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June 2, 2007
Bill Griffith’s automotive column in the Boston Globe today has a nice quote from Saab USA’s new general manager:
“A blogger, I think he was from Tasmania, immediately made a post on behalf of Saab owners,” Shannon said. “The gist was, ‘You’re working for us now, and you better take care of our baby.’ “
Evidence? Nah. An anecdote that expresses a whole bunch of themes? Yup.
[Tags: marketing cluetrain saab]
June 1, 2007
John Palfrey of the Berkman opens the conference by looking at the digital age from the point of view of students,
Students: “It’s not about being digital. It’s about students who are born digital.” This is a profound difference, JP says. He points to four traits of students,always on and always attached.
1. Digital Identity. The natives assume they have ’em.
2. Natives arre multi-taskers “but in ways heretofore unseen.” The Socratic method changes when every student has a laptop in front of her. Everyone has multiple IM sessions going. “It’s not necessarily a good thing” but it’s the fac.
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3. Natives assume media comes in digital form, and thus is malleable. And it’s searchable. “Research now means a Google search.”
4. Natives are creators. “This is a huge shift from previous generations.” From consumers to creators.
These changes are not all good, JP says. Henry Jenkins has identified the “participation gap” (an effect of the digital divide). There are ethics challenges and transparency problems (“who created what”).
Teachers:
1. Digital identities: Should faculty members have Facebook accounts? Is your teacher your friend?
2. Emergent tools: “How do we capture this extaordinary move from consumers to creators?” Should teachers start using wikis, e.g.?
University: What about it ought to be reborn?
1. Digital ID: What does it mean for Harvard to have a digital ID? now that both students and info are born digital, how does a university understand its identity?
2. Digital info: JP points to Dan Gillmor’s Center for Digital Media as a site trying to figure out what things like accuracy and fairness mean. He also points to PLoS.
3. Open Access: One Laptop Per Child,Access to Knowledge , OpenNet Initiative and many others are responding to this need. The “Open to Harvard ID Holders Only” badge is up in front of Harvard’s digital information, and it doesn’t need to be, says JP.
Now JP raises “hard questions.”
What is the relationship between the university and say, Reed Elsevier, Google, RIAA, MPAA, Second Life? Should the U be striking exclusive deals with Google? Should the U deliver the RIAA’s cease and desist letters?
“What is the best way to invest in libraries in a digital age?”
“How do we fund and sustain the generation of digital knowledge?” Should we be looking at funders, or should we be adopting a business model like Google’s or Times Select’s?
“How does this generation of new library scientists learn?”
“What is the impact of an outdated copyright system?” Should the U be taking a leading role in improving the system? [Tags: is2k7 john_palfrey]
I’m at The Berkman Center’s Internet and Society Conference (“Knowledge beyond Authority”). Yesterday was an an invitation-only day for about 100 people. Today is a public conference:
Stream: http://www.law.harvard.edu/media/2007/06/01/berkman.rm
I found portions of yesterday’s meetings a little frustrating. It was a fantastic set of people, from all over Harvard, other universities, non-profits, open access folks, and representatives of the content industries (journal publishers, entertainment industry). There were many great discussions, but with some I think I’m just out of step with the times. I thought we spent too much time trying to find “common ground” with the content industries. Especially the Hollywood folks seemed to think common ground means a tit for a tat: We turn in file sharers and they let us have more access to their copyrighted content for educational purposes. I hate that deal. Whatever you think of file sharing, it should not be tied to the ability of the university to advance knowledge, research and education. We might as well be talking about giving away the stadium’s naming rights in return for more academic freedom.
That sounds good, but in fact it’s obstructionist. In fact, at one point I was so exercised about this that I behaved badly. And not in the cute or righteous way. More in the rude asshole way. I feel terrible about that, and have apologized to the person I was rude to. I really don’t like the self-righteous me. And it gets in the way of thought.
Charlie Nesson , the conference creator, has inspired me with the idea that the university can be the leading defender of the Internet and of the needed expansion intellectual rights. I’m not ready to be realistic. And that’s a problem.
Mary Wong is opening the conference (after Charles Ogletree ‘s welcome … subbing for Charlie Nesson who is in the hospital having something fixed (he’ll be fine)). She says the discussions yesterday focused not only on the challenges around universities using licensed material, but also around the licensing and commercialization of material generated by the university. She says there was a lot of discussion of the vagueness of Fair Use. Is there anything we can do to clarify it? And if we did, would that new understanding, intended as a floor, get taken as the ceiling, thus actually limiting Fair Use in practice?
[Tags: berkman harvard a2k copyright copyleft digital_rights education is2k7]
May 24, 2007
Tom Matrullo’s got a helpful post about opening up JSTOR, a digitized archive of scholarlship. Tom registers “puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge — knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.”
Damn right it’s frustrating. And there’s lot’s going on trying to free the knowledge. On the one hand, we have the economic hurdles, which Tom’s post explains. On the other, we have at least a sense of how much smarter our species could become if enabled open acess to scholarship. Someday…
(Thanks to Frank Paynter for the pointer.) [Tags: open_access knowledge universities tom_matrullo berkman jstor everything_is_miscellaneous]
May 23, 2007
Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon and the author of Dreaming in Code, has posted at Salon an interview with me about Everything is Miscellaneous.
At his blog, Scott adds some “out-takes” from the interview, and recommends the book. [Tags: salon scott_rosenberg everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy tagging ]
May 16, 2007
HelpALot.org helps you find charities using your social network, and uses social networking tools to figure out which charities you want to support and which ones you trust. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much, but I like the concept and the implementation initially seems promising. [Tags: philanthropy charity everything_is_miscellaneous ]
May 6, 2007
The always enjoyable Andrew Hinton has an insightful, witty, surprising set of slides ‘n’ text that tries to explain not only what Information Architecture is, but why it’s been so hard to explain. Along the way he has things to say about communities vs. communities of practice, how to attract flies, and why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16. Great stuff, elegantly and entertainingly communicated. [Tags: information_architecture andrew_hinton ]
May 4, 2007
EOM.
[Tags: james_governor monkchips brevity everything_is_miscellaneous ]
May 3, 2007
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 ]
May 1, 2007
Wired has just posted the first in the Everything Is Miscellaneous series of podcast interviews I’ve done on the topics in my book (which, by the way, was officially published today). The series is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center. (A transcript is also posted.)
The first is with Cory Doctorow, who talks about his Metacrap article about the problems with explicit metadata. I think they’ll be posting one a week at the Wired business blog.
Coming up in the: Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost, Craig Newmark of CraigsList, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Kayak’s Paul English, the BBC’s Richard Sambrook, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the DailyKos. [Tags: podcasts cory_doctorow everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired metadata metacrap]
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