Mario Sixtus has posted a podcast of his interview of me from a couple of weeks ago. It’s about 15 mins long. (Mario has dubbed in his questions in German but has left my answers in English, so if you don’t speak German you can always play “Guess the question.”) BTW, I didn’t put my fears of digital ID very well, possibly because they’re unfounded and thus can’t be put well: The mere ability to demand hard, digital ID I’m afraid will result in a widespread “Don’t shop here if you don’t like it” attitude, not to mention the fears I mention about what will happen in totalitarian states.

Mario points out that Handelsblatt has posted the podcast under a Creative Commons license, which he thinks may be the first time a major German publisher has used CC. Whether it’s the first or just one of the first, I still say: Yay! [Tags: podcast pr creative_commons]

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Wikimania is coming to Boston, August 4-6. If you want to propose a paper or workshop for this global gathering of Wikipedians — and aren’t we all Wikipedians, after all? — go here and propose away. [Tags: wikipedia wikimania]

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Kevin Marks links together danah boyd, Suw Charman, Susan Crawford and Douglas Adams in a fine post about how little we know about what the Internet will be. [Tags: internet]

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Jeneane wonders whether there’s a more reasonably priced source for the sort of info industry analysts offer:

The major analyst firms either need to offer a price/platform for indies and new media folks, OR new media folks need to start indie analyst groups of their own, offering their findings at a price that’s at least sort of affordable, which is not $3K for a report.

Or even better, a wikipedia version of research and analysis compilations.

It’s an interesting question because the analyst companies sell their authority as much as their data — believe them when they say the size of the Asian bronzed shoe market will be $1.27 billion this year and $1.31 B next year. I wonder what it would take to have an Open Source Gartner not only with the same accuracy but with enough credibility that one could site it with confidence. [Tags: jeneane_sessum gartner wikipedia]

InformationWeek’s cover story this week is on the conflict of interests that plague the big research firms. The article is by Larry Greenmeier and Paul McDougall, and it airs stuff that needs airing. InformationWeek responds to responses here.

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Steve Johnson blogs about a Bill Clinton talk at Davos, and about the question Steve asked Bill Gates. Entertaining and perceptive, as usual. [Tags: steve_johnson bill_clinton bill_gates games davos]

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Science Roundup summarizes an article in Science:

Social networks are dynamic processes that evolve over time depending on the shared characteristics, activities, and affiliations of their members. In a Report in the 6 Jan 2006 Science Kossinets and Watts offered an empirical analysis of social network evolution in a large university community. Over the course of one academic year, the team compiled a registry of e-mail interactions between more than 43,000 students, faculty, and staff. In combination with encrypted information about personal attributes, as well as lists of classes taught and attended, the team assembled a quantitative picture of how the strength of personal interactions depends on similarities between the individuals and how the interactions change with time. The results show that at least in this particular environment, people were more likely to form ties with others when they had a shared “focus” such as a class that brought them together or a mutual acquaintance, but were less likely to interact solely on the basis of shared characteristics such as age or gender. Comparative studies of corporate or military networks could shed light on which features of network evolution are generic and which are specific to a given cultural, organizational, or institutional context. [Emphasis added]

(Science Mag only posts the abstract of the article for free.) (Thanks to Andrew Weinberger for the link.) [Tags: email social networks demographics]

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The OneWebDay site is up.

OneWebDay is a day to celebrate the Web and what it means to us.

Like Earth Day, it’s up to each locality — virtual or real-world — to come up with ways to celebrate. Perhaps on this first OneWebDay your community can set up wifi for a local school, hold workshops for newbies on how to use the Web, or collect online stories to capture part of your local history. Perhaps your company can sponsor an online gallery of creative works or connect with an unexpected part of the world. Better yet, invent your own way of celebrating, one that expresses the value of the Web to you and makes the world a little better…

OneWebDay.com provides a place to aggregate activities so we all can see what we’re doing. Go to the site to see other ways you or your company can help make OWD a success. Why, you can even learn the secret greeting!

OneWebDay is September 22.

Hats off to Susan Crawford for the idea and for organizing it. (Disclosure: I am on the OWD board.) [Tags: onewebday digital culture susan crawford]

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Ok, so that’s not quite the appropriate take-away from the new Pew Internet & American Life study. Its subtitle is more accurate:

The internet and email aid users inmaintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions

The first nine pages summarize the findings.

Here’s an almost-randomly chosen snippet to give you a taste of its flavor:

Robert Putnam argued in 2000 that people are seeing friends and relatives much less than they were in the mid-1960s. For example, family picnics decreased by 60% between 1975 and 1999, and card playing went down from an average of 16 times per year in 1981, to 8 times per year in 1999.

Yet evidence from the Social Ties survey show that the situation is not so dire. For one thing, we did not ask about picnics; we asked directly about social relations. This leads to a focus on social networks, whomever they include and wherever they are located. For example, friends and relatives are now spatially dispersed rather than concentrated in neighborhoods. The difficulty of traveling to get together may explain why picnics have declined as a way for friends and relatives to meet. Yet other ways of interacting have flourished, on- and offline.

Americans have an average of more than 200 relationships with friends, relatives, and acquaintances…

Lee Rainie of Pew says, “We worked with some terrific network sociologists to get this right and try to place it in the larger context of social change over the past generation.” Looks good. It’s even well-written, a real plus for a research report (but not a surprise for a Pew Internet report). [Tags: internet pew leeRainie]

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“…purity is an idea for a yogi or monk…
Well, I have dirty hands.
Right up to the elbows,
I’ve plunged them in filth and blood”
JP Sartre*

Google is going to censor results for Chinese users.

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, puts the problem well: “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

It’s a tough world. Most of what we do is morally mixed. The consequences aren’t unambiguously good and our intentions are never pure. Google has apparently gone through some genuine soul-searching. I know Andrew and have the highest respect for him; if you had the privilege of spending time with him, you would too.

So, I find myself torn. Doing the work of a totalitarian state is bad. Of course. But Google plans on noting on results pages when results have been censored; alerting Chinese users to the fact of censorship could have a positive political effect. Apparently Google also plans on having a link to the US-hosted version. And they won’t host user data on servers under Chinese jurisdiction so they won’t have to turn users over to the Chinese police.

That helps. But is it enough?

If forced to choose — as Google has been — I’d probably do what Google is doing. It sucks, it stinks, but how would an information embargo help? It wouldn’t apply pressure on the Chinese government. Chinese citizens would not be any more likely to rise up against the government because they don’t have access to Google. Staying out of China would not lead to a more free China.

I’m not sure I’m right. Maybe my assessment of the likely consequences is wrong. And the high ground has its appeal, not least of which is that it keeps my hands clean. But the Chinese government is a big gob of repression plopped onto the middle kingdom, spattering our clean white robes.

At least it shows once and for all that Google’s motto is just silly in a world as complex as this one.

Some other opinions:

Rebecca MacKinnon:

At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot further into the mud. Now let’s see whether they get sucked in deeper or whether they end up holding their ground.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch:

Oh, the irony. Less than a week after we hear that Google is ready to fight the US government in part to defend its users, now comes news that Google will cave into the Chinese government’s demands for its new Google China web site. However, the issues aren’t directly comparable. Moreover, while I’m no fan of Chinese censorship, I like some of the way Google is reacting to the demands. Come along, and we’ll explore the entire censorship situation in China, the US and some other places you rarely hear discussed, like France and Germany.

Ethan Zuckerman:

The devil’s in the details. And the attention taken to detail tells me that Google has thought long and hard about what they were doing and come up with a compromise. It’s a compromise that doesn’t make me happy, that probably doesn’t make most of the people who work for Google very happy, but which has been carefully thought through. And that, I think, gives some reason for optimism.

[Tags: google china]

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Zephyr Teachout and Britt Blaser, both veterans of the Howard Dean Internet campaign, reflect on how to fix what’s going wrong at the well-intentioned Since Sliced Bread contest. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is sponsoring the contest, offering $100,000 to the person who comes up with the best idea for improving the lives of working women and men. 22,000 ideas were submitted which “a group of diverse experts” winnowed to 70, a process some felt was too top down.

This is a fascinating case in which a bottom-up process is supposed to squeeze out a single winner, the contest is intended to advance the social good, and the reward includes a hefty chunk of change. [Tags: seiu zephyrTeachout brittBlaser]

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