Born Digital, a book by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser — my brilliant friends and colleagues at the Berkman Center — has just been published. Yay!

JP has posted some of the first reactions to the book. I can’t wait to read it.

[Tags: berkman digital_natives born_digital john_palfrey urs_gasser books ]

Scott Kirsner has posted his ten favorite worst predictions about the movies, drawn from his just-published book. My favorite of his favorite: Jack Valenti’s. (I missed Scott on Science Friday…)

[Tags: movies scott_kirsner ]

Fantastic Contraption is a free, simplified riff on the old Incredible Machine game. Your aim is to move a box into a zone by hooking together some wheels and sticks. It lacks the inventive motor elements of the older game (set the balloon to pop to lower the basket that has the mice that will cause the elephant to move onto the scale that flips the lighter that sets off the rocket, etc.), but its simplicity also works in its favor.

You may have a child that will love it. You might also. If not, there are bunches of other games on the site.

[Tags: games ]

Initiated and managed by three Swedes with a background in advertising and PR, Noko Jeans is our attempt to approach and get closer to North Korea, and it is our attempt to answer the question: is it possible to do what no one has ever done before? Is it possible to design, produce and import jeans from North Korea? [link]

The NoKo blog is here. It gives a peak at North Korea from a Swedish, jeans-making perspective.

[Tags: north_korea noko_jeans ]

I may get around to blogging about Michelle Obama’s speech. I’m still floored.

You can see the entire speech here. [Tags: obama michelle_obama politics dnc08 ]

Last night’s IRC chat party was fun. I’m going to set up a room again tonight, starting at 8pm EDT, so we can watch the Democratic convention together: irc://www.freenode.net/#democonvo. (If that link doesn’t work for you, you’ll have to download an IRC client. I use Chatzilla, an add-on to Firefox. Once you’ve installed it, plugging the URL into Firefox’s address bar should launch Chatzilla automatically.) (Dave Winer also had a chat going, at #dnc08.)

See you then!

[Tags: dnc campaign chat irc obama dnc08 ]

I love Twitter, but I’m wondering whether it’s the right tool for getting together to do a group-watch (we’ll laugh, we’ll cry) of the Democratic convention tonight. Would old-fashioned IRC be better?

I like IRC as a way of watching an event together. So, suppose I set up irc://www.freenode.net/democonvo tonight and opened it to anyone who wanted to join. As opposed to Twitter, the group would be smaller, it would consist of people who were there only to talk about the convention, and it would encourage more back and forth because the set of readers is the same as the set of potential writers. (With Twitter, the people you read don’t necessarily read you.)

On the other hand, Twitter brings together unexpected people who are highly unlikely to jump into any one IRC chat, especially mine. On Twitter, I’ll be able to read running commentary from Joe Trippi and Michael Turk (Democratic and Republican Net strategists). I can pretty well guarantee that neither will show up to an IRC chat that I throw.

So, I’m not sure what to do…

[Tags: twitter irc social_media politics ]

Dave Winer’s got an IRC going right now. He’s at the convention as a blogger…

WE magazine has launched with a set of articles by, and interviews with, a stellar set of folks, including Stephen Downes, Dan Gillmor and Ethan Zuckerman. You can read it online for free, or pay for PDF or a paper version.

[Tags: we_magazine media ]

I blogged yesterday about wanting a word processor that reflects better how we actually write. Islamoyankee in the comments suggested Scrivener, a Mac tool I tried once but didn’t take to, for whatever reason.

This morning, I took another look at it and found this paragraph on its home page, at the end of its product description:

Because Scrivener is about shaping chunks of text into a final typescript, Scrivener knows nothing of pages until it comes to exporting or printing and therefore does not have the page layout viewing features of modern word processor applications. So if you are just looking for an alternative to Word you might want to try Nisus Writer or Mellel. If you are drawn by Scrivener’s full screen mode but aren’t bothered about its large writing project management tools, try WriteRoom. If you came to this page because you have struggled with traditional word processors in trying to manage or finish a large writing project, try Scrivener by downloading the 30-day trial. And if after 30 days you decide that Scrivener isn’t the tool for you, be sure to check out the Links page for a list of alternative writing tools.

This is how a company acts when its confident of its product and is genuinely on the side of its users.

[Tags: scrivener marketing cluetrain ]

Declan McCullagh has the goods on Biden’s tech and Net policy record. It totally sucks and is completely out of step with Obama’s. Thankfully, Obama’s not appointing Biden as head of the FCC.

I like Biden as a VP pick. He’s prepared in case the unthinkable happens. He’s got some real values as a person. And I think he brings not only foreign policy experience but also some bluntness to the campaign. But, have I mentioned that his Net policy sucks?

[Tags: biden obama tech_policy net_neutrality ]

Brad Sucks is declaring his Music Video Cliché Contest to be a success. Hard to argue with the collected works…

[Tags: bradsucks music_videos humor ]

Yesterday afternoon, my assorted nieces and nephews clustered around the ol’ laptop, googling their name + the word “needs,” and reading aloud the amusing results.

Amusing!

[Tags: google games ]

Typewriters were terrible tools for writing drafts if only because they had no facility for crossing sections out. At least with a pen, you could make a quick line through an entire paragraph that failed.

Word processors still act as if we know what we’re writing. Oh, they’re obviously much better than typewriters, for which I have zero nostalgia. (”Ah, remember the month I spent locked in my room, typing the final draft of my dissertation? Sweet!”) Word processors let you swiftly delete failed paragraphs, let you undo mistakes and re-do mistaken mistakes, and awkwardly track revisions. But they’re not designed for writing when you’re unsure of what you’re writing.

When you’re writing something hard, you probably work the way you do with a music composition system. You try out some notes. You play them back. You make a change. You shave and fit the pieces together. The same when you’re writing words. You try out a phrase, a sentence, a transition, a motif. You see how that affects the words around it. You make a change elsewhere, and now you have to hear how it presses on the ideas, words, and rhythms around it.

Word processors don’t recognize that way of working. They treat drafts as continuous improvements, not as tentative attempts. They don’t let you toggle quickly between two versions of a paragraph, side by side or back and forth, so you can see how each works, the way you might weigh two photographs to see which one you want to keep.

I don’t have a set of features I want. I’m just saying that word processors don’t work the way we write.

[Tags: word_processors fantasyland ]

If McCain hadn’t become Karl Rove’s sockpuppet, this is what he might have said in response to the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate:

I congratulate my friend and colleague Joe Biden on his being selected as a vice presidential candidate. Joe and I have disagreed frequently over the years, and we disagree now on many of the important issues facing this country. But I’ve also worked with him, count him as a friend, and respect him as a capable man who loves the country he’s served for so many years.

That said, I remain convinced that the solutions Joe and his running mate are proposing are dangerous, and dangerously out of step with the American people. We’re going to keep on making that case up and down this great land, offering our own practical, down-to-earth solutions that will make a real difference in the lives of hard-working Americans.

McCain’s actual response, in full, from his Web site:

ARLINGTON, VA — Today, McCain spokesman Ben Porritt issued the following statement on Barack Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his running mate:

“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden. Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be President.”

[Tags: biden obama mccain politics democracy patriotism ]

Chet Edwards is the rumor of the day for Obama’s vp. Here he talks about how Democrats can win. He is very close to Obama in his thinking on this:

[Tags: chet_edwards obama politics ]

In an effort to counter Apple’s must-see Mac vs. PC ads, Microsoft is paying Jerry Seinfeld $10M to appear in Vista ads.

Yes, nothing proves you’re hip like hiring a retired, 1990s sitcom star.

Sure, I love Seinfeld repeats. But re-read my lips: Reeeee-peats. I think maybe the problem is that Microsoft, in its irked ire, is unable to see that on the Apple ads, even the PC guy — John Hodgman — is hip. Hodgman’s book, The Areas of My Expertise, is brilliant. Apple even gets cool guys to play the uncool guys.

On the other hand, Microsoft has hired Michael Gondry to direct the ads. Expect the Eternal Wait-times of the Spotless Mind?

[Tags: microsoft marketing seinfeld ]

Microsoft has launched a blog about the development of Windows 7

Windows 7 codename: “Do-Over”?

Here’s how the DMCA has worked so far: A copyright holder (henceforth “publisher”) notices an instance (henceforth “video”) of what it thinks is a violation of its copyright on a site such as YouTube (henceforth “YouTube”). The publisher sends YouTube a notice that the video infringes copyright. YouTube then has a choice: It can disagree that the video infringes, and leave it up, or it can take it down and let the video’s poster know that it’s done so. If YouTube chooses Door Number One, it becomes liable if a court decides the video really was infringing. So, inevitably, YouTube takes it down. The video’s poster can then counter-notify YouTube that the video is not infringing. (In this one example, YouTube’s lawyers will actually take a look to decide whether they think it infringes or not. But YouTube is very special in this regard.)

On paper, this seems reasonable. And maybe if the whole thing were done with paper, it would be. But the claims of infringement can be compiled digitally — publishers like Viacom automatically generate lists of every instance of, say, “jon stewart” in a video’s title and submit lists of over a hundred thousand URLs, obviously without having actually reviewed any of the videos — while the response is analog, and thus hard, time-consuming, and risky.

Now there’s been some good news.
A federal judge has ruled that before a publisher submits a DMCA takedown notice to a site like YouTube, some human being has to look at it to decide if it actually infringes, or if it is protected by Fair Use. If this ruling is maintained, it will help re-balance the insanely pro-publisher, pro-protection, pro-restriction copyright regime by taking away the incentive to take down anything and everything that looks like it might maybe perhaps upset a publisher’s delicate sensibilities.

PS: Did you remember to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect your online rights? [Tags: copyright dmca youtube copyleft eff ]

There’s an excellent story on the front page of the Boston Globe today, by Carolyn Johnson, about scientists who just go ahead and blab about their data before the village elders have given them permission.

Yay.

The article says:

Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up.

“Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn’t want to blab to the whole world about why it’s interesting,” said Michael Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not post “all the gory details of what someone is working on, because I don’t want my grad students necessarily to be scooped by someone else.”

Laub is just saying what everyone knows.1 But the fact that everyone knows it and we’re ok with it is a sign of the problem with the system: The system we want maximizes knowledge and innovation, but the system we have swerves in order to preserve credit for individuals. From the discovery of the shape of DNA to AIDS research, we’ve seen some of the problems with the competitive model of science. But we also routinely see the benefits, as scientists work overtime in order to get credit for a discovery.

And yet, the mix seems wrong. The competitive model made more sense when it was more difficult to share data anyway. The collaborative model is proving itself in unexpected places. It’s clear that a mixed model works — some competitive, some collaborative — but it’s not clear how far we can push the slider toward the collaborative side. My hunch, and my hope, is that it’s way further than we would have thought, especially since experience shows that the satisfaction of being recognized as a continuously generous member of a network can at least equal that of authors of intermittent, officially-sanctioned publications.

[Tags: science open_science collaboration ]

1I’m totally guessing about his, but I suspect that Laub actually talked with Johnson, the reporter, mainly about the virtues of open science, but noted that his group doesn’t give away absolutely all of its data…and it was only the last part of the sentence that made it in. As I say, I’m totally making this up, but the quotation had that sort of ring to it.

#8567 If iTunes — one of the least intuitive user interfaces around — isn’t transferring podcasts onto your iPod (which, except for the wheel, is a UI so badly designed that your first instincts are almost wrong):

1. Click on your iPod in the “Devices” section of iTunes

2. Click on the “Podcasts” tab in the window on the right. (See here for instructions and a screenshot.)

3. Click on “Sync”

4. Click on “Apply” in the bottom right.

5. Smite your forehead and say “D’oh!”

(I’m not proud of this. It just never occurred to me that syncing podcasts would be off by default. And I had always clicked through the very top level of the device, not recognizing it as a preference pane. Hence the self-inflicted D’oh!.)

#8568 If you are using Firefox and want to quickly scroll among the many, many, many tabs you’ve accumulated, install the add-on All In One Gestures and set the mouse wheel preference so that you can then:

1. Position your mouse cursor over any tab.

2. Spin the wheel away from you.

3. Watch the tabs fly by.

4. Spin the wheel towards you.

5. Watch the history of your tabs pass before your eyes.

4. Smite your forehead and say “D’oh!” [Tags: tips itunes firefox ]

Here’s an animated explanation of how humans spread across the planet. (Thanks for the link, Greg!)

[Tags: science anthropology genetics ]