Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO and holder of 700 patents, is coming to Harvard to give a talk this Wednesday, at 11-12, in the Maxwell Dworkin Building (map), Lessin Auditorium (G115). At 2:30 2:15, he’s going to come to the Berkman Center (map) for an informal discussion. I’m moderating it and I plan on asking him about his critique of the End to End architecture of the Internet. Both events are open to the public.

See you there!

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I’m starting up this year’s Web of Ideas discussion series at the Berkman Center, and our first guest will be David Isenberg. I’ll interview him about the current telco situation and how to keep the Internet open and free, something David has been thinking about for a long time. There’ll be open discussion, the event is open to everyone, and I think there will be pizza. It’ll be sometime in the early evening on September 14 at the Berkman Center at Harvard, in Cambridge, MA. Details to follow… [Tags: WebOfIdeas]

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I ended up spending a fair amount of time with Josh Kinberg at foo camp. His FireANT — at the attractive URL http://www.AntiSnotTV.net/— aggregates and plays video feeds quite nicely. It looks highly useful, even in beta.

Glenn Fleishman has started using LookLeap instead of TinyUrl (one of my favorites) because he finds it “a little more transparent” because LookLeap lets you look up the shortened urls to see where they take you. In fact, simply adding “/look” to LookLeap’s short url takes you to a page that tells you where you’re going. Plus, the domains are human-readable.

For example, here are some versions of the Wikipedia page on “Abbreviation”

Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation

TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/c3eq3

LookLeap: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2

LookLeap info page about the LookLeap Url: http://lookleap.com/en.wikipedia.org/a2/look

Note: With either LookLeap or TinyUrl, the links you create will only work so long as the LookLeap and TinyUrl sites remain up and working. [Tags: fireant lookleap tinyurl GlennFleishman utilities aggregators video]

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We used to believe that the world was divided into those who believe the truth and those who don’t. Our job was to convert them, kill them, or let them live their lives peacefully unaware they were about to plummet into an eternity of fire for believing the wrong things.

Then we were able to communicate at the speed of light rather than at the speed of wind, so we learned more about other cultures. At least some of us grudgingly concluded that those other people were entitled to their contrary beliefs. The world, we admitted, was unsatisfyingly relativistic and we attempted the impossible task of believing that beliefs for which we were willing to die were no better than their contradictions. Different strokes for different belief systems.

Then the Internet happened and the world fell into conversation. It’s no longer a matter of getting reports back on the strange beliefs of distant lands — “Why, in China crickets are considered to be smart and monkeys to be dumb…Believe it or not!” — but an immediate awareness that we’re all living within a single conversation space. We may not actually be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but we at least know that what’s being said in one corner of the Web is being refracted elsewhere. And we know that we can pick up the Skype phone and actually talk with a Communist. Where there aren’t actual conversations, there is now the constant awareness of the potential for conversation.

There is a big difference between a relativistic world in which contrary beliefs assert themselves and a conversational world in which contrary beliefs talk with one another. In the relativistic world, we resign ourselves to the differences. In the conversational world, the differences talk. Even though neither side is going to “win” — conversation is the eternal fate of humankind — knowledge becomes the negotiation of beliefs in a shared world. What do we need to talk through? What can’t we give up? What do we believe in common that seems so different? What should we just not talk about? These are the questions that now shape knowledge.

Knowledge is not the body of beliefs that needs no further discussion. Knowledge is the neverending conversation. And much of that conversation is precisely about what we can disagree about and still share a world.

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The wikiwyg demo from SocialText is getting close to the way you’d want a wiki to work. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the company.) [Addendum:] Adina Levin of SocialText points out in the comments that Wikiwyg is an open source javascript library… [Technorati tags: wikis SocialText]

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Fanastic post by danah on her findings looking at 500 random blogs with an eye towards the differences in how men and women link. One finding: The fact that links are untyped — they don’t tell you anything except that A is linking to B — favors the male pattern of having many weak ties. [Technorati tags: danahBoyd gender]

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Incidentlog.com has added Boston to its coverage, once a week mapping police reports of crime onto Google Maps. It’s easy to imagine this system being then integrated with more information about the crimes, presenting aggregated data in order to spot trends, etc.

While it’s always good to see this type of integration, I had trouble with the UI: I couldn’t get it to show any Boston incidents except what seem to be all of this year’s fatalities even though there’s a pulldown that lists about a dozen crime categories. Maybe I’m not doing it right. [Tags: gis boston]

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Liz Lawley found a feature of Google that I can’t reproduce, but she’s got the screen capture to prove it. Maybe it’s in beta, or maybe Google likes Liz more than it likes me. Anyway, for a search Liz did that had 34 million returns, after the fifth item Google suggested an altered search query and listed the results for it. Sounds like it could be useful. (And Liz’s screen capture is much clearer than my description.) [Tag: google]

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From “Teens and Technology” by The Pew Internet & American Life Project, as summarized by the Center for Media (taken verbatim):

About 21 million teens use the Internet and half of them say they go online every day

51% of online teens live in homes with broadband connections

81% of wired teens play games online, which is 52% higher than four years ago

76% of online teens get news online, 38% higher than four years ago

43% have made purchases online, 71% higher than four years ago

31% use the Internet to get health information, 47% higher than four years ago.

Girls are the power users:

97% of girls 15-17 have used instant messaging, compared to 89% of younger boys and girls and 87% of older boys

57% of older girls have ever sent a text message compared 40% of older boys 51% of older girls have bought something online

79% of girls 15-17 have gone online to search for information about a school they might attend, vs. 70% of older boys.

Older girls are more likely to search for information on health topics both mundane and sensitive, for spirituality or religious information, and for entertainment topics like favorite sports or movie stars or TV programs

The only problem with these numbers: Marketers are going to see that only 43% of teens have made online purchases and will therefore put them in the crosshairs.

[Note: I can’t find a working link to the Center’s report.] [Technorati tags: pew teenagers]

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It’s no secret that Technorati‘s response time has been spotty as the site has tried to keep up with the number of blogs and with its own traffic. Dave Sifry this morning has posted what seems to be a frank report on Technorati’s atempt to improve search and index times. Or course, it helps that the news is good. Dave reports that the median time between the moment you post and the moment it’s indexed at Technorati is now five minutes, which is impressive. It’s also crucial to Technorati since the site has two, related benefits: It indexes weblogs and it gives you a picture of what’s being talked about now. So, congrats to the Technorati crew — still providing all this value for free — and thanks to Dave for living the transparent business lifestyle. (And, yes, I am hugely biased because I’m on the advisory board and am proud to count myself as a FOD: Friend/Fan of Dave.)

Also, Dave blogs that Technorati now filters by language, which should be a useful feature both for those using Technorati as a search tool and those using it as an analytic tool. [Technorati tag: technorati]

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