Happy New Year to all! I'm starting the new year under the weather, where the weather is defined in this case as juniper pollen in the South Central Texas air, clogging sinuses as a result of viral exploits of weakened defenses. We're spending New Year's Day at our house at Inks Lake, which is blissful though unexciting.

I'm going to chant this mantra for a while: 2004 will be better. We will make it so.

Have a great day! More soon.

Bruce Sterling and I are having our annual "state of the world" talk on the WELL. Join us! (If you're not a member of the WELL, you can send questions to inkwell-hosts at well.com; they'll be posted. [Link]

The Internet has always been "very transitional." Stuff just booms and blooms and collapses in there, there are vogues and rumors and moral panics. I suspect that the deep driving forces are social and ethnic and civilizational now, it's no longer a matter of sort-of engineering the hubs to be smarter or dumber, or sticking in spam
guards and security patches. The driving forces are things like vast batallions of Chinese and Indian software engineers who are discovering that this stuff can be bent to their own civilizational purposes.

Ethan Zuckerman's built an interesting statistical analysis tool that looks at Amazon book sales for a specific keyword. [Link] Ethan explains the thinking behind the tool in his blog, here.

While Amazon customers are sufficiently interested in other countries to purchase 10,383 titles a day, worth $245,342.76, this interest pales in comparison with their interest in dieting. Amazon customers purchase 10,992 titles on dieting, with a sales value of $150,967.19. Lest you find that figure too heartening, let me point out that the 10,992 diet books are the result of a single search for the keyword "diet", while the 10,383 books on foreign countries are the result of 183 separate searches summed together. Clearly, the best way to get people to pay attention to my research would be to write a diet book. Keep your eyes peeled for the "Johann Galtung Foreign News Flows Diet Guide", appearing on bookshelves soon.

Adina Levin posted a note about the discussions between Honoria and I re. esthetics of social networks and software. Adina notes some criteria. Honoria and I have been looking at three aspects of the subject:

• social networks that form for esthetic purposes (e.g. mail art and network art)
• esthetics represented in the visualization of social networks
• an esthetic of social experience (e.g. harmonious and productive group-forming)

John Shirley, the author most readily held accountable for the instigation of cyberpunk as a literary explosion within a sleepy science fiction genre, has just started a blog, and it's a doozy. [Link]

That's how scary Bush/Ashcroft can be: they're scaring the conservatives. The piece is called Quarantining Dissent and it seems that Bush's secret service has done something unprecedented (and therefore issuing from the President or his staff)--when Bush is in town to make an appearance they have required local govt to restrict people who are protesting to "free speech zones" which are sometimes a third of a mile and more from the Bush event. A lady and her five year old girl were arrested for protesting too close to Bush and refusing to leave--the cops *separated* mother and daughter and took the weeping child away in a separate squad car. One man popped up with an antiBush sign in the midst of a pro-Bush rally and was arrested--police said "yes sir it is the content of your sign that is the problem". They moved him two hundred yards away--and that wasn't enough! "The protest zone kept moving" he said. Strom Thurmond junior pursued prosecution of this gentleman who is now in line to get a 5000 dollar fine and six months in jail just for exercising his constitutional rights. Just for being there--he was not disorderly. Some believe that they're using this case, which was in South Carolina, as a test case in order to establish a precendent, in a conservative state, to control dissent. An anti-terrorist information center spokesmen--presumably a govt employee--said that protesters protesting the war against terror (Iraq), are committing terrorism. "...a protest against that [the war] is a terrorist act." According to a senate report the FBI's "belief [was that] dissident speech and association should be prevented because they are incipient steps toward the possible ultimate comission of an act which might be criminal."...Suppression of free speech rights is unlawful and *that* is what is criminal here. The precedent of creating "free speech zones" is very dangerous indeed. It's a short, short step from there to totalitarian media control. . .

O'Reilly's Emergent Democracy Forum morphed into the Digital Democracy Teach-In, a name change that emphasizes the tutorial aspect of the event. If you spend time at the intersection of democracy and technology, this event is your cup of stout.-

Jim Cashel of Online Community Report interviewed Ross Mayfield about wikis, which are web systems for collaboration in relatively simple text environments which, as Ross says, "are deceptively simple, yet extremely flexible." Ross is CEO of SocialText, a company that makes social software for the enterprise. They've been evolving a wiki version that's easy to use and has rich features. I use SocialText wikis to organize and manage projects, and they're very effective once people get used to the idea that they really are simple to use. The simplicity actually throws people who are used to complex software packages. [Link]

They are also cool because they are the antithesis of traditional enterprise software with its top-down design the imposes process, ontology and structure upon users. By giving users the power to create, link and form groups it serves the domain of business practice, the unstructured collaboration that leverages informal networks. A wiki can serve group activities quickly, so a project can begin with conversation and prototyping instead of waiting for a tool to be created or implemented. Work done in a wiki creates its own usable archive, rather than requiring a side-activity or having designated experts determine what is of value. The bottom-up approach also produces a dense link structure that has its own emergent patterns, with the best content and expertise rising to the top, to inform decisions based on what your organization actually knows.

Tim O'Reilly blogged his Digital Democracy Teach-In, noting that he's "tried to put together an event that helps spread the word about what the digital democracy pioneers are doing." Mitch Ratcliffe and I, who are editing a book for O'Reilly on the same subject, are on the organizing committee and will be at the event. Other people presenting include Wes Boyd of Moveon.org, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, Joi Ito... this promises to be a great event for activists.

Kevin Marks was telling a bunch of us in social software discussions how important Friedrich Hayek's thinking had been, and since then I've had a too-low priority note in the back of my brain to look into Hayek's work. Forunately I've just stumbled onto a Boston Globe article clarifying the value of Hayek's thinking, which wasn't widely accepted in Hayek's time, the mid-20th century – but is like a road map for 21st century thinking. Though he was an economist, he theorized that the brain's activity is emergent, "arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals." And he understood the problem of knowledge management:

Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."

The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."

As one of the "commons crowd" he refers to, I'm blown away by Adam Thierer's stunning cluelessness in his TechKnowledge Newsletter piece about "Howard Dean's Plan for the Internet." He complains that, by suggesting that the Internet be kept free and open for all to use, we're guilty of "collectivist" thinking that opposes free markets and property rights. He also notes that we're guilty of the worst possible sin - advocating democratic rule. He feels that radio spectrum should not be open to all, but should be regulated as a "market," and Larry Lessig notes the fallacy here:

Cato apparently believes it is a loss if the FCC doesn't get the chance to establish and regulate a "market" in spectrum; they like the idea of more middlemen, and hence more overhead, for innovators and technologists to negotiate over before they bring their products to market. Or at least, Cato's supporters (like Murdoch) like that picture best -- because with such a powerful and successful lobby throughout Washington, they'll be in a good position to "guide" this market best.

But test your own views: Think about the market for newspapers. In principle, we could imagine creating a property right called "the right to publish a newspaper" which the government would auction off in a particular market. Then people who wanted to publish a newspaper would not only have to compete in the market of newspapers, but also in the market for the right to publish a newspaper. I can understand the theory that says that such a "market" might improve efficiency. But I don't believe that theory is correct. I think one market -- the market in newspapers -- is quite enough. Nothing would be gained by adding another on top.

Isn't that different, you ask? Wouldn't a "property right" to publish a newspaper violate the First Amendment. Indeed it would -- and so too does much of spectrum regulation, as Benkler and I argued (subscription required) half a decade ago.

Joi Ito describes the blogging panel he sat on at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I think we all agreed that the ability for blogs to talk with and become one with the audience was key." There's some good ablout blogging in here, like Loic Le Meur explaining that blogging is like "open sourcing" himself. [Link]

What was interesting was the number of people from the mass media in the audience who still seemed to think that blogs were either just poor quality news or that bloggers were just wannabe journalists. One person from a newspaper said that she thought blogs would just become incubators for journalists. I (emotionally) asserted that the mass media and blogs were not the same. Many bloggers (such as myself) are blogging, not for the money, but for a passion which embodies what I believe is part of the heart and soul of journalism. We are not encumbered by the pressures of advertising, marketing and the burden of having to sell print media. It's insulting to think that all bloggers just want to be journalists for print media. I pointed out that big media had a role and that their ability to protect their journalists from litigation and to fund particularly expensive investigations and stories was something we can't do, but the notion that we're just little versions of them was absurd.

Wolf Blitzer, discussing the self-reinforcing character of political polls and reportage, made a comment that had me chuckling. I wonder if he heard himself? The comment: "What we report almost has a tendency to be believed by people."

I've spent most of the last year working with IC² Institute here in Austin on a project called Wireless Future. We recently published a well-received report on Austin's Wireless Future, and we're following that up with a national conference March 12-16. I urge you to register for the conference now if you're coming, because the price escalates from $195 to $225 on February 1st. Kevin Werbach delivers the opening presentation, Howard Rheingold is the keynote, and we have other great people including Cory Dcotorow, David Weinberger, David Isenberg, Col. Dave Hughes, and hopefully you! [Link]

Mitch Ratcliffe and Britt Blaser have posted insights about the Dean campaign's recent primary losses and Clay Shirky's comments in his post "Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?" Clay has followed up with a post explaining that he wasn't dismissing the use of social software, just trying to understand why the campaign didn't sustain its apparent success in establishing early leads in the polls. My thought is that the campaign did very well using social software where it would be most effective - bringing people on board, creating a community of supporters, raising funds. However the campaign didn't organize effectively on the ground, and that's what mattered most in the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. In retrospect I don't think it was a good idea to bring 3000 strangers into Iowa to solicit support – Kerry focused more on locals, and made sure they had local support to get people to the meetings.

Whatever the case, it's clear that Dean still values the online campaign tools and will continue to use 'em. The Deanspace team's still working away. Social software and Internet communities promise to bring us closer to democracy by bringing more and more citizens to civic engagement. (Not everybody wants democracy - someone was telling me today that we are a republic and should hope to stay that way. Is a republic more practical and scaleable than participatory or direct democracy? Something to discuss....)

dana boyd posted a little diatribe about the knew social network site Orkut, a new Google project that feels like a beta test of concept and functionality to me. Marc Canter says he was banned from Orkut for reasons unknown; he suspects because he added 300 people right off the bat, but you'd think they would dig that, no?

To get on Orkut you have to be invited by a member, and people are auctioning invitations on ebay. Talk about easy money.

Back to danah - she doesn't dig Orkut for several reasons, including the invitation requirement, which feels elitist to her. I most dig her last three points:

5) Hell, haven't we learned ANYTHING? We still have articulation. But worse, now that everyone is paying attention to this, the network isn't growing naturally. You jump on. Fast. And connect to everyone you recognize. WTF? And what the hell are you supposed to DO once you get on the damn thing?

6) And boy is it irritating that everything is broken. I know it's an alpha, but it's too popular to withstand the interest. Can't change picture on certain parts. Can't delete account. Can't get rid of picture. And what's up with the regular crashes?

7) And then there are the Terms that show contempt for academics. There's a blanket ban on robots, collecting information, reverse engineering, and other "unauthorized" use (hello, fair use). You can't even link from the damn thing (i.e. i can't identify myself outside of the constraints of Orkut... like on my own site or identifying a research project in which i'd like people to participate. Thus, i can't use a social networking tool to fucking social network). Of course, there's not much appreciation for anyone else either. THEY OWN EVERYTHING YOU POST!!! You CAN'T OPT OUT! Complete registration only.

And don't worry... they can modify the ToS without any notice.