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| Wednesday, April 27, 2005 |
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For learning out loud 
| | I'm auditing an evening class here at the Harvard Law School. There's a site online that explains the class, but I don't want to interrupt the class to find out where it is. So I'll just take some notes... |
| | Most conversations move toward crisis or opportunity: one of those two boxes. |
| | More people read and cite articles online than ones offline... Vision of the Internet as the Library of Alexandria... There's a effort to lead the movement of body of knowlege (now offline) to the Web, where autodidacts (like yours truly) can have access to it. |
| | What makes an article the right unit for scholarly communication? Good question. An article can be a living document. Why not blog it? Why not make it into a wiki.... You can take the unit of communication and change it... |
| | We don't have to take anything for granted... Optimizing scholarly communication. |
| | It's really the emergence of the blogosphere as a new and exciting part of the revolution in publishing... Long tail economics... The marginal value of scholarly information can find its markets... |
| | Looking for a test case for studying disintermediation/remediation story... |
| | You can take apart the publication function. What roles do the publishers play? They have a certification function. A branding function. A dissemination function. Preservation and archiving, though they haven't been good at that. Online it's a big issue. We can break them all apart. You can have a registry for new ideas... |
| | The certification function... Create overlay journals. Don't send it to an editor; just post it online and send peer reviewers to it. They grade it and can choose to be publishers as well. |
| | Version control. If your article is a living document, what version of it is canonical? |
| | If you take the long view of scholarly communication, we know there's been a market for the duration. Since papyrus. Aristotle. The printing press. Is this as big a revolution as we talked about ten years ago? Could be. (How could it not?) |
| | Copyright. To promote science... What was the content the framers were concerned about when they brought up copyright in the constitution? They were scholars. They cared about knowledge, not entertainment, not games. They cared about scholarly works, and the costs of disseminating it. |
| | Copyright may be impeding science as we understand that word. A revisitation to what we mean by copyright. Raise the issue of funding this stuff on the one hand and having libraries pay the cost of acquisition on the other. |
| | Authors aren't in this for the royalties. Nor are peer reviewers. So the justification for copyright falls away. |
| | Although scholars don't care as much about compensation (as say entertainment dudes), they care about attribution. They want to control derivative works. Ray Patterson, in telling copyright history, reviews this topic. |
| | Even if the economic justification falls away, along with the distribution justification, the attribution and integrity interests remain. And we have to deal with that in any revisions in the law. |
| | John just put me on the spot, asking for some dialog between Michael and myself, about the issues I just blogged about. Couldn't blog and talk at the same time. |
| | John just put David R. Johnson on the same spot. Been hanging with David since the earlier event today here. |
| | The system, while broken, is not completely dysfunctional. |
| | There is this attribution and integrity interest on the part of the authors that needs to be recognized. That's why a bottom-up solution needs to happen. The top-down needs carrots rather than sticks. Making sure there's no prejudice in the tenure process, for example, against scholars who chose to publish through Open Access. |
| | It's ridiculous that authors don't fight more copyright battles... that they don't scratch out the onerous clauses in agreements. |
| | Says here that Law may be the ideal low hanging fruit: the first discipline to break from the pack, and endorse open access. |
| | Michael Carroll has a number of posts there. Very interesting stuff. I'm wondering why the class doesn't seem more energized about the cause here. |
| | Jonathan Zittrain just talked about the incentives of writing papers for an audience larger than a professor who throws the paper away later — of writing, essentially, for more than a grade. Instead, write a paper half the length of the one you were going to write anyway... and spend half your time editing somebody else's paper... (the student doesn't know who the editor is)... and the end product will be a wikipedia of sorts. Public and still editable. Nice idea. If I understand it right, which I may not. IANALStudent. (Speaking of peer review, I'll never forget Craig Burton's Droppin' Bloggin' Packets.) |
| | So, by the way (I first wrote "say" instead of "way") quotes are not verbatim. Some may be. I dunno. I'm taking notes here. Sure to be full of mistakes. Just hoping to get the gist across. |
| | Also, I'm just digging taking part in this thing, and reporting live. I get the sense that Law really will lead scholarly publishing into the, um, present. |
| | An aside. What's being talked about here, it seems to me, is caring about the larger role of both scholarship and scholarly works in the world — and of moving one part of scholarship out of sports (working for the grade alone) and into constructive work in the world. I do believe this is where school is headed, inevitably, in general. |
Pressure points
All-pod radio
| | Infinity Broadcasting on Wednesday said one of its San Francisco radio stations will carry programming created exclusively by listeners using podcasting technology... |
| | Beginning on Wednesday, users can upload their podcasts for free at http://www.kyouradio.com where it will be eligible to be selected for broadcast on San Francisco's 1550 KYCY-AM, which has been one Infinity's underperforming stations. |
| | KYOURADIO is the first radio station in the world to get all of its programming from podcasts. Everyday we'll feature new, innovative and cutting edge programs produced by people like you. Your original thoughts and sounds will be broadcast in San Francisco on the revolutionary 1550 KYCY-AM and streamed worldwide at KYOURADIO.com. |
| | We envision KYOURADIO as a station for the people. We think you have something to say and we want to hear it. You're out there creating, riffing, ranting and raving and Infinity is going to give voice to your vision. In fact, we want to share it with the world. KYOURADIO will no doubt evolve over time, but our intention is to make the experience as real as possible. Input from the world at large will provide lots of inspiration and plenty of constructive criticism. |
| | Doesn't everyone have a streak of genius waiting to be heard? Welcome to OPEN SOURCE RADIO. |
| | KYOU isn't a big station, but it's still a cool thing. The transmitter is a familiar three-tower landmark alongside Highway 101 in Belmont, just North of the Ralston exit. The signal is 10000 watts day and night, with two patterns, both pointing Northwest, toward San Francisco. The night pattern has a deep null to the Southeast, toward San Jose. (I just think it's really cool that FCCInfo.com lets you know this stuff.) |
Talk about piracy
| | Something has hijacked the RSS feed URLs for every single channel. So every time the channels in this group check for updates (that's once per hour), it's going to this hijacker URL. And what's happening then, I wonder? |
| | I was in the same hotel, but I didn't have the same experience. |
| | I did notice that I couldn't use my company's mail server (though I could use my own). Not sure what that was about, either. |
Shining
| | Yesterday, the blogs team was officially recognized by Scott McNealy and rest of the executive leadership team as one of 15 recipients of Chairman's awards. The title of our award was "blogs.sun.com: Humanizing Sun, Changing Perceptions and Re-Enlisting Champions". |
I'll drink (to) that
Clarifrication
Tablecast
| | I'm at the Gruter-Berkman Roundtable Workshop at Harvard, which is being webcast live. I see I'm on a 2:15pm panel: Evolved Values: Freedom, Trust, and Transparency: Preconditions for Markets and Civil Society in Physical and Digital Domain |
Why more rain on a flatter world turns the mainstream into a braided river
| | Older people, whom Mr Murdoch calls "digital immigrants", may not have noticed, but young "digital natives" increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for "web logs", these are online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post. Whereas 56% of Americans haven't heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup. |
| | Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. |
Starting to notice
Blogging back on a good show
| | Doc Searls gave a great finishing keynote, talking about why we shouldn't talk about content, consumers, audiences - because blogs are "writing" and should be thought of as a form of speech (which can be free) rather than media (which needs to be managed). |
| | Slides were involved. Those will go up soon. |
| | Bonus link: Lloyd's podcast of his lunch interviews with a bunch of people. |
Why Irish Eyes are Smiling
| | Berie Goldbach: Sex and the Irish. Refers to a story by Helen Murray in the Tribune (which appears to have approximately 100% paid content, hence no link to the story) about a survey on sex in Ireland. The top pull-quote from the story: We like sex and plenty of it, with lots of different partners, oh, and a few toys to give it that extra edge. And we're not averse to a bit on the side either, if the opportunity is there. |
For Square Wi-Fi
| | I'll probably never know for sure why the Wi-Fi worked selectively yesterday in the airport lounge at Charles DeGaulle. (Though Bernie Goldbach has noticed the same thing.) But it's clear why it works perfectly here at the Harvard Square Hotel in Boston: it's free and uncomplicated. |
| | That's one reason I'm staying here. The other is that it's the cheapest hotel I found. Also the most convenient for a day of meetings at Harvard due to start in several hours (it's 4:48am right now... 9:48am in Paris, which is why my body wants to head down to the street, sit in a sidewalk cafe and enjoy a petit dejeuner). |
Great food, bad atmosphere
| | One thing I won't miss about Paris is the ubiquitous cigarette smoke. When I opened my suitcase here in my hotel, six time zones west of France, the room filled with the odor of an old ash tray. Same thing happened again when I unzipped my hanging clothes bag to pull out a shirt. The smell even penetrated the shirts hanging in plastic bags from the cleaners. |
| | Obviously you get used to it. I grew up in New Jersey in the 50s and 60s, when smoking was at least as ubiquitous as it remains in France. I remember disliking it, but not smelling it on everything. |
| | One more reason to love Santa Barbara, where the amount of smoking rounds down to negligible. |
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