Berkman
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Shootings up
Painted Cave. Lava Falls Trail. Uinkaret Volcanic Field. Nat Friedman. Denver International Airport. Sarah Lacy. Rainsford Island. Dorney Lake. David Boies. A peak above a glacier. Rim of the World Highway. Elena Kagan. Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Lake Havasu. Berneray, North Uist. Spectacle Island. San Gorgonio Mountain. River Nith. Paul Trevithick. Dumont Dunes. Tunitas Creek.… Continue reading
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Freedom, Independence and Data
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. — Thomas Jefferson Near the start of his Institutional Corruption talk the other day, Larry Lessig sourced the quote above, from Thomas Jefferson. Larry was making a point: that the Framers were interested in personal independence,… Continue reading
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Lessig on Dependence and Independence
First, Larry Lessig gives some of the best sermons in academia. Or anywhere. He is so freaking good. That Larry’s a master presentationist is secondary to his excellence in the art of homiletics, in the sense that Ray Charles’ piano mastery was secondary to his transcendent skills as a singer, a composer, a performer. Instituional… Continue reading
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Whose Side(wiki) Are You On?
What are we to make of Sidewiki? Is it, as Phil Windley says, a way to build the purpose-centric Web? Or is it, as Mike Arrington suggests, the latest way to “deface” websites? The arguments here were foreshadowed in the architecture of the Web itself, the essence of which has been lost to history —… Continue reading
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Fee Culture vs. Free Culture
Allan Gregory (a 3rd year law student and my summer intern at the Berkman Center) and I have spent a lot of time this summer looking at the history of copyright and royalties, mostly in respect to music. What I’ve noticed in the course of this work is how much commercial interests of one kind… Continue reading
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Thinking past the I-I boundary
For the form of life we call business, we are at a boundary between eras. For biological forms of life, the most recent of these is the K-T boundary between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic Eras. The Mezozoic Era ended when Earth was struck by an object that left a crater 110 miles wide and… Continue reading
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Because advertising encourages Alzheimer’s
I dunno why the New York Times appeared on my doorstep this morning, along with our usual Boston Globe (Sox lost, plus other news) — while our Wall Street Journal did not. (Was it a promo? There was no response envelope or anything. And none of the neighbors gets a paper at all, so it… Continue reading
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Soon to be a major motion picture
Over at the ProjectVRM blog: Dawn of the Living Infrastructure. Continue reading
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Quotetrain #1
… customers are so empowered that they don’t feel especially empowered. The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. — David Weinberger, from the new Introduction to 10th Anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto. That’s from the first of eight new chapters.… Continue reading
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An opportunity for the AP
It helps to recognize that the Associated Press is exactly what its name denotes: an association of presses. Specifically, newspapers. Fifteen hundred of them. Needless to say, newspapers are having a hard time. (Hell, I gave them some, myself, yesterday.) So we might cut them a little slack for getting kinda testy and paranoid. Reading… Continue reading
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Cluetrain Chugs Again
I think this may be the first time I’m listed first on anything alphabetical. The S in my surname usually puts me near the back of the aphabetical bus; but with Weinberger and Zittrain’s help, I’m listed first. Cool. I also love the early-60s design and typeface. That title “So How’s Utopia Working Out For… Continue reading
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#Cluetrain @10
Ten years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto was a website that had been up for a couple of months — long enough to create a stir and get its four authors a book deal. By early June we had begun work on the book, which would wrap in August and come out in January. So at… Continue reading
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New Innerface
Sorry I’ve been quiet. Let’s see… I’ve only blogged on 12 days this month. A new low for me, I’m sure. There are several reasons, all good. The new one, though, is that I’m hunkering down on a book. For the first time, ever. Not easy for me. I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner.… Continue reading
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First VRM West Coast Workshop: 15-16 May 2009
We’re a little more than a month away from The first ProjectVRM West Coast Workshop. It will will take place on Friday-Saturday 15-16 May, 2009 in Palo Alto. Graciously providing space is SAP Labs which is a beautiful facility at 1410 Hillview Street in Palo Alto. That’s up in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley and… Continue reading
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Saving the Globe From its World of Hurt
One of the geeks here at the Berkman Center walked into a room recently and started poking his index finger down on a newspaper that was laying on the table, as if expecting it to do something electronic. “This isn’t working,” he said. So true, in so many ways. Take for example the Boston Globe, New… Continue reading
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After the advertising bubble bursts
Thesis #74 of The Cluetrain Manifesto says, “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” We wrote that in 1999, when everybody thought that advertising was going to be THE model for businesses on the Internet. The crash came less than a year later. Then the next bubble came, and this time everybody thought (surprise!)… Continue reading
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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