Barbara van Schewick asks at a Berkman lunch whether we need network neutrality rules that prevent carriers from preferring or excluding particular applications or content. She is today going to present the theoretical case for network neutrality rules. (Here is her paper.)

Network providers say that they don’t want to discriminate against applications, so “network neutrality rules are just regulation in search of a problem.” She says there are three questions you need to ask to make the case: 1. Is there a threat of discrimination? 2. If there is, what’s the impact? 3. What’s the impact of regulation on social welfare? She is going to argue that there’s a real threat, it’s more common than often recognized, and the cost in reduced innovation is significant. Fostering competition is not the solution. “Network neutrality rules are the only possible and sensible remedy” to this problem, she will argue.

The potential impact, she says, is on independent application development. That’s important because (she says) the Internet is a “general-purpose technology” and thus has the potential to be used in many places in the economy. Without apps, the Internet has little value precisely because it’s so generic. So, app development “is key to the promise of the economic growth.”

She concludes that there are real costs to introducing network neutrality regulation, but the benefits outweigh them. She says there are still important questions — e.g., what should the rules look like, what are the exceptions, etc. — but “the case for network neutrality is made.”

Q: (David Isenberg) Don’t we really need structural separation (the separation of the wires from the content – e.g., SBC would be forbidden from offering any content or apps), not just network neutrality? Neutrality was the compromise to avoid structural separation, but we’ve seen over the past decade that the carriers will do everything they can to avoid neutrality because they have the opportunity to make billions and billions of dollars at the expense of the country and economy. Just saying “network neutrality” is the wrong thing from a pragmatic and political point of view. [Much discussion ensues.]

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Go to Google Base and search for “gold’s gym” (no quotes required). (Clicking here will perform the search for you.) The first entry, at least today, is from Mark Dionne who provides Gold’s corporate address, information that Gold’s Gym doesn’t like to make public, perhaps to ignore letters from unhappy customers such as Mark. [Tags: google marketing]

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Brian Millar, knowing my continuing interest in unfortunate urls, points to:

www.penisland.com

www.therapistfinder.com

The canonical example remains www.lumberjacksexchange.com, which, unfortunately, is no longer up.

Then there was the local movie theater in Great Barrington, Mass., named The TriPlex which for a while had the url www.triplex.com and got lots of visitors who were not interested in when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is playing.



[Tags: humor]

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I just watched a webcast of a very informal talk given by Alexander Macgillivray, Senior Product and Intellectual Property Counsel at Google, at Oxford, teleconnected to the Berkman Center. A couple of points arose:

1. Alex says that Google is not becoming an ISP. It has wired a local pizza place and a local gym, and has put in a bid to wire SF (where wire=go wireless). It’s buying up dark fiber for its own internal use. But it’s not going to become an ISP. [Too bad. Somone has to save the Internet. Might as well be Google.]

2. He was asked how frequently Google is asked by governments to give up information. He carefully said that he’s not allowed to say, but it’s less than other big companies. He also noted that the law prevents him from giving a trustworthy answer to this question.

3. Jonathan Zittrain checked the Google user license which turns out to say that if Google is sold, users will be notified that their data is going into new hands, but there is no language giving users the ability to opt out. Alex said that he’d raise that back at HQ.

4. I asked him whether “Don’t be evil” translates to “Trust Sergey and Larry,” and whether that scales. He answered that Google’s culture is strong. But that’s exactly the problem. “Don’t be evil” only makes sense in an homogeneous culture. It’s great that Google has morality in mind, but the “Don’t be evil” slogan makes it sound like it’s clear what’s good and what’s evil. How about “Try to make the world better,” or “Be aware” or “Muddle through”? Just thinking out loud… [Tags: google berkman oxford]

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From the press release:

The Great Wiki Raid of ’05 begins at 12:01 A.M. 31 October. For 24 hours futurists from around the world will mount a “knowledge assault” on Wikipedia.org, the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia. Their goal is simple: to improve public knowledge about the field of futures studies.

Cool idea. (Thanks to Library Stuff for the link.) [Tags: wikipedia]

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In the lefthand column, I have a link to my disclosure statement, a practice I recommend. But, although I’m honest in it, it doesn’t really get at the truth.

For example, I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. But that’s not the relevant fact. Yes, I’ll make some money if Technorati goes public or gets bought. I’m not sure how much, but not enough to consciously affect my behavior. What does affect my behavior and disposes me to like Technorati, despite their flaws, is that some of the people who work there are my friends. Even then, I wouldn’t knowingly lie or go out of my way to mention the company. But I like helping my friends, even in tiny ways. The possibility of making some money actually serves as an inhibitor: Before I post something about Technorati, I think about my motives. (And, yes, I generally add a disclosure statement in brackets.)

So, in the interest of transparency, I propose a standardized Disclosure Code to get at the actual influences that affect one’s blogging. Entries would include:

Anyone know how to submit a proposal for an ISO standard?

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First, read Jeneane‘s prose-poem, We used to bleed here.

Then go to the Hemorrhoids Tips page and read the list of helpful information for hemorrhoid suffers.

Two points:

1. The hemorrhoid page might want to refine its search string since it seems to be getting a feed of anything with “bleed” in it.

2. Congratulations, Jeneane, on having your poetry published in the prestigious literary journal, Hemorrhoidal Tips :) That’s gotta be a first.

(Thanks to Euan for the link. Plus, he has a PDF capture in case they fix their query.) [Tags: JeneaneSessum EuanSemple TheObvious poetry]

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David Berlind suspects Microsoft muscle and money is behind the official opposition to the Commonwealth’s standardizing on the OpenDoc format. And David makes the right point bluntly:

All Microsoft must do to prove its point — that Massachusetts has some anti-Microsoft agenda designed to keeps its products off its procurement lists — is call Massachusetts’ bluff. The company doesn’t have to lift one engineering finger. All it must do is issue a press release announcing that it will support for ODF.

Call, raise or fold, Microsoft. [Tags: microsoft DavidBerlind opendoc]

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us spoke twice at the Berkman Center yesterday. I blogged the first session, but I was moderating the second so I couldn’t. Both sessions I thought were excellent: Joshua is a low signal-to-noise communicator, he’s working on important issues, and I find his point of view unpredictable (which is a good thing).

Here’s some of what I thought was especially interesting. (Warning: Miscellaneous list ahead:)

Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.

Delicious is not going to go after the enterprise market. Instead, eventually Joshua will make an open source version available. I was surprised by this since I’ve been talking about tagging with a fair number of large companies who are excited about it and would buy a version of Delicious for internal use. Joshua thinks he couldn’t charge enough. I think they’d pay substantial sums for it.

Joshua’s elevator pitch says that Delicious is about remembering stuff. I continue to think its success is due to its social nature. The disagreement is one of emphasis only. But if I were his marketing vp, I’d tell him to market the tagstreams, not the bookmarks or the tags. Of course, I have no data supporting my view, but I was never that sort of marketing vp (i.e., reality-based).

The rate of tag spam seems incredibly low: A couple of incidents a week. (Tag spam means someone tags a page with hundreds or thousands of tags so that people will come to it.) In part, said Joshua, that’s because tag spam brings you no google juice.

He is not using stemming software that recognizes “blog,” “blogging” and “blogs” all have the same stem in part because there is meaning to the variants and in part because he hasn’t found any that’s good enough.

A little thing: I learned last night that if you use the tag “for:someone,” that bookmark is sent to the Delicious user with the name “someone.”

By the way, the evening session will be available as a podcast sometime soon. I’ll let you know. [Tags: delicious JoshuaSchachter berkman tagging]

Beth Kanter did an excellent job live-blogging the evening discussion. Thanks, Beth!

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Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us is giving a lunchtime talk. His presence has sold out the small conference room at the Berkman Center so we’ve moved to a bigger room.

What follows are paraphrases of what he said; I am certain not only to have omitted much but to have gotten stuff wrong, so before you get pissed at Joshua for saying x, you might want to check that he in fact didn’t say y and I said he said x.

He built delicious in 2003 to manage his own links. He had been using a text file, but twenty entries into it he had already introduced a tag into it.

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

The Chinese firewall blocks delicious now.

Hard core tech pages have gone from 25% to 17% over the course of this year. “So interests are starting to broaden.”

Q: How would you describe delicious to a layperson?


A: It’s a way to remember stuff. Links initially but we’re adding some new types.

Q: How do you improve performance, i.e., latency time?


A: We’re continually upgrading. At times scrapers/spiders are half the load.

Q: Delicious is aggressively without a user interface, so I think of it as a pipe instead of as a consumer destination…


A: I’ve finally hired people who have a different sense of user design than I do. We’ve done a round of UI testing — the one-way mirror, etc. That was an entirely terrifying day. Once they figured out the point and got through the URL, people like the interface. It does what it does without a lot of jokey stuff, etc.

The API: People do get value out of it, but it’s also a political statement that it’s your data. Plus I’m lazy.

Q: What’s the financial model?


A: The same as any other advertising-backed discovery engine, like Google. The people who are using it are paying us with information. Ten times the number of people are on the site but not signed in than those who are signed in.

Q: What about the August spike on Alexa?


A: Everyone had it. Don’t know why.

If I had imported the categories out of DMOZ, people would have said “Screw this” and would have left. Tagging is the easiest thing people could do and get any signal out of it all. People tag things “read later” which is useful to them but not to others.

I’ve spent too much time working with fuzzy models of the world to need discrete taxonomies. There’s no such thing as a perfect categorization. There is value in controlled vocabularies, but that doesn’t really map to the task. I’m not trying to categorize the web but helping people find stuff later.

Q: I found people because only 4 of us were using the “Africa” tag. How about making that more explicit?


A: I wrote the code to do that but it wasn’t pleasing. It tended to be dominated by people who have more tags overall.

Q: Is this compatible with the Semantic Web?


A: It’s easy to express your tags in RDF. That’s easy. Doing OWL is as hard as everything else is, namely, impossibly hard.

Q: What’s the infrastructure?


A: Mason (?), SQL [did he say “mySQL”?], lots and lots of replicas of the database for scaling, which isn’t good. The data still fits on a single disk. The search engine is a full text store and the recommendation engine is a database I wrote by hand (BerekelyDB).

Q (me): Which are you going to push, the individual or social uses?


A: You won’t use it if it’s not useful to you. But we’ll put in more social structure. Group tags are coming — tags that are lightly permissioned. You’d tag it as for a group, e.g., “groupname: tag.” (Example: nptech, a tag used by people in the non-profit tech field.) In the case of people collectively organizing around a tag, I think you want to amplify that. We’re trying to put in privacy now; it’s a little bit of a challenge to do and keep it fast.

I worry about systems that stay in stealth mode. There’s stuff you’re not learning. We generally push code out to the live site 2-3/week.

Q: Say more about group tags and privacy…


A: Items can be private. If it’s tagged for you or your group you’ll be able to see them. The items won’t be visible (in order to avoid problems with totalitarian governments.)

There are 8 people at Joshua’s company now.

Q: Why “tags” instead of “keywords” in coming up with the terminology?


A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don’t see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

Q: (me) Will we see typed tags, e.g., for events you get a field for time and a field for place?


A: I would like to store more rich datat types but that won’t happen immediately, e.g. contacts and events. You can make a date tag now: “date._____” There’s stuff about the url, stuff about the post, stuff that belongs to you. E.g., if you bookmark an Amazon url. I could go get the bookcover, the price, etc. Then how do you represent them. We have to figure out how to do that once we’ve got performance up.

Q: As delicious scales, certain tags become meaningless. E.g., the “china” feed is pretty useless. But if I could specify subsets or groups…


A: You’d create a group and let people in. It will be implemented as a tag, so you could get a feed of (say) “berkman” and “china.” (With your inbox you can map tags, i.e., this person’s “china” is that person’s “asia.”) We have something called “the nework” coming; I originally called it “friends” but that was somewhat creepy. You identify people as being in your network and get feeds from them. [A group will be an established set of people who opt in. A network is a set of people you designate; they will not know they’re a member of your network. I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he’s been added as a contact “I want to rip my face off.”]

I’m not trying to build up the delicious community. There are plenty of communities.

Almost no one subscribes to a person/tag. Most subscribe either to a person or a tag. So, if you bookmark something and someone else has notes (nee “extended”) on that thing, you’ll be able to see them in your inbox. (“Inbox” is badly named, Joshua says.)

About a third of people who create accounts never come back.

Q: Do people use ISBNs as tags?


A: Not many. Amazon is one of the top bookmarked things. The number one bookmarked site is delicious itself.

Q: Tag spam?


A: In general it’s not that big a deal. Every couple of days, and they pop right out as outliers [or as “outliars”? :)]

Q: Are you building systems to monitor the trends of what people are doing?


A: Right now it’s not hard to identify the outliers. It’s not our focus. But my background is in analyzing bulk data.

Q: How about letting your users see that data?


A: I’m generally wary of this. If I publish the most clicked-on list, then it becomes a high score list that people will try to get on.

Q: Do you think there is a niche for something that is delicious but with more structured data?


A: That’s faceted classification and there are other people doing it.

[Tags: berkman JoshuaSchachter delicious]

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