Peter Morville reviews David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous. [Link]

...while I agree with David that "second-order organization is often as much about authority as about making things easier to find" and that all taxonomies embed bias, the same can be said of search engines, books, blogs, Amazon, eBay, and the Wikipedia. This doesn't negate the value and good intentions of librarians, information architects, authors, editors, designers, and users who labor to improve findability, accessibility, and understanding for all.

It simply suggests that we must all be more aware, as consumers and creators, of the incentives, biases, and weaknesses inherent in all sources and structures of authority and knowledge.

I'll be discussing the book with David W. for two weeks, beginning May 30, at the WELL, in the Inkwell forums.

If you care about global free speech, follow the link below and sign the petition. [Link]

“We call for the release of Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman (Kareem Amer) and of Abdul-Moneim Mahmud, who have been imprisoned for expressing their opinion online. We urge the organisers of the Internet Governance Forum to intervene with the Egyptian authorities on behalf of these two bloggers. It would be intolerable for a UN summit on the future of the Internet to be held in a country which imprisons bloggers”.

There's also a wiki where you can sign (especially if you need to be anonymous).

Somewhere in the 21st Century... [Link]

Thomas Leavitt writes (via Dave Farber's Interesting People email list) a sane response on the Facebook privacy question. (However, if you're a full-blown conspiracy theorist, you might want to note that Thomas Leavitt is a Mason.)

The macro issue here is the potential for our government (or any other) to abuse their access to this information for repressive purposes, or, in the worst case, to simply round up people of a particular political persuasion and summarily execute them.... and in reference to that, it seems that the information available in a social networking site about someone's political affiliations would be insignificant, in relation to the trail left online via other mechanisms... such as, say, postings to Dave Farber's IP list. :) The reality is that the Internet is the new town square, and if you've got even the slightest inclination to express a political opinion, in all likelihood, you're going to do it online, and leave a record that a repressive government would have no problem finding. In point of fact, it would be interesting to do a study of a hundred random individuals picked out of the phone book, and find out how many of them have enough of a corpus of identifiable online postings to enable a reasonable guess as to their political affiliation - and then cross check that guess against voter registration records and direct inquiries. I'd bet the success rate for those folks where a reasonable guess could be made would be very high.

Yesterday we visted Pliny Fisk at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, followed by a conversation about regional economic development with Angelou Economics - quite a contrast. The "we" who made the visit, other than yours truly, included David Armistead, Bob Murray, Josh Parker and my co-consultant, David Swedlow. The five of us are engaged in a conversation about the growing need for paradigm shift in economic thinking, with sustainability as a key factor. One thing we learned from Angelos was that many business and policy people hear the word "sustainability" as anti-business (whereas we see, in sustainability, a source of business opportunity). Much to ponder these days.

This had me laughing. [Link]

This got me to thinking about how searchable my name is. Turns out that thanks to this blog and the fact that my name is plastered all over some former employers' websites I'm doing okay. Type in Jon Lowder, even without the quotation marks and my blog comes up first and a bunch of work stuff, my LinkedIn profile and other stuff related to me comes up in the first few pages. So I decided to see how I do with just Jon. There I don't appear until the 9th page of results (54th position) but that's okay considering that there are some pretty web-loved Jon's out there: Jon Stewart, Jon Udell, and Jon Lebkowsky. Wait...who?! I'm being beaten by a guy named Lebkowsky and who names his blog "Weblogsky"? At first I thought maybe it was a fan site for The Big Lebowski but I was wrong. Ends up its just a blog by a guy named Jon Lebkowsky, and from my short reading I'll have to begrudgingly admit that it's a good blog. Okay, it's a better blog than mine, but that doesn't help my ego.

Texas State University learned that a lot of people don't want a body farm (i.e. a few decomposing corpses) nearby, but the real problem is all those buzzards flying 'round. [Link]

Google's making strategic purchases to build out its portfolio. [Link] I would just add that this is a major driver for business development – i.e. many businesses, especially those built around relatively simple functionality (like Twitter), could only be profitable if acquired as an addition to a larger suite of services. Google is driving innovation by creating a pot of money to reward incubation, and by driving competitors to do the same.

Live Ink uses an algorithm to break blocks of text into a cascade that's more readable. [Link] (It obviously won't save any trees, though.)

Although Live Ink offers the potential to improve world wide literacy and support the growth of screen-based reading, it still faces the challenge of overcoming our entrenched reading habits. Since grade school, we were all taught to read block text. It’s not perfect, but it’s comfortable and familiar.

Yet the Internet has a way of forcing rapid evolution of communication habits, especially when the communication methods are faster, easier and more direct. One only has to look as far as email, cell phones, or recent innovations such as texting and Twittering to understand that we humans crave immediate communication. If Live Ink is truly a breakthrough, those who use it will have competitive advantage over those who don’t. At a minimum, Digital Ink reminds us that as human evolution collides with Moore’s Law, we’re bound to learn more about ourselves.

I spent some time today at the Clean Energy Venture Summit here in Austin (where Bruce will be empaneled tomorrow 'round noon), and I'm working on a post for Worldchanging about one session, on Utility of the Future (or electric grid of the future - smart energy). Luncheon keynote Dick Gephardt repeated one of his mantras, "Politics is a substitute for violence." He and Jim Woolsey, tag-teaming the keynote, had much to say about the relationship of energy to terrorism; Woolsey says we should remember, as we stand pumping gasoline, to look in the rearview mirror to see who's funding terrorists (i.e. we are, buy buying gasoline). The less we buy oil, he was saying, the less we empower terrorists to blow things up. Gephardt, when asked in q&a about the proposed plan to reduce the gas tax in Texas over the summer, said it was "pretty much lunacy" because we want to discourage gasoline consumption, not, pardon the pun, pump it up.

The talks at the conference were information-intense, and I need time to sort out my notes and post more (partly because I can barely read 'em - I was showing off my tiny scrawl and the conference, proud that I could pack so much info into a page, not quite getting that it's only information if it's readable).

I was called away to a meeting in the middle of a good talk about clean transportation; hope that's recorded somewhere. I'll be back at the conference tomorrow, late, but in time to see Bruce's session on "science vs science fiction of cleantech." It's a conversation including Matthew Nordan (though I'm not sure why Nordan's there, we thought it was going to be a solo. Maybe his focus on nano is the key.)

I made a couple more posts on the Clean Energy Venture Summit this week, at Worldchanging and at the Supernova Conversation Hub. The conference closed with a discussion featuring Matt Nordan of Lux Research and Bruce Sterling, who said the emerging new clean energy industry has "a hard row to hoe – you have to get your head around this kind of immediate, fast transition. Success is not an accident coming from a place that likes to keep itself weird." 418 people attended the conference, all excited to be sniffing the foundation of a new business paradigm, though Bruce made the great point that it's not really so much as a business shift as a global cultural change. The conference was all about business, research and development, science and technology – but all these are driven (and constrained) by culture. (Not only that - I'm looking for a clean energy conference that focuses on policy, on the legal and regulatory environment and how it needs to change in order for the best-case possibilities to manifest. Bruce and Jasmina joined David Armistead, David Swedlow, Josh Parker and I after the conference ended to talk more from a cultural angle. Bruce asked a question that we all took seriously: What would it take to bring every green pundit in the world into Austin? Bruce called this idea the "Buckminster Memorial Big Brain Superdome."

(Photo: Bruce and Matt Nordan talk... "the science and science fiction of clean energy.")

The Freakonomics boys interview the randomly intelligent Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book The Black Swan should be a great followup to Everything is Miscellaneous, which I'm reading now. [Link]

Theorizing is the default activity for our brain; suspension of belief is an active one. Because of the narrative fallacy, our minds default to theory making. It takes more conscious effort – and energy - to suspend beliefs. It also takes more training – we train children to find “explanations” instead of just teaching them to have the guts to say, “I don’t know” in certain circumstances.

In a way, it is Aristotle’s pupils that I am after – the proponents of the superiority of “knowledge” over saying “I have no clue.” I have been trying to revive the class of skeptical thinkers who resisted Plato and Aristotle. I have also tried to revive pre-enlightenment thinkers – people who focused on the fallibility of human understanding.

So Big Brother is watching, but doesn't really care who you are, and just wants you to pick the right pair of shoes to wear tomorrow. [Link]

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

Gunner brings a lot of insight to his critique of the design of the Netsquared conference agenda, how it conflicts with the principles th at Netsquared espouses. [Link]

The N2Y2 approach is based on scarcity model (i.e., a fixed $100,000 pie where we fight for the bigger slices) rather than an abundance model (a broad pool of potential collaborators and funders with no set bounds on collective benefit). While the latter is arguably embedded in the former with the N2Y2 agenda, it's a matter of focus and primary paradigm. Michelle Martin recently did an excellent blog post on how “scarcity thinking” potentially affects content sharing in the nonprofit sector, and Michelle Murrain elaborated with her inimitable clarity on parallels in open source software and technology for nonprofits; I take their points and echo them in an open question: is the N2Y2 agenda model moving innovators in the nonprofit tech sector towards abundance thinking or scarcity thinking?

And it's not just the competition component of the N2Y2 agenda I lament. Those who know me and my work know I have no shortage of opinions on agenda design for nonprofit events. The notion that a great majority of 350 brilliant people will be in sit-and-listen-mode for the better part of 2 days represents a real opportunity cost to me; an event that aims to remix the web for social change should arguably remix the agenda for social interaction :^) I also question to what degree the agenda's competition component favors those demographics who are most comfortable speaking in English to large crowds; will the innovation and potential of those presenters who are shy or non-native English speakers really be borne out in this format? Does ability to pitch a room really equate to ability to best impact the sector and change the world?

(Agenda side note: I'm really grateful for Net2's willingness to let me facilitate a pre-event collaborative session among the featured projects in response to my concerns, but I continue to worry whether any collaborative ethos we establish on Monday afternoon will crash like a wave on the beach come Tuesday morning.)

And I wonder aloud how the N2Y2 contest processes (both pre-event and at-event) reflect the values of “content from the edge” that is so often said to characterize this era of internet innovation? It's pretty web 1.0 to let a community vote in a prescribed process; it's much more au courant to let the community design the process. Wikipedia was a total failure before it was a total success, Del.icio.us took years to become usable; they succeeded when they enabled the users to drive the whole process. Looking to the future, I heartily encourage the Net2 team to consider how it would work to engage the community at the outset of the Net2 process design, not just once the rules have been cast.

Back in January I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker, ostensibly about Enron, but actually about the difference between mysteries and puzzles. Here's how he made the distinction:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.

David Pescovitz has blogged another Treverton piece on the distinction in The Smithsonian. Pesco has a longer quote from the Smithsonian piece, concluding with this thought: Solving puzzles is useful for detection. But framing mysteries is necessary for prevention.

As gas prices and transactional expenses increase, independent gas station owners can no longer compete; they're shutting down. In fact, I can't think where there's an independent station in Austin. [Link]

Between Feb. 1 and Monday, Bartlett said, the average wholesale price paid by service stations in Milwaukee to buy gasoline rose from $1.66 to $2.94. Add in taxes paid to the federal and state governments, as well as transportation costs, and the average service station had to cover $3.47 on Monday, without charging any profit. On that day, stations were charging their customers $3.47 on average in Milwaukee, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report.

Facebook (which isn't for sale, thank you) is becoming more of an operating system, opening to other companies who want to leverage the social network as a platform for their applications. The quiet guys are always the smartest. [Link]

Facebook aims to be a central clearinghouse for software developers, borrowing a few pages from the decades-old strategy playbooks of Microsoft or IBM, while retaining the flexibility of the new generation of Web-delivered services.

Thanks to Bijoy for the pointer.

My friend Josh Baer has organized a benefit for DonorsChoose, which is "a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack." Just heard that he has tickets left - the benefit's next Sunday, it's for a great cause, and it'll be a terrific evening of music by Stills and Rachel Loy, plus a special guest. Stills, son of Stephen Stills and Veronique Sanson, is an excellent musician who's played with the Jayhawks, Ryan Adams, and (currently) Richard Ashcroft. [Link]

DNA is code, and where there's code, there's bound to be hackers. Welcome to the new world of programmable biology. [Link]

But SynBio engineers think they can take what we know and design and construct novel forms of life that are programmed to do practical things that couldn't otherwise be done. "We can now regard cells as 'programmable matter'," says Ron Weiss, a Princeton computer scientist who now writes genetic software for cells. Weiss is convinced that he will soon be able to "program cell behaviors as easily as we program computers."