HighTouch Book Club Next Read: delete

Our next read will be, delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Princeton University Press, 2009). A review from John Seely Brown, USC:

Delete is, ironically, a book you will not forget It provides a sweeping but well-balanced account of the challenges we face in a world where our digital traces are saved for life. These issues transcend just issues of privacy but go to the heart of how our society and we as individuals function, remember, and learn. I highly recommend this most informative and delightful book.

The book was just released two weeks ago, and they had plenty of copies at my local Barnes and Noble. I'm off to a conference this week, but plan to get started reading almost immediately. I probably won't post any book notes to FriendFeed until next weekend at the earliest.

I do hope you'll join me.

Voicemail has become completely useless

Image via Wikipedia

Outside the flow==dead! Is voicemail getting old?

A recent study by the marketing research firm Opinion Research Corp. found that cell-phone users, who are under 30, are four times more likely to respond within minutes to text messages than to voicemail.

Google Voice has put it back in the flow a bit by converting voicemails to texts. But, I get so few of these that it hardly matters.

The stark reality-- leaving me a voicemail is next to useless if you have any expectations of reaching me. I suspect I'm not unique in this regard.

This blogger likes the FTC's new regulations

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From Fast Company: FTC Sticks to Its Regulations as Blogger Backlash Builds

Today, the Federal Trade Commission responded to an "open letter" from online advertisers that asked for the commission's newly updated guidelines to be scrapped because they purportedly "muzzle social media" and, thus, inhibit the freeflow of ideas.

This blogger isn't the least bit offended by the FTC's new regulations guidelines. Articles (and letters) that pretend to speak for the 15.5 million bloggers as if we were united in a single voice annoy me. The FTC's new regulation guidelines mandate transparency. Some of us think this is a hell of a good idea. If you have nothing to hide then there's not a single thing in these regulations guidelines to concern you.

Is it a bad thing that the FTC isn't treating all media the same? Probably. This reminds me of when my teenage children would ask to go to a party. We as parents would do our requisite due-diligence, and when the situation warranted we'd say no. Then we'd get, "But, everyone else is going." And this is supposed to matter? Who gives a crap about the others-- we need to focus on keeping our own house in order.

It's a shame that this has to be regulated. It's also a shame that some people are unethical. Most of us are smart enough to see right through the purchased blog posts, but many of us are not. I'm thinking honesty in our writing makes a lot of sense. I'm one who thinks it's time that the unethical among us come clean. If it requires government regulation-- so be it. I hardly consider this a threat to free speech.

In the interest of transparency I must declare that I take nothin from no-one.

Social networking and social class

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From CNN: Does your social class determine your online social network?

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

This is supposed to surprise us? If the opposite were true I would be surprised. Why would we expect our online world to not reflect the same sort of social concerns that we see in the physical world? We're going to leave all this baggage behind by waving a social media magic wand?

There is a lesson here. If you value the richness to be found in diversity, you might want to branch out of your comfortable social networking spaces. Get out on the edge a little bit. If the only place you ever go is Facebook you're not going to find much diversity. Your world is more likely to look like a suburban strip-mall than a vibrant suk.

I find little conversation concerning diversity in social networks. The conversation needs to be elevated to another level. If all our followers and friends are just like us our world is going to be a bit myopic and boring.

Google Wave: Embracing the chaos

Image by curiouslee via Flickr

Geez...  From Slate, It's Just Fancy Talk: The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.  I might buy that if he ever talked about what was hard to use. He never mentions anything about using Google Wave that is difficult. Instead the whole article is about his own self-consciousness.

Chatting on Wave is like talking to an over curious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you're typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug.

Here's some news, we don't type in "normal conversations" either. Most of the time we use our voice, and sometimes we have difficulty organizing our thoughts, using proper grammar, and from laughing at inappropriate times. So if you don't want to type-- pick up the phone.

Google Wave is more like a normal conversation than conventional chatting. There is something to be learned from watching our fellow paddlers organize their thoughts. Right now, we're all paddlers trying to learn this new way of constructing knowledge. We're going to have to learn to embrace the messiness. That so many are freaked by Wave tells me that there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.

I'm sticking with  my original assessment-- it's going to be huge.

Ray Charles on learning

Clara Ward via last.fm

There is an incredible chapter in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind where James Boyle discusses a single song by Ray Charles, "I Got a Woman" which became a number one hit for Charles in 1955, and is widely credited with launching a whole new genre of music:

The Legendary K.O. samples Kanye West, who uses a fragment from Ray Charles, who may have taken material from Will Lamartine Thompson or, more likely, from Clara Ward (who herself borrowed from a gospel standard). The chain of borrowing I describe here has one end in the hymns and spirituals of the early 1900s and the other in the twenty-first century’s chaotic stew of digital sampling, remix, and mashup. Along the way, we have the synthesis of old and the invention of new musical genres—often against the wishes of those whose work is serving as the raw material... Far from building everything anew, these musicians seem quite deliberately to base their work on fragments taken from others...

This definitely had my interest and I was doing some searching when I came across this interview with Ray Charles by Johnny Carson:



Johnny asks a great question at 2:43 of the interview, "You haven't done any rap yet have you?" and Charles tells Johnny how we think, create, and build upon the works of others. This is how we construct new knowledge. Sense-making in action. And of course, the way Charles learned would probably be illegal today. His work would be driven underground. He'd still find a way to create just not in a way that the whole of society would benefit. The exact opposite effect from what copyright was intended to enable.

QOTD: Dave Snowden on IT departments

I found this in the Dave Snowden podcast that I posted about yesterday: KnowTech 2009 Keynote

I could take 40% of the cost out of any IT department tomorrow by stopping them managing things they don't neeed to manage anymore.

That is so true. Control-freaks aside, why do we have such a difficult time with letting go and moving on?

This little thing called fair use

I'm so tired of hearing these people complain about Google "stealing" their content: Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch said. "But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators—the people in this hall—who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph."

Of course, he's just blowing hot air. He can stop them tomorrow. He has two courses of action:

1. <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
2. Take them to court for violating copyright.

He will lose, as we have this little thing called fair use under Section 107 of the U.S Copyright Act. But, if he really believes they are "co-opting" his content he should take them to court. Good luck with that!

He has two things he can do immediately, and he has failed to act. He'd rather pontificate. So what is his real objective? I suspect he wants to litigate this through the media, and they will make another run at our legislators to further erode our fair use rights with more bad laws (e.g. DMCA). They are not to be trusted.

Dave Snowden keynote (podcast) from KnowTech 2009

I started listening to this Dave Snowden podcast as I wanted to hear what he had to say about "semi-constrained signification" (more on this later, perhaps). This is a great podcast, and it's a must listen for anyone who thinks they're in the content business (bottled knowledge).

Explicit knowledge has no utility what-so-ever without a tacit presence. The idea that you can take human knowledge and render it into some form of explicit information has been one of the things which has gone badly wrong, and is one of the reasons why knowledge management is on a major downturn at the moment worldwide.

Great stuff: KnowTech 2009 Keynote. When you have finished listening you'll have a better understanding as to why engagement around information objects is not an option.

Nobel Peace Prize photo licensed Creative Commons Share Alike

How cool is this? The Nobel Foundation uses a Creative Commons Share Alike licensed photo. What's even more cool is that the Obama transition team chose to use a Creative Commons license. If there was ever a time to follow the leader... I hope we're reaching a point where all-rights-reserved is considered inappropriate (and evil).

Questioning copyright-- is this evil still necessary?

Great video of Lawrence Lessig speaking to scientists at Tokyo University on October 5, 2009 (with thanks to @ethnobot for sending it my way):

The bearer of this certificate, trained in a field of science, is hereby officially entitled to question whether copyright law as currently crafted makes sense for science.

Lawrence Lessig
Professor of Law
Harvard University

What's Google Wave going to kill?

There are a zillion conversations going on about what current sites or functions that Google Wave will be killing-off: Twitter, Friendfeed, Content Management Systems, Learning Management Systems (we can only hope), email, blah blah blah... Let me be the millionth person to say, all-or-none-of-the-above. Who really knows?

I tried Wave from my iPhone this morning and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked, and how easy it was to get around. To me, this kind of puts a nail in "the interface is so difficult and complex that my grandmother will never use it" argument. If it works on an iPhone how difficult can it be?

When I first fired-up Wave up on the iPhone I was presented with this screen:

I absolutely loved that message, and clicked on go ahead. I logged into Wave with no problem and was presented with my Wave inbox. I then had the tough decision, what to do next? I opted for posting a tweet that would once again rub-in the fact that I had a Wave account, and was getting to have all this fun while the rest of you waited impatiently for your invites. With little effort I was able to navigate to my personal folder and selected my wave for sending stuff to Twitter (a wave that includes the Tweety bot). It was that easy:

It was here, however, that it failed to work. I couldn't get a cursor to go in the Tweety text box. So I couldn't get an iPhone keyboard to enter my tweet. I could place text elsewhere in the blip but not where I needed it. Regardless, I did see the potential for what Wave might become. I also knew that I was using something that I had been cautioned was perhaps not ready for prime time so my expectations were not too high. It was actually much better than I had anticipated.

I'm thinking Wave has the potential to become your interface to just about everything. People are busy building bots to talk to just about every service you can imagine. For many of us we'll be using Wave in custom applications, and we may not even realize we're using it. For others, the native Wave interface could become the place where we spend the bulk of our online time. It definitely needs to get better, but for such a new application what's there right now isn't at all bad. I can definitely see the potential.

I've already been a part of many conversations where people are saying that Wave is a time sinkhole and/or productivity killer. It wouldn't be a sinkhole if conversations and other compelling things weren't taking place there. This is happening with only a small number of users. I can't imagine what this will be like when the folks in my social network all have accounts. When everyone is using it, and has it open all the time (like I do now) Wave has the potential to be our gateway to the entire Internet. There will be no reason to go anywhere else.

Yet another academic research wiki

Image via Wikipedia

I've said it before, Mediawiki proficiency will be an essential job skill for academics of all flavors going forward. It should be a part of every graduate education program.

So it makes me smile to see that yet another MediaWiki research site launch today. This one funded by the Hewlett Foundation:

Today, representatives from the new nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the opening of their website, http://acawiki.org, to the public. AcaWiki’s semantic-wiki based website allows scholars, students, and bloggers to easily post summaries, and discuss academic papers online. All content posted to the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Also note the Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license. Commercial and derivative works allowed. Just give due credit to those you borrow from. It's so nice to see so many academics that get it.