Julian Bleeker is interested in how first life and second life (with SecondLife.com as a good example) overlap.

E.g., he designed a game in which players got a word square (jumbled letters that contain words) that they had to track physically in a field, wired with GPS. Some decided instead to “draw” by walking in a path that created a picture.

Nikolaj Nyholm talks about how Imity.com uses Second Life to prototype user interactions.

Matt Bidulph has been doing Second Life mashups. You can use http, he says, to pipe out info from SecondLife, including what people are saying. Cory Ondrejka, Second Life CTO, says that there’s been an explosion of interest and development since they put in http requests. (Someday, he says, they’ll make every object a Web server.) He says that there are 100 classes a week inside Second Life in how to use the API and scripting language.He looks forward to the day when there is a Second Life renderer inside a Web browser.

Phillip Rosedale, Second Life founder, says that they’re a small development house. They’re focused on opening Second Life up and getting it to run fast.

Nikolaj says that it’ll be at least five years before we can programmatically and ubiquitously locate someone in terms of latitude.longitude based on their phone positions, but we can already (see Imity) see who is around a particular phone number. GPS will take that long to get put into cellphones because of battery life…

[Tags: foocampe06 second_life ]

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Web -1.0 is the successor to Web 2.0 unless we’re vigilant and refuse to allow our permission-free Web to be turned into pay-for-play, always-ID’ed, ask-before-you-post, 100%-terrorist-free, professionals-only tubes. [Tags: digital_rights ]

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Ed Yourdon has a long, thoughtful posting about Jimmy Wales’ keynote, proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize, not entirely jokingly. (He suggests putting him on a stamp as an alternative.)

I think Wikipedia is important enough that the suggestion is only somewhat absurd.We need one more milestone before we take the idea seriously. Maybe international editions of Wikipedia will get together and try to work out their differences. Hell, if they could even agree on how to draw the maps, Jimmy should get the prize.

[Tags: wikipedia wikimania2006]

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Mary Chimato who works in a medical library at SUNY Stonybrook gave a terrific presentation on how she introduced a wiki into her millieu. She reassured people that they could make no mistakes that couldn’t easily be undone. Sounds totally human. E.g., the staff training sessions — which everyone dreads — were Hawaiian themed parties. As people started using the “sandbox,” experimenting with the wiki, others read what they were writing. People discovered interests. People who hadn’t ever spoken found each other. Sounds just perfect. (They use twiki.)

Maureen Clements of NPR set up an internal wiki for the organization’s 750 employees. It started out for news folks, but as people heard about it, it’s gone corporate-wide. It does lots: Helps reporters find experts. Lists (and plays) pronunciations. Tracks previous guests. Briefing books. It’s designed also to help hosts who may have questions such as “How many Republican governors were elected in the last election.” [I hope she went to the Semantic Web presentation yesterday, where the question they used as an example was “How many female mayors of major cities are there?” In a closed system such as NPR’s, a Semantic Web approach makes tons of sense.]

[Great presentations.] [Tags: wikimania2006 libraries wikis wikipedia npr suny-stonybrook]

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Larry Lessig begins by citing John Philip Sousa’s concern in 1906 that the phonograph would end kids hanging around, singing the old songs together. Larry says he was right. A read-write culture was displaced by a read-only culture. [Paraphrasing, of course.] [The audio of LEssig’s talk is here.]

This is not just about cullture, he says. The Republican party started out believing in free labor. Not unpaid, but free to engage its capabilities as it wants. The return of read-write labor is key to Benkler’s Wealth of Networks and also to Wikipedia.

Same for politics where broadcast politics displaced read-write politics.E.g., the Dean campaign that encouraged people to explain their thinking in blogs.

The 20th Century was weirdly totalitarian: R/O culture, politics and labor.Massiv, massively powerful, controlled, read-only society. But, fortunately, that century is over. The 21st Century is the revival of the read-write.

There are two very new cultures being produced by the Internet. The first is a new kind of read-only culture that facilitates the buying and consumption of culture. Poster child: Apple I-Tunes. Trying to increasingly perfect the power of the copyright holder.

The second is a second culture in which people consume and create. E.g., Anime music video that reedits anime and sets them to music. Larry shows one. It’s a remix. [I worry about the emphasis on remixes. The examples are almost always trivial, even if delightful. Remixes of these sorts aren’t the issue. It’s the subtler absorption of cultural elements that’s the issue.]

Words are the Latin of our time, he says. The vulgar, democratic language is pictures, videos and music. [Which is why Larry focuses on those sorts of remixes.]

The law’s attitude to these two cultures is radically different. Copyright law doesn’t like the R/W culture. It loves the R/O culture. The law’s attitude is that every use makes a copy and thus requires permission. This is made worse by the desire to preserve the business model of the R/O culture. The laws and technology will kill the R/W culture unless there’s resistance.

How to resist? Larry’s first instinct was to litigate. He (we) lost 7-2 when the Supremes said Congress can do whatever it wants with copyright. Instead, Larry decided, we need to ignite a popular movement. We need to take two steps:

First, practice free culture.

Second, enable free culture. Make it possible everywhere, not just in the hacker’s den. Wikipedia is an example. Wikipedia shows that it’s possible.

There are lessons about how this extraordinary potential is possible. There is a proprietary instinct, but we’ve learned that freedom is a bigger, more important value. The Defense Dept. ended the cycle of autistic computing — smart machines that couldn’t communicate — by insisting that computers interoperate. Open, free standards facilitates competition and opportunity. We should remember that lesson as we praftice free culture.

But it’s not enough to build the infrastructure. We have to make it possible. There’s a clear and present danger to this freedom. When they build the locks to protect the R/O Internet, they will lock out the R/W Internet.

At the technical layer: Support free codecs. Support free software that enables free culture.

At the legal layer: Protect free culture. Larry points to Creative Commons as an example. Now there are 140 million link backs to CC licenses.

Larry praises Wikipedia but says he also is here to plea that Wikipedia does what it can to increase free culture. He points to two ways: First, help others spread the practice. He points to the PD-Wiki project (public domain wiki). It will launch first in Canada where a database of all published works is becoming available. From this will come, it’s hoped, a better list of what is and is not in the public domain.

Second, Wikipedians should demand a useable platform for freedom. Free culture products aren’t usually interoperable. We need a layer that facilitates interoperability of content enabling it to move among equivalent licenses. Equivalent = means the same thing. E.g., FDL = CC-BY-SA. Re-licensing would create an ecology of licenses. A market of licenses. The legal layer would become a commodity layer. No monopoly. No single source of failure if a court deems a particular license unworkable. License authors ought to add a compability clause that says that derivatives can be relicsensed under equivalent licenses. The Software Freedom Law Center could be the organization that is the center of this. Even if this isn’t the right platform, Wikipedia could be a strong force for establishing some platform for cultural freedom, says Larry.

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia larry_lessig copyright]

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I don’t know that anyone needs correcting on this point, but that won’t stop me…

Identity isn’t a continuum with anonymity at one end and documented, certified, authenticated ID on the other. It probably never was and it certainly isn’t online. There’s a third vertex: Pseudonymity. Pseudonyms online are not midway between anonymity and ID. They’re different in kind, but enough on the same plane that any discussion of anonymity and ID that does not include pseudonyms is likely to go wrong.

It’s hard to find an exact analog to this in the real world. Social roles aren’t really the same as pseudonyms. But that means that we have to be extra special careful to include pseudonyms in our thinking so we don’t port inappropriate real world schema into the new virtual world, especially since the porting is being done top down by the traditional fear-based organizations (big corps and governments). [Tags: digitalID id anonymity pseudonymity ]

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Brad Sucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has some new demos out, here and here. Plus, his band, Brad Sucks Live — just about inescapably pornographic in its implication — will be making a genuinely rare appearance at Riverpalooza August 12 in Ottawa. [Tags: bradsucks music mp3]

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Mario Sixtus of Handlesblatt has posted a video interview he did in which he asked me about Cluetrain, PR, ID, Web 2.0, etc. [Tags: mario_sixtus cluetrain marketing pr]

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It’s Earth Day for the Web…a day when we can all celebrate just how important the Web is to us. Each locality, site or business makes up its own way of celebrating.

Just two months and one day to go until September 22…

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Here’s the Couchsurfing mission statement:

CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance, and facilitate cultural understanding.

On June 27, they suffered a catastrophic crash and had no adequate backup. (Insert smug “tsk tsk” here.) You can read how the community not only rallied but created Couchsurfing 2.0 in the process… (Thanks to Mike O for the link.) [Tags: couchsurfing]

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