Berkman
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Clearing up
Media Cloud is a Berkman project that has been in the works for a bit, and has just launched into the public space. More here. It’s new and the folks there are looking for feedback. Enjoy. Continue reading
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Getting rained out in a brainstorm
In a meeting yesterday, somebody on the IRC shared links to “Re-identification of home addresses from spatial locations anonymized by Gaussian skew” and “Bregman divergences in the (m x k)-partitioning problem“, from Science Digest. Sez the abstract of the latter, A method of fixed cardinality partition is examined. This methodology can be applied on many… Continue reading
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Pixel pi
Check out David Bergman‘s 1,474-Megapixel GigaPan picture of the 2 gigaperson presidential inauguration last Tuesday. You can all but look in the noses of the people there. What impresses me most is how many cameras with extremely long lenses were there. Yow. Canon and Nikon were cleaning up. Hat tip to Sheila Lennon. Continue reading
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Faustian bargaining
Lots of folks in China get around the Great Chinese Firewall by using circumvention tools. But at what risk? That’s one of the biggest questions raised by Hal Roberts in this post here. Seems the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIFC, which offers this laudable PR… GIF Offers China-Based Reporters Software to Break Through Internet… Continue reading
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Tune in, Turn on, Say nice things
So now my dream app is ready on the iPhone. It’s just the beginning of What It Will Be, but it’s highly useful. If you have an iPhone, go there and check it out. It’s free. As you see here, I’m involved, through the Berkman Center, which is collaborating with PRX, which is working under… Continue reading
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Outlining in MediaWiki
Earlier this month I blogged about something I’d like called a “Micki”: a wiki that works like an outliner. Now, thanks to mind-opening help from Dave, I’m looking to edit existing wikis with an outliner. That’s a great place to start. I’m writing this blog in an outliner. Why not a wiki? MediaWiki is what… Continue reading
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Rethinking out loud about infrastructure
One of the most common expressions in geology is “not well understood”. Which is understandable, because most rocks were formed millions to billions of years ago, often under conditions, and in locations, that can only be guessed at. One of the reasons I love geology is that the detective work is of a very high… Continue reading
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Talking VRM in Cambridge & Amsterdam
This afternoon at 4:30 I’ll be talking (though not alone… it’s a discussion, not a lecture) at the Ethos Roundtable in Cambridge (the new one with Harvard and MIT, born in 1630-something; not the older one The topic will be The Intention Economy: What happens when free customers prove more valuable than captive ones. Are… Continue reading
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An immodest proposal
FORWARD WITH FIBER: An Infrastructure Investment Plan for the New Administration is my second essay at the Publius Project. The first was FRAMING THE NET. This one is a bold proposal: putting $300 billion into bringing fiber to every possible premise in America. Unlike other proposals of this sort, this one goes out of its… Continue reading
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Seems like last millenium
Sitting and shooting at U.S. v. Microsoft, 10 Years Later, at Austin Hall in Harvard Law School. Extremely interesting, and free as well. If you’re nearby, stop by. Continue reading
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Markets under reconstruction
Here’s my report (with links to as much as I could gather in a short time) on the VRM Workshop, over at the ProjectVRM blog. It was an outstanding event. Lots of projects and subjects were not only vetted with the whole group, but moved forward very effectively. Thanks to everybody who came, or participated… Continue reading
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Pulling the scales from our whys
Noah Brier has an interesting post titled Metcalfe’s Plateau, which he describes as — a place where the value of the network no longer increases with each additional node. In fact, thanks to spam (as deemed by me), the value of the network had started to decline, I was looking for other places to spend… Continue reading
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Discovering Columbus, cont’d
Flying out now. They have free wifi here. No spash page, no goofy PR. Just an open hot spot. Or a bunch of them. A major high five for that to the CMH folks. Continue reading
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ROFLFP
At ROFLCON, this time for more than a few minutes. Observations… I can’t post a question using the question tool. I’m at a panel on fame, and I don’t know any of the panelists. (They are, in fact, moot of 4chan, Randall Munroe, and Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. They are arranged according to size:… Continue reading
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Living Lessig
Listening to, and blogging, Lessig live from the Ames Courtroom here at Harvard, as part of the Berkman@10 celebration. Lessig was here at the founding. Some public notes from his talk… There are two and a half doctors for every drug representative. Story: He disqualified himself as a geek by asking a question about law… Continue reading
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When serving intention outperforms recruiting attention
Life in the Vast Lane — What lives past the Web 2.0 bubble is my EOF essay in the February Linux Journal. One sample: In the long run, there’s going to be a lot more money in helping demand find supply than in helping supply find (or create) demand — simply because the efficiencies… Continue reading
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Scattering words
People ask why I don’t blog as much as I used to. One answer is that I write as much, but I just don’t do as much of it here. I’ve been blogging more at Linux Journal, in addition to writing for the magazine. (The March issue just arrived. In it are eight pieces of… Continue reading
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Is Google selling out to the GOP?
… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it? Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release: As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP’s online presence with new… Continue reading
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Live lunch
I’m at the weekly luncheon series at Berkman, which will be webcast live. Today’s speaker is Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Fellow here at Harvard, and a journalism researcher with the New York Times’ Beijing bureau. More here. An excerpt: Michael will address the question: what is the result when decentralized and democratized Internet… Continue reading
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Making Rules, II
So many comments, so little time. I have to run to a bus in the rain shortly. So I’ll respond to just one: Don Dodge’s. Yes, it’s true that “consumers sometimes forget the bargain they made in exchange for the free services”. But it’s also true that almost nobody reads Facebook’s “Terms of Service“, much… Continue reading