Austin is 101 degrees with a realfeel of 111... it's sizzle or melt, so I'm hanging out inside, checking out the Live8 Concert Feed at AOLmusic. Over my broadband connection I'm getting great quality, though none of the acts currently onstage pulls my trigger. I checked MTV's 8-hour coverage on the telly, and found it obnoxious; they'll toss you 3/4 of a great song by Green Day or the Marleys, then cut to yammering vjays or commercials. Ethan Zuckerman posts a pointer to a Christian Scientist Monitor poll, "How can the West help Africa? A global Q&A"

The Monitor decided to find out what some Western concertgoers really know about Africa, and where there is - and isn't - common ground with Africans.

Our correspondents spoke with eight ticket-holders for concerts in Philadelphia, London, and Rome. They also interviewed eight people in Senegal and Nigeria, two indebted African nations.

As it turns out, the two groups have different priorities. Nearly every Westerner mentioned HIV/AIDS as a top African problem. Only one African did. Every African cited poverty as a major worry. And most wanted investment - not aid.

Happy Fourth of July! My real July 4th post is here.

I watched the impact, not in the night sky but over the NASA channel, where images were broadcast as received. Can't wait to see the processed images and analysis. [Link]

Science Magazine has published a list of the 125 "most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today." If you know the answers, feel free to post them here! [Link]

Live8 may have been successful in its attempt to raise consiousness about conditions in parts of Africa. [Link]

It was high-tech coalition building. At one point the rapper and actor Will Smith in Philadelphia played host as audience members at simultaneous concerts roared video-screen greetings to one another. Then he had the viewers snap their fingers at three-second intervals; in Africa, he said, an impoverished child dies every three seconds.

Against statistics like that, rock hits can sound lightweight and narcissistic - overly concerned with the preening or the romantic mishaps of people making considerably more than $2 a day. It's a rare band - U2, to be precise - that can make big booming songs sound humble as well as rousing. A few performers, like Sting, also rewrote lines of familiar songs to address the G-8: "We'll be watching you," he sang in "Every Breath You Take."

Others hoped that their love songs would double as songs of empathy. And the rest kept it to themselves if they were worried about the context. Rappers boasted, rockers flailed at their guitars, country singers honky-tonked. Parochial, frivolous, raucous and more, the songs were hits nonetheless, and performing them drew attention. That is what stars are supposed to do, as well as providing fantasies of pleasure, success, rebellion or shared trauma. Whether it was Beyoncé of Destiny's Child boasting "I'm a survivor" because an album sold millions of copies, or the Cure's Robert Smith moaning about angst, the stars provided enough media leverage to put Live 8 on all those television and computer screens.

San Marcos Texas State University police ordered Dan Newman to stop saving Abed Duamni, who was drowning in the San Marcos River, and when he wouldn't comply, they arrested him. I'm thinking of nominating the San Marcos Texas State University police for a special kind of award. [Link]

Google's expected to release a Firefox version of its toolbar (and it's about time!) [Link]

This is all over the news, and I don't know what I can add here, but I feel compelled to report this morning's explosions in London, three blasts in the subway and one in a double decker bus, all at during rush hour. Something called "Secret Organization group of al-Qaeda of Jihad in Europe" claimed responsibility for the bombings.

Update: Europhobia blog has good coverage of the attack.

Update: Wikipedia coverage (includes hotline numbers).

Update: Xeni at boingboing has posted a summary of coverage with quite a few good links.

Arabs and Muslims are fed up with terrorist attacks, according to CNN.com. "The loud condemnation of the attacks that targeted civilians reverberated on the street, over the Internet, in newsrooms, and in Arab and Muslim seats of power." Al Jazeera posts a similar report.

Meanwhile, at Global Voices, Rebecca posts a summary of responses from the Muslim Blogosphere.

Peter Merholz gets credit for reducing "weblog" to "blog," as in "we blog." But who came up with the term weblog in the first place? Jorn Barger, most likely, with his Robot Wisdom Weblog. Paul Boutin describes a recent close encounter with Barger.

Barger crossed over from Usenet to the Web in 1997 and set up his own site, which he dubbed the Robot Wisdom Weblog. He began logging his online discoveries as he stumbled on them - hence "weblog." I barely understood what he was talking about, and still I read him giddily. Barger gave a name to the fledgling phenomenon and set the tone for a million blogs to come. Robot Wisdom bounced unapologetically from high culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn.

Joe Lopez and Brandon Wiley got some "ink" for their ACTLab TV project - from a surprising source, Austin's KXAN-TV 36. (Thanks, Maida!) [Link]

The Universe is beyond our understanding, so we build a "middle world" of vernacular reality that just works, according to Richard Dawkins, speaking about "Meme Power" at TED Global. (I think a lot of us get this; my question is how we stretch?) [Link]

Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins.

We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.

This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms.

Because we exist in such a limited section of the universe, and given its enormous scale, we cannot expect to be the only organisms within it, Professor Dawkins believes.

I talk about Extreme Democracy in a podcast interview by R.U. Sirius on his Mondo Globo Network. [Link]

When George Bush talked about "the internets," we all laughed – of course there's one Internet, just like there's (by definition) one Universe, right? But Joi expresses a concern that there is in fact a fragmentation of the Internet into local/regional networks, partly because some countries block access to much external content, and partly because many users prefer to stay within their own realm. And "there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet."

It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.

Dina Mehta blogs Jean Nouvel's Louisiana Manifesto...

The global economy is accentuating the effects of the dominant architecture,
the type that claims "we don't need context".

And yet debate on this galloping frenzy does not exist: architectural criticism,
invoking the limits of the discipline, is content with aesthetic and stylistic
reflections devoid of any analysis of the real, and ignores the crucial historical
clash that - more insistently every day - sets a global architecture against an
architecture of situations, generic architecture against an architecture of
specificity.

Is our modernity today simply the direct descendant of the modernity of the
20th century, devoid of any spirit of criticism?

Does it consist simply of parachuting solitary objects on to the face of the planet?

Shouldn't it rather be looking for reasons, correspondences, harmonies,
differences in order to propose an ad-hoc architecture, here and now?

The sun's surface has "a hard and rigid ferrite surface," according to Michael Mozina at his Surface of the Sun web site. He had this insight while studying unprocessed SOHO images. The current assumption is that the sun is a ball of gas.

Based on Doppler imaging techniques, SOHO has demonstrated that the the sun has a solid, electrically conductive, ferrite surface, just below the observable photosphere which rotates uniformly every 27.3 says.  The uniformity of this movement is unlike anything we find in the photosphere.  It's rigid.  It moves UNIFORMLY from equator to pole.  It is being dynamically reshaped and eroded by continual electrical arcing between magnetically polarized points along the surface.  These arcs emit light consistent with a number of iron ferrite ions, suggesting this surface is composed of ferrite based materials.  This electrical erosion process continually eats away at the surface like an arc welder melts the ends of a welding rod and the surface where the arc touches. 

Eventually the surface is melted away, sometimes along very long "fault lines" ultimately resulting in cracks along the surface and "sunquakes".  Sometimes these resulting sunquakes release massive solar tsunamis that are visible across the sun's photosphere and result in magnificent coronal ejections.

With Sharp Reader open, I've been watching blog headlines roll by all day with references to Karl Rove's rough week. People who've been around Texas politics for a while aren't surprised to hear that Karl Rove plays dirty – what's surprising is that it's taken this long for the national press to pick up on it and actually dig in. If they dig a little deeper, I suspect they'll find a trove of newsworthy stuff. Meanwhile I wanted to blog something about Rove that wasn't redundant with other bloggers' rants, so I hopped over to Wikipedia and saw that the Karl Rove page is disputed. There's quite a bit of discussion in the item's back room. I noticed they'd removed an allegation that Rove was responsible for the CBS/National Guard forged memo; I once mentioned Rove's possible (probable?) role in that affair to Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales, who thought it was a conspiracy theory. To me, though, it seemed to fit his modus operandi. Consider these excerpts from a Guardian article:

The aggressive tactics won the 22-year-old Rove a walk-on role in the Watergate saga that was consuming the nation. A report was published in the Washington Post on August 10, 1973, titled "[Republican party] Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks", gave an account, based on tape recordings, of how Rove and a colleague had been touring the country giving young Republicans political combat training, in which they recalled their feats of derring-do, such as Rove's Chicago heist at the Dixon headquarters.

At the time, Rove claimed the tape had been doctored to exclude a warning to the audience not to try to emulate any of his past misdeeds. Others present simply remember a caution not to get caught. The publicity forced the intervention of the Republican National Committee and its chairman, a former Texas congressman clinging on to his political career: George Herbert Walker Bush. After considering the case, Bush Sr took action. He drove Edgeworth out of the party on suspicion of having leaked the tapes, and hired Rove, bringing him to Washington.

...

In its last days, the 1994 campaign also turned nasty. Texan voters began receiving calls from "pollsters" asking questions such as: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?" In the business, it is called "push-polling" and Shipley has no doubt who was behind it."Rove has used this kind of dirty tricks in every campaign he's ever run."

Maybe we'll find out.

After its recent server meltdown, Drupal make a public call for help and got a donated Sun Fire V20z server and 10K in cash, with more on the way! (However I couldn't get drupal.org to come up this morning... slashdotted!) [Link]

OPML has been around for a while (Marc Canter was evangelizing OPML 2-3 years ago and you'll run into opml files used for import/export of syndication feed lists etc.), but there was a surge of interest over the last few days after Dave Winer demo'd an OPML editor at the Berkman blog meeting last Thursday. David Weinberger has posted a good summary of that session:

It lets you work in outline form, press the "save" button and the contents get posted to your blog. To update your blogroll, you open it in the editor, type, link and save. It has nested categories which, again, you edit using the editor. Press "Build RSS" and it does.

It's OPML all the way through. E.g., the categories are an OPML file. Want to absorb someone else's taxonomy? Open up her OPML file. Want to merge feed subscription lists? Drag and drop. Reorder the way you want, as if it were an outliner...because it is an outliner. You can link an entry to another OPML file and it links in the appropriate content as if it were actually part of the document. E.g., You might link the "Florida" heading to an URL that has an OPML outline of towns in Florida. When you click on the "Florida" heading, you'll see the content of the outline of towns. [This makes it possible for an outline to contain multiple people's expertise. Very cool.]

Sunday morning news and infotainment programs focus on the wrangle over the revelation that Karl Rove leaked info about Valerie Plame's role with the CIA. The Republican message, in heavy rotation: Karl Rove didn't identify her by name, and even if he did identify her by name, he broke no law, and even if he did break the law, the law shouldn't matter because Plame had a desk job by then, wasn't an "operative." When Plame's CIA role was originally leaked, recall that an apparently outraged President Bush said he would find the source of the leak was traced and take appropriate action – no indication then that the leak wasn't a problem. However now that we know that "Bush's brain" was leaking, the Bush League are reframing the issue and asking the Democrats for an apology for suggesting that Karl Rove might've done something illegal, unethical, or (shudder) immoral. If you want step back as consider what all this is really about, check out this piece by Joshua Micah Marshall, and follow the links.

Ubiquitous social computing, always on everywhere, smart mobs, emergence, convergence... these are the various buzz words terms that are relevant to Wade Roush's piece about "Social Machines." Nothing exactly new here, but there's a good list of sites that Roush refers to as "social services." (Thanks, Bruce!) [Link]

Bruce Sterling's excited about House Industries after hearing House's Andy Cruz. [Link]

This Cruz lecture was one of the most important and interesting things I've seen in my stay at Art Center. I mean... Bohemians are supposed to be recuperated by Modernists; Modernists just aren't supposed to be recuperated by Bohemians. But I just witnessed that, and what's more, they're great at it it. That's like watching Paris fall to the Mongols and discovering that Mongols are brilliant at vichysoisse and the can-can.

Frank Paynter's posted an exploration of spin in the postmodern context, reminding me of the bumperschticker that admonishes us to Question Reality. [Link]

How was The Rail Splitter different from George W. Bush?  What and who informed the electorate in 1860 and how does that information differ from so called "postmodern spin?"  I sense an historical cycle playing out, but my inference is probably naïve and wrong.  History does not repeat itself any more than the planets' "retrograde motion" is evidence of epicyclical behavior proving that the Earth is the center of the solar system.  Stephens suggests that the postmoderns have rationalized "spin" as acceptable information sharing behavior and that this is somehow new.  Spin is neither acceptable nor new.  To spin is to lie and lying remains unacceptable.

The right recognizes that the people abhor spin, but they also know that the people are willing to forgive a few little lies.  The warmth of belonging to the fan-base of the demagogue more than compensates for the chilling effects of a few campaign exaggerations. There's a right wing propaganda broadcast that touts itself as "no-spin."  This exercise in self-conscious ironic recursion speaks volumes about the public's willingness to accept what they are told, so long as the story is presented in an entertaining fashion. "No-spin" is itself of course a spin.  It represents a clashing of values with the leftward perspective that the show's performers are "lying liars."  No dialectic, no reasoned argument, is possible between these two positions.  The self-righteous left and the duplicitous right have no common ground for discussion.

Paul Krugman, writing recently about Karl Rove, said, "What Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: The faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."  Stephens points out in his essay that this is consistent with the postmodern destruction of fact in favor of context.

It could just be that the progressive elite inside the Beltway are idiots wrong about some things. Glenn Smith is onto 'em, though. [Link]

Another problem touched on or made more visible by George [Lakoff] but not addressed directly: most political opinion methodology sucks. It sucks because it's overdetermined from the beginning. An example? Post 9/11 and through the 2002 cycle every smart pollster we had said, "Go with Bush on the war. The people support him. They'll kill you if you oppose him." So, we dutifully dressed Bush in a Military Uniform. We tried to take it back in 2004, but it was too late.

Now, few Americans (beyond Democratic loyalists) were going to reject Bush's propaganda unless some voices of leadership gave them an alternative. No alternative, they go with the president. But the pollsters say, "Don't give the people an alternative." Who could be surprised that a Midwestern voice asking a poll question on the telephone does not count as a voice of authority?

This is as close as we got to opposing Bush. An unknown caller with a neutral accent asked a respondent on the phone: "Do you strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: A war in Iraq will distract from the effort to find those responsible for 9/11, waste thousands of American lives, and bog the country down in a war it cannot win while making it easier for the terrorists to recruit more terrorists?"

Meanwhile, the President's on television saying: "I'm going it. Saddam dead or alive. Cover my back." Who's the respondent gonna follow?

Blogger Khalid Jarrar from Baghdad blogged a week ago that his hard drive had been stolen, then he disappeared. Word is that he's been detained by the Iraqi intelligence service. His brother Raed writes

We’re not sure whether our blogs are the reason behind the abduction of my brother, but it’s one of the possible scenarios. In case if they were, we’ll stand for our political values of anti-violence, anti-occupation, pro-dialogue, pro-free speech, and all of the other honourable stands that my family has taken in our lifetime.

A new postage stamp features the late physicist Richard Feynman along with some of Feynman's diagrams, drawings that "offered a means for visualizing the unfamiliar entities and their interactions," according to Science News.

Because these cartoonish sketches seemed to depict subatomic particles breaking the established rules of quantum physics, many eminent physicists were initially reluctant to adopt them. In the 1940s, some young theorists who embraced the tool had to meet in secret to learn how to use it to tackle formidable calculations.

After only a few years, however, the approach caught on. "Feynman diagrams ... revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics," [MIT physicist and historian David I.] Kaiser says.

Actually, Google maps and a bad but useable wifi connection. I guess this means you should always take your laptop to court! (Thanks to Jim Downing for the pointer!) [Link]

Sometimes what you think was lost was merely misplaced, even if it was an elephant. Conservationists assessing the near-disappearance of the wild elephants of Myanmar discovered them hard at work out of the wild, hauling logs. [Link]

Although the capture of wild elephants was banned in 1995, it is thought that people continue to round up animals that raid crops or otherwise bother humans. The group presenting in Brazil guesses that at present there are about 6,000 animals in human hands.

...

It may be that the elephants' usefulness in the logging camps is the best way to encourage locals to save the species, [Peter] Leimgruber [of Smithsonian's National Zoological Park] says. The animals do a good job, he adds, and cause relatively little pollution. "I'd rather have the forest logged by an elephant than by heavy machinery," he says.

Giddy from the success of their earth maps, our friends at Google have mapped the moon and marked the sites of the Apollo landings. Be sure to zoom in full on the image. [Link]

Rupert Murdoch is acquiring Intermix Media, Inc., which operates MySpace.com, for $580 million in cash, dragging the social network site into his media empire (which includes everybody's favorite "fair and balanced" news network, Fox News. The UK's Guardian Unlimited has a pretty good assessment of Murdoch's attempt to embrace "the internet and the peer-to-peer communications which power its current growth."

There is something of a backside-covering operation here with the purchase of internet advertising growth via the Intermix websites as well as an acquisition of a new skill set. But herein lies the problem. All of the truly successful web businesses which Murdoch seeks to emulate - at least in terms of revenues and reach - Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN - do not have pioneering vision bolted on to them but embedded in the heart of their corporate culture. The mess of AOL and Time Warner has proved one thing - that integrating online and offline can take a decade, millions of dollars, and still leave you with two distinct businesses that have barely budged an inch.

A self-confessed "digital immigrant", Rupert Murdoch might have finally run into a boundary which he cannot transcend. His vision for News Corp on the web, which in America means Fox Interactive Media, has undertones of portals and keeping your audience tied in - something which is a long way behind the latest curve, where content flies freely across whichever platform the users choose. To be successful on the web takes more than acquisitive power - like all other media it takes total commitment and concentration from the very top of the company and a culture steeped in its progression. Murdoch should note the reverse takeover going on at the BBC where its online business is moving from the periphery to the core of all its activities.

John Dvorak has an aggressively clueless column at pcmag.com wherein he calls Creative Commons "humbug" ... "This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes."

I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, "It does nothing." Okay, then why are bloggers and do-gooders and various supporters making a point of tagging their material as being covered by Creative Commons? Is it just because it's cool and trendy—a code for being hip amongst a certain elite? There is no other answer.

Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this? In other words, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that's okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it's for commercial purposes. What is this telling me?

This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It's called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I'm a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws. In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we'd all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.

He's also disturbed about the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication... "This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain. So what's Creative Commons got to do with it? Public domain is public domain. It's not something granted by Creative Commons." He's right about one thing - it's not something granted by Creative Commons. Creative Commons doesn't grant anything - it simply provides a mechanism for authors to grant licenses. And a work doesn't enter the public domain automatically, of course - it's covered by copyright until the copyright expires unless the author specifically commits the work to the public domain. Creative Commons has created a bit of legal text for dedication to the public domain, and has also given visibility to this alternative.

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15

Joi Ito experimented with an in-flight podcast using Audio Hijack Pro, Skype and the Boeing Connexion service on Lufthansa flight 711. I'm waiting for a flight-to-flight experiment! [Link]

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can catch the Kosher Kimchi Tour's latest stop, "The Greatest staged Reading of Prose and Poetry in the World." My pal John Shirley is joining Joseph Kim and Allison Landa... the blurb:

How to make Kosher Kimchi: Bring together a Korean and a Jew at a Catholic school then add a secret ingredient known as a Special Guest. Mix it up and you've got the best-tasting literary dish this side of the Red Sea. We are a fearless bunch of hooligans who never should've been writers, but are, so just accept it -- dammit.

Not all Republicans are whacky extremists and corporate tools. My friend Phil Windley, a Utah Republican, suggest a replacement for Orrin Hatch (per Doc, "Utah's five-term Senator from Disney"): Steve Urquardt, a Utah State Rep who's also a blogger (been waiting to see that sorta thing take off). [Link to Doc on Phil W., Hatch, and Urquardt]

Rohit Gupta questions whether participatory journalism is a good idea (and includes some interesting thoughts about Wikipedia, the Bhagwad Gita, and myth-making). [Link]

When decorum fails, one is likely to see "forest fires" and "edit wars" in Wikipedia, akin to riots in a city. On a peaceful day, though, one might wonder how neutrality is made manifest in Wikipedia. In fact, is it even possible to have an article that is completely unbiased, whether in Wikipedia or in a newspaper? An explanation for this is the concept of "systemic bias" or the sum of prejudices inherently present and active in the human group we are dealing with. As the community grows and awareness about the bias spreads, it is hoped that the articles, by assimilating as many point of views as possible, will become increasingly objective.

This idea is dangerous, in that it undermines the work of an excellent, dedicated journalist coming up with a very objective report. It is dangerous to assume that the language of crowds can be so easily deciphered, or that location/access is the only important criterion for credibility. Wikipedia is a populist history of the world, a myth, a history in consensus. However, the fact that it can be changed makes it more reliable than Encarta or Brittannica.

It appears that the newspaper is making its second mistake after going capitalist – going populist. The shift of certain traditional mass media towards participatory journalism is not guided by altruist ideas, or survival, but by the opportunity of cutting costs involved in traditional journalism. It is motivated by the possibility that the traditional reporter can be replaced by a zero-cost mob reporting several points of view, even eyewitness reports. This removes the need to hire a dedicated journalist, the seeker of truth, and replaces him (or her) with a murmur of crowds.

New FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to increase access to high-speed (broadband) Internet, and he's okay with municipal networks. However he doesn't want to force phone and cable companies to share their networks (in effect creating a duopoly) because he thinks this removes an incentive to extend service. This Wall Street Journal piece is a good overview of current conflicting ideas about broadband delivery. [Link]

Just overheard on CNN: Nic Robertson in London told Miles O'Brien that, despite reasonableness of Muslim communities in the UK and elsewhere, the problem is the Internet - young Muslims can be inspired to commit terrorist acts of violence by radical Muslim web sites. O'Brien responded that this is something that "we have to do something about." I guess we're all relieved to know that we can end attacks by suicide bombers if we just do away with that pesky Internet.

Rebecca MacKinnon reports how Newsweek screwed up her background information in an introduction to an interview with her about censorship in China. I don't think it's just Newsweek, though... I don't think I've ever given an interview or been close to a story that was handled with complete accuracy. Rebecca notes that "even if their reporters are hard-working, well-intentioned and trying their best, you can count on their editors to mangle the details and have no respect for interviewees - without whom they would have no stories." [Link]

I first heard about the Electronic Frontier Foundation as it was forming. There was talk about it on the WELL, and I ran into "Johnny Mnemonic" on an Austin BBS, and he told me he was moving to Boston to work with this new nonprofit that was going to focus on civil liberties in cyberspace. Johnny Mnemonic was Mike Godwin, and the nonprofit was EFF.

When Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service soon after EFF was formed, and a very pissed off Steve decided to sue the bastards, EFF adopted the case as a first bit of rocket fuel for a prolonged flight. At the time EFF saw its potential as a community-based organization with chapters around the US and (eventually) the world. Steve got right on it, calling a picnic/meeting to call for the formation of EFF-Austin as a model for other chapters to follow. Along with Steve, John Quarterman, Bruce Sterling, Ed Cavazos and others, I helped organize EFF-Austin, which became the nexus of Austin's hyperactive Internet community through the 1990s. Our public meetings and events were where you would go if you were based in Austin physpace and living any part of your life on the electronic frontier.

In 1991 we joined with several other potential EFF chapters around the country on an email list called "thesegroups," and discussed (sometimes flamed) about the prospect and design of an EFF with chapters. Representatives from all the groups met in Atlanta in a very cold January 1992 to hammer out a conclusive model so that chapters could form and get to work. The board and staff of a recently
reorganized
EFF arrived from a retreat where they had decided that EFF would move from Boston to Washington DC. In the retreat they decided on a model that would not include chapters. The rest of the meeting was about how we might work effectively with EFF, but as independent groups.

We were all a bit crushed, but Jerry Berman, EFF's Director at the time, mentioned how it didn't make sense to them, given their commitment to decentralized networks, to form an organization that was centralized and that was working through chapters over which the central organization had ultimate authority. It made far more sense to have the chapters become independent organizations that could network effectively. I extended this thinking in an unpublished 1997 book, Virtual Bonfire, which included a chapter on "Nodal Politics" that was published online in 2000 by the webzine Mindjack. More people are thinking this way today; Mitch Ratcliffe and I recently co-edited Extreme Democracy, a collection of papers written as the concept of network-based advocacy and democracy began to have an national impact - during the 2004 election season.

EFF-Austin had already incorporated as a Texas nonprofit and had been active as a standalone before the Atlanta meeting was held. Despite a long dormant period (around 1997-2000), the organization is still active today, most recently actively opposing a legislative prohibition on municipal wireless projects as part of a larger coaltion. (I've been President of EFF-Austin since we revived the organization in 2001.)

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15

A team from IBM and New York's Cornell University has developed a new way to spot spam, called SMPT Path Analysis. [Link to article at NewScientist.com]

The algorithm at the heart of SMTP Path Analysis studies Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) information, which is added to an email message "header" as it is passed between servers on the internet. This remains hidden when a message arrives in a recipient's inbox but can be used retrace its steps between different mail servers.

Most spam filters try to catch spam by looking at the content of a message, rather than its hidden header. Many already learn to identify new spam by examining previous message. But spammers are constantly coming up with new tricks in an effort to outwit such content-filtering techniques.

Roll over beethoven and tell Tschaikovsky the news.

 –Chuck Berry

Mark at boingboing.net posted this link to an interesting item at Daily Kos. The Supreme Court, in the Grokster case, sez that p2p technology companies are liable for illegal uses of their systems, whereas the presidente and Senate Republicans want to protect firearms manufacturers for lawsuits over gun crimes... "The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others," White House spokesman Scott McClellan is quoted as saying. "We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse."

My WorldChanging colleague Rohit Gupta wrote me that it was raining in Mumbai, and I wrote back that we'd driven through what we call a gullywasher here in Texas a few days before, and Rohit explained that the rain in Mumbai was a whole nother level of storm. Mumbai flooded completely, and it was still going to rain for at least 30 more hours. News reports today show 37 inches of rain and counting. [Link]

Great article by Emily Gertz in Grist... the Arctic is melting and the impact on the Inuit way of life could be devastating. Sheila Watt-Cloutier is chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which is taking on the USA for its history of persistent and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. The Inuits have petitioned the Inter-American Commission, which has no enforcement power. A finding in favor of the Inuit may, however, lead to future lawsuits. Watt-Cloutier says the group is "defending our right to be cold." [Link]

Adam Weinroth interviewed Clay Shirky and I about the future of tagging. [Link]

The intellectual commons is a rich source of innovation, but it's being squelched as business interests extend claims to intellectual property rights, actually extending the sense of what's defined as "property." Andy Oram's written an insightful piece about the real value of the commons. (Thanks, Seth!)

Could our intellectual heritage suffer a "tragedy of the commons," as described by Garrett Hardin when he introduced that term in 1968? What Hardin described was a degradation or exhaustion of the commons through overuse. Clearly, there can be no tragedy of the intellectual commons in this sense, because the commons of ideas provides enough for every taker. Rather, two different tragedies threaten it.

The threat most resembling the classic tragedy is a fencing off of the commons, a predatory and premature division of its goods among private owners. This indeed can starve the commons. The trend worries librarians, researchers, creative artists, and others responsible for tending the commons of ideas.

The creator of a new work should not be allowed to monetize it completely, because it owes its existence to the commons and contains part of that commons. The new work is a shared achievement--shared between the individual who added his or her personal touch and the community in which it arose--so both sides must respect each other. This means the public must allow the creator a fair reward, and the creator must allow a certain amount of reuse by the public. Copyright is a short-term monopoly meant to encourage new works, and it was recognized as such by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

Information goods are a critical piece of the development picture. Every successfully developed country made use of free information goods. More accurately, they all went through a stage when they were a pirate nation. America spent a century as a pirate nation, ripping off the intellectual property of every country around it, and in particular, of Britain, because when you're a net importer of intellectual property, signing on to multilateral copyright and patent agreements is signing on to exporting your wealth off-shore. When you're a net exporter of intellectual property, it makes economic sense.

The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes which could give developing world countries the tools they need to serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the commercial and the humanitarian fairly.

But WIPO completely failed to do that, and it went on being a completely captive agency, simply making more copyright, more patent, more related rights, more trademarks on the grounds that all of these rights were themselves a good, regardless of the impact they had on people -- whether they were denying access to patented pharmaceuticals in poor countries that desperately needed them and couldn't afford to buy them at the market price, or simply creating copyright regimes that made basic education more difficult to provide in developing nations. WIPO and the World Trade Organization's intellectual property instruments together foisted a lot of policies on the developing world that required them to adopt knowledge goods laws that were incredibly dangerous to their body politic.

"The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures," [climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] said. "The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming .... The damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future," Emanuel said.