openpolitics.com

Experts in the audience

Yesterday evening while I was watching Donald Rumsfeld's speech, at the Council on Foreign Relations on C-SPAN, three things struck me:

1. Pete Peterson:

   "I've been informed that this occasion is also being webcast. Someday I'm going to have to figure out what that means exactly, but it's apparently very significant" (audience laughs) (21:50/53:56)

2. Secretary Rumsfeld:

   "I find when I come to New York, there's always somebody in the room who's the world's leading export on a subject that I get asked about..
   and so I'd like you to identify yourself right now... All right then forever hold your peace...
   I am told, and it's not authoritative.." (28:30/53:56)

   

   This was in preface to his answer about missing Iraqi museum items, and given the context, a excellent piece of self deprecation.

3. Audience Members with questions were asked to introduce themselves. All of them professed an institutional affiliation except one:
   1. American Securities LP
   2. former Senator, Indiana 3rd District
   3. Morgan Stanley
   4. PBS
   5. journalist

The journalist was pressed for her credentials (she was a freelancer) and treated as an outsider. Her question wasn't even terribly biting-- what are you going to do to prevent people like Saddam from using the banking system to hide their assets-- but I got the sense that journalists were not welcome in the audience. (46:20/53:56.2)

This got me thinking about all the webloggers who are experts in their fields and how their expertise is presented and viewed.

• Politicians caught in controversy or ignorance fear expert opposition

Note

My Computer has access controls which prevent the public appropriation of real audio clips, but I was able to bring you this low quality screen shot by using the analogue hole (using my brother's Camera and tripod). #

Update

I was wrong about the whole access control thing. It is possible to make screenshot of realplayer; you just have to turn off hardware acceleration. (31 May 5:41 pm) #

Update (2011-09-01)

• Youtube Video of the Speech

Intellectual Property: Rented not Owned

What's the lesson to be learned from the success of Apple's Music Store? Is it the low price? Great UI? Security? Integration? Portablity?

Microsoft wants to duplicate all of these things, but the one thing they underestimate is the whole ownership thing. For all the talk about Property, they think IP rental is the next big thing.

I'm not opposed to business model experimentation, but as I've said before:

Don't expect people to take your moralizing about Intellectual Property very seriously if you insist on an IP Rental Scheme.

Related

• Jenny the Librarian: When Does "Own" Not Mean "Own"

Paul Martin: world's first big political blogger

Dave Winer pointed to a dark horse congressional canidate and a British MP who blog, but I haven't heard much about Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin, the leading candidate to succeed Prime Minister Chretien.

It's true that Paul's style isn't as informal as most bloggers, he doesn't update very often, and he doesn't have permalinks or RSS, but he is the first high-ranking government official to post.

Now I'm waiting for the university presidents. It's a group with a lot of potential.

I've seen the reports; now show me the weblogs!

Note:

I haven't "verified" my claim that Paul Martin is the highest ranking politician currently blogging, but Tim Bray's article about scholarship got me thinking about fact checking.

My Conclusion: Unlike laws, which are assumed to be constitutional unless proven otherwise, weblog posts are not assumed to be true until after they've passed though the deliberative process of the blogosphere. (updated May 24, 11:21 am)

Hypertext Progress Stalled, but on verge of BreakOut

Bob DuCharme has interesting articles about link typing and Shepard's Citations. He says hypertext has not advanced. I think perfectionism is the cause of our mediocrity.

Hypertext experts tend to be purists rather than pragmatists. Take Xanadu is as a case study. Ted Nelson has a Grand Hypertext Vision that he's been working on since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the web won with an evolutionary "worse is better" design.

I had similar Grand Visions for a my openreference project, but it's become apparent that weblogs and xml are the path to better hypertext.

an Evolutionary Approach #

I've taken my brother's elsewhere links as inspiration for an simple link management system. Here's a few advantages:

• Simple: uses an existing product: Movable Type & bookmarklets
• Can be Published at a URL and syndicated
• Easy to include in other files. Example: My navbar [output] [template]
• server-based: stored in a relational database, replaces browser and machine dependent bookmarks
• easy to search and categorize

Link Classification is Moderation #

At first Categories will be Chaos. It will pain those used to controlled vocabularies, and disappoint those hoping for logically structured semantics; but subjective classification was actually a feature of file sharing.

The other thing to notice about link classification is that just as:

• Trackback implements notification; but is really distributed comments
• Openreference implements link management; but is really distributed moderation.

Take an example from kottke's remainder links:

• url:   http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments-voteresults.pl?506790
• categories:   brilliant google parody

Or imagine the slashdot categories:   insightful interesting informative offtopic flaimbait

Distributed Voting #

Companies have tried to establish web site rating systems, but distributed ratings will not work unless content and counting are decoupled so that:

• Voters can establish a reputation, using their own domain
• Counting implementations can compete
• Vote casting methods can be innovated

Doc Searls provoked my imagination:

"imagine what would happen if mute buttons on remote controls delivered "we don't want to hear this" messages directly back to advertisers."

Broadcast networks and web sites are not about to design a method to hear the audience's "boos"; and it would be comical to establish an engineering task force for such a purpose.

Instead I propose a RESTian approach

Notification #

• Proposed Syntax for notifying publishers that do not implement Trackback:

  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/weekinreview/18NUNB.html
  	?vote=boo
  	&voter=http:/www.openpolitics.com/tim/
  	&categories=uninformed
  	&commentURL=http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000390.html
  

• get may not be a contract, but it is can be notification of an insult or a compliment
• Eventually some managers will start to ask their techies to check their server logs to see what people think of their site. A few of the results may be useful, but notification is not as important as publication.

Publication #

• on the internet, secret ballot pinging is mob rule
• If you stand behind your opinions, publish them in a machine readable format.
• RSS seems like a good format. I'd like to hear your schema suggestions

Aggregation #

• Vote counting on the internet has it's own forms of "hanging chad" problems. The best way to deal with them is allow anyone to write their own vote counting program. Blogdex and Daypop are two existing implementations. Richer voting content would simply encourage more implementations and greater quality.

Correction

I while back, I got a trackback from Bob DuCharme. His writing is much more nuanced that the words I put in his mouth. #

Here's the actual text:

In fact, none of the taxonomies I know of have improved on the one described twenty years ago by Randall Trigg in chapter four of his University of Maryland Ph.D. dissertation *

In one sense, the stickers they produced in 1873 were already more sophisticated than web links, because if more than one case had cited the same case, the sticker for that case added a one-to-many link to it. *

Cyveillance "Honor Roll"

It looks as though I made the Cyveillance^® "Honor Roll"

• March 1: Reframing the Intellectual Property Debate
  • link: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cmusings/2003/03/03/
  • link: http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/03/01/
  • Cyveillance bot hits:
    • March 7
    • March 9
    • March 18
• April 10: Patriobfuscate
  • link: http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/04/11
  • Cyveillance bot hits:
    • April 16

How to tell

Use the grep search utility on your web server logs:

grep '63.148.99' access_log > myResults.txt

Note:

For those of you who don't read the articles, the "Honor Roll" is not a Cyveillance^® product, but an "anti-brand".