include the recipe, and ask for advice on how to improve it. ;)

: )

[Tags: firefox mozilla microsoft internet_explorer competition business ]

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Berkman sponsored a discussion at Supernova on governance, the topic of the Publius project. Here are Ross Mayfield’s notes. Sounds like it was a terrific session, with great people on the panel and joining in from the audience. [Tags: berkman publius governance supernova ]

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I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but I’m hearing only good things — no surprise there — about Jonathan Zittrain’s appearance on The Colbert Report. (Out of respect for Mr. Colbert, during the show the second ‘t’ in Jonathan’s last name went silent.) [Tags: berkman jonathan_zittrain colbert_report ]

I’ve seen it now. It’s one of Colbert’s best interviews, because he asks the right questions and because JZ is so sharp, eloquent, and charming.

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Scott Kirsner has a nice profile of Craig of Craigslist in the Boston Globe today.

One more fun fact about Craig: His company of 25 has never held a meeting. At least I think I heard him say that once.

I am a fan, needless to say.

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I’ve found myself using Google Docs more and more. It’s about a Bronze Age word processor at this point, but it makes collaborating easy, I like being able to get at my work from anywhere (even when offline), and the continuous backup and versioning is comforting.

But, not only is Docs way under-featured and butt ugly, Google is fixing it up really slowly.

What would Google have to do to enable The Community to enhance it?

We presumably (i.e., I don’t know what I’m talking about) could write an enhanced system that uses Google Docs for storage, but that slaps a new UI on it and adds features. In fact, maybe this is something that Adobe’s beautiful Air-based word processor, Buzzword, should be (or is?) looking at.

Even better: Google could make Google Docs as amenable to add-ons as Firefox is. Of course, I have no idea how hard that would be, and what the possibilities of terminally screwing up your docs might be.

At the very least, while Google Docs is getting better at allowing us to redefine existing HTML elements, to create new classes, and even to create new elements (albeit without giving us a UI to use these classes or elements, other than entering into HTML editing mode), letting us attach CSS style sheets seems like an obvious and non-destructive improvement.

But, IDKWITA (I don’t know what I’m talking about … and why isn’t that a standard Web acronym?), so there may be obvious technical issues mooting all of the above. But I’m sure that won’t mute you from telling me what I’m missing.

Please. [Tags: google google_docs word_processors openness css ]

Marco Barulli at Clipperz (a password manager) blogs about what it would take to get more freedom and privacy from the providers of Web apps. He has a three-part solution…

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Britannica has announced that it’s going to enable some measure of reader participation in the extending of the online version of their encyclopedia. You can see the beta of the new site here.

The detailed overview of the planned site says:

two things we believe distinguish this effort from other projects of online collaboration are (1) the active involvement of the expert contributors with whom we already have relationships; and (2) the fact that all contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s core content will continue to be checked and vetted by our expert editorial staff before they’re published.

Excellent! We needs lots of variations on the theme of collaboration. Editing and expertise add value. They slow things down and reduce the ability to scale, but Wikipedia’s process makes it possible to read an article that’s been altered, if only for a minutes, by some devilish hand. It all depends on what you’re trying to do, and collectively we’re trying to do everything. So, this is good news from Britannica. It’ll be fascinating to watch.

To pick a nit, I’m not as convinced by Britannica’s insistence on objectivity as a value, however. The blog post says “we believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one.” It lists three positive consequences of this. The third is “objectivity, and it requires experts.” In a reference that makes you wish they’d at least once use the word “Wikipedia,” the post continues: “In contrast to our approach, democratic systems settle for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a ‘neutral point of view.'” I think it would be reasonable for Britannica to tell us that an expert-based, edited system is likely to yield articles that are more comprehensive, more uniform in quality, more accurate and more reliable. But haven’t we gotten past thinking that expertise yields objectivity?

Anyway, I think it’s amazing that the Britannica, in its 240th year, is taking this step. Britannica will be better for it, and so will we. [Tags: britannica wikipedia knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Anne Balsamo from U of Southern California and the Annenberg School is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk, called “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work.” [Live blogging, paraphrasing. And Anne is talking about deep themes. So, these notes will be especially inadequate, as well as getting things wrong, missing stuff, etc.]

Her book touches on technological imagination (how we engage the materiality of the world), technological innovation, and the reworking of culture. She’s particularly interested in the importance of training the technological imagination. Her book discusses designers who explicitly consider culture throughout the design process. The book speculates about what it would take to train imaginations to create new cultural possibilities as they are at designing new technologies. This is the responsibility of educators as well as of engineers, etc.

Chapter 1 does some framing. Chapter 2 is called “Gendering the technological imagination,” extending the topic of her previous book. “Technology was always gendered. We just didn’t recognize it as such.” It draws on feminist theories of reproduction as the basis of all technologies as reproductive. Chapter 3 (“The Performance of Innovation”) draws on her time at PARC designing a museum exhibit on the future of reading. It focused on how we perform innovations, rather than discover them. Chapter 4 (“Public interactives and technological literacies”) reflects on the literacy a designer must always take into consideration when designing interactive pieces, and how interactives draw upon existing literacies and require new ones for the future. It then looks to the ethics of designing public interactives. Chapter 5 (“Working the Paradigm Shift”) is on the labor of creating this shift. It draws on Henry Jenkins and calls on people to do the hard work of shifting the paradigm. People have to learn how to engage deeply under the hood, as well as the policy work. Chapter 6 is a coda (“The Work of the Book in a Digital Age”) about why she’s writing a book in the age of the digital. The book is transmedia and includes a multimedia documentary (“Women of the World Talk Back”) she co-authored about 15 yrs ago, a Web site, and some other pieces. She also is working on a new thesaurus that maps technology as a cultural ensemble.

She talks about working the paradigm shift. We have failed to bridge C.P. Snow’s two cultures. We need to do so through practices. New participants (esp. women) and new commitments. We need to learn to be learners, not to be the smartest person in the world. And we need more collaborative teams and new spaces where people can work together on technological things. We need places that aren’t owned territorially but are places where people can come together from multiple disciplines.

She is working on a new MacArthur project. Scholarship will be distributed and networked, Macarthur understands. Part of her new grant is understanding the technology to enable this to happen. Learning is happening in distributed fashion, not in any one place. She is looking at how museums and libraries will function as part of this distributed learning environment. She’s starting with the portfolio of reading devices developed at PARC for the museum exhibit. She is looking at digital learning objects, mixed reality learning environments (body-based, gesture-based), and thinking with objects (DIY … but, Ann asks, as the digital divide mainatins, will the poor get access only to the virtual while the affluent learn how to solder, weld, saw…).

Libraries and museusm are important for presreving culture and bring it into new understandings.

She leaves us with the question: What about the future of libraries and museums?

Discussion begins, but I’m not going to try to capture all of it. Here are some random points:

Ann says that we need to be smart about our metadata, recognizing that there is always a narrative there. If we don’t think about this, the semantic web will be stupid.

Ann thinks books will continue to be printed. But libraries may be about more than lending books and CDs/DVDs. They could lend tools, toys… [Great vision!] A library is also a stage where people can perform and participate in their culture. [Tags: berkman ann_balsamo libraries museums culture technology everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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AllVoices is a new site that lets anyone upload an “event,” which in other circumstances might be called a “news story.” The site enables the clustering of bloggage and msm coverage of the event in what looks like a useful way.

I like a lot about it. I just hope it doesn’t become the preserve of yet another homogeneous group, which is exactly what the site doesn’t want to happen.

(It could use tags. [LATER that day: A helpful person from AllVoices tells me that there are tags for user-contributed items but not for ones that the system susses out.] And, at the moment the registration process is broken.)

Tags: allvoices global_voices media news social_tools everything_is_miscellaneous

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Alex Leavitt recorded the DRM zuneral on May 25, at which our old friend, Digital R. Management, the progeny of CD Keys and Read Only Floppies, was given a burial at sea.

[Tags: drm digital_rights roflcon zuneral ]

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