Latest News from David Weinberger

The Net as Paradigm

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazon, check the non-Amazon sellers listed there) which [...]

Goodies from Wolfram

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:17:05 EDT

Some wonderfully interesting stuff from Stephen Wolfram today. Here’s his Reddit IAMA. A post about what’s become of a New Kind of Science in the past ten years. And a part two, about reactions to NKS. And here’s a post from a couple of months ago that I missed that is, well, amazing. All I’ll [...]

Awesome James Bridle

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:36:10 EDT

I am the lucky fellow who got to have dinner with James Bridle last night. I am a big fan of his brilliance and humor. And of James himself, of course. I ran into him at the NEXT conference I was at in Berlin. His in fact was the only session I managed to get [...]

Newly de-classified diseases

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:19:27 EDT

The DSM — the psychiatric tome that lists diagnosable (and thus billable) disorders — is being overhauled. Famously, in an earlier edition, homosexuality stopped being counted as a disease. I have some hopes that some illnesses of the Internet will be formally recognized: Internet Conceptual Infantilization: Sufferers believe what they read on the Internet simply [...]

[everythingismisc] Scaling Japan

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:03:38 EDT

MetaFilter popped up a three-year-old post from Derek Sivers about how streeet addresses work in Japan. The system does a background-foreground duck-rabbit Gestalt flip on Western addressing schemes. I’d already heard about it — book-larnin’ because I’ve never been to Japan — but the post got me thinking about how things scale up. What we [...]

[roflcon] Microfame

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:26:12 EDT

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. Matt Oswald drew Me Gusta. He’s now an illustrator because of the drawing that made him famous. Nate Stern is Huh Guy. He [...]

[roflcon] Syrian memes

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:07:52 EDT

I’ve come in late to Ethan Zuckerman’s panel on worldwide memes. I heard the fabulous Brazilian discussion from my spot in the back of the room. Now I have seat and anasqtiesh, a Syrian blogger, is talking about the importance o memes in Syria’s repressive environment. For example, as soon as Assad used germs as [...]

Impacted by conflicted

Thu, 03 May 2012 08:11:06 EDT

For me, “impacted” refers to an unpleasant dental condition, and cannot be used as a verb. So, given my grammatical self-righteousness on this point, I was chastened to read a column written by William Safire sometime in 1989-1991 (in his anthology In Love with Norma Loquendi) criticizing the use of “conflict” as a verb. He [...]

[2b2k] Pyramid-shaped publishing model results in cheating on science?

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:09:05 EDT

Carl Zimmer has a fascinating article in the NYTimes, which is worth 1/10th of your NYT allotment. (Thank you for ironically illustrating the problem with trying to maintain knowledge as a scarce resource, NYT!) Carl reports on what may be a growing phenomenon (or perhaps, as the article suggests, the bugs of the old system [...]

You score this movie

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 10:44:33 EDT

An indie movie launching in September is holding a contest to find four songs for four scenes that need musical backing. The movie is We Made This Movie from Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman (creators of the TV show Ed; Rob is the Late Night with David Letterman producer). Because of the theme of the [...]

[2b2k] Libraries are platforms?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:28:02 EDT

I’m at the DPLA Plenary meeting, heading toward the first public presentation — a status report — on the prototype DPLA platform we’ve been building at Berkman and the Library Innovation Lab. So, tons of intellectual stimulation, as well as a fair bit of stress. The platform we’ve been building is a software platform, i.e., [...]

A pleasant experience with the TSA

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:00:06 EDT

They say the way to succeed as a blogger is to use shocking headlines. Now you have mine. And it’s true. This morning at the Seattle airport, I had a very pleasant experience going through Securty, and no, I am not referring to an especially loving pat-down. Because I am a Special Person, I got [...]

[2b2k][everythingismisc]“Big data for books”: Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:28:31 EDT

(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliographic information about virtually all the 12M works in its 73 libraries. This is (I believe) the largest and most comprehensive such contribution. The metadata, in the [...]

[2b2] Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50 years later

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:25:19 EDT

The Chronicle of Higher Ed asked me to write a perspective on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions since this is the 50th year since it was published. It’s now posted.

[2b2k] Astounding two-minute video edit from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager missions – Only if you love Saturn, Jupiter, and, you know, the Universe

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:24:06 EDT

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

The semi-transparent Prisoner’s Dilemma

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:44:38 EDT

A British game show that I never heard offers a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As the host explains at the beginning, if both contestants agree to split the pot, they split it. If one chooses to split and the other to steal, the stealer gets the whole thing. If they both choose to steal, [...]

Neelie Kroes: European Commission’s voice for the open Internet

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:35:28 EDT

Neelie Kroes is becoming one of the open Internet’s most influential supporters. Kroes is Vice President of the European Commission and is responsible for its “digital agenda.” At the Forum d’Avignon I was at (see here and here) she was just about the only person in a positon of power — economic or regulatory — [...]

Media reports its reaction as news…again

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:41:08 EDT

Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip That’s the headline in USAToday. It’s typical of the news coverage of the Secret Service scandal before the President arrived in Colombia. Let me fix that for you: Media’s decision to focus on the Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip The eclipse has only to do with how the [...]

Timbuktu librarians, scholars, and citizens preserving ancient documents and Islamic heritage

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:45:13 EDT

On April 1, rebels overran Timbuktu, so, according to a Reuters article, librarians, scholars, and citizens in this important site of Islamic learning are hiding away thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts. “Estimates for the total number of historic documents in the city, some of them from the 13th century, range from 150,000 to five times that [...]

[2b2k] Too Big to Know’s network

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:03:00 EDT

Valdis Krebs has posted a map of books that Amazon says people who bought 2b2k also bought, and then the web of books that are one degree away from those books. It’s interesting to parse as you try to discern what the shared interests are. And I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t picked up on it [...]

Erin McKeown on copyright ambivalence

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:22:00 EDT

Musician and Berkman Fellow Erin McKeown has written a wonderful post expressing her ambivalence about copyright. Her heart and her brain are on the side of copyreasonableness, and thus she reacts strongly against the insane copyright totalitarianism that has come to be taken as obvious, normal, and even righteous. But then this happened: In 2003, [...]

Digital Differences – a Pew survey

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:36:51 EDT

Highlighted results from a new Pew Internet poll (taken directly from their pr email): One in five American adults does not use the internet. Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 [...]

[2b2k] The power of extreme diversity

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:12:01 EDT

Brian Millar has a brief article in FastCompany about his company’s strategy of consulting “extreme customers” to get insight into existing products and ideas for new ones. He writes, “You can learn a lot about mobile phones by talking to a power user. You can learn even more by talking to somebody who’s deliberately never [...]

When philanthropy gets personal

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:11:18 EDT

My friend Nathaniel James has a kickstarter-like project going in order to fund a 90-day tour gathering stories and information about “New Giving.” (Yes, this is a self-reflective New Giving project.) He’s got five days left to reach the tipping point so that the project actually gets funded. Nathaniel is a smart, sincere, good-hearted person, [...]

[2b2k] Editorials and echo chambers

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:25:47 EDT

From a New Yorker article (April 9, 2012) by Adam Gopnick on Camus: Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostely not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing…Not “Say this!” but “Sound this way!” is [...]

CFPB.gov goes open source

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:35:58 EDT

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — AKA “The Agency Elizabeth Warren Was Born to Lead” — has announced that its software will be open source, with rare exceptions for security, although “… we believe that, in general, hiding source code does not make the software safer”. The CFPB’s explanation of why it’s going the open [...]

Google Exodus: Passover told in social media

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:25:30 EDT

Culture of Hope

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:42:34 EDT

Forum d’Avignon is an annual get-together in France to talk about culture, by which most of the attendees (and especially President Sarkozy who came to give a speech) mean how they can squash the Internet and retain their stranglehold on culture. A little harsh? Maybe, but not entirely unfair. I went last year, and both [...]

Why? Does the Times have research that

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:22:51 EDT

Why? Does the Times have research that shows that when someone is denied access to her eleventh NYT article, she’s going to cave in and buy a subscription for $195/year? Because my informal market research — I sat myself in an airless room, asked myself some questions, and rewarded myself with m&m’s — indicates that [...]

Books by Friends: Write Hard, Die Free

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:04:11 EDT

Howard Weaver’s Write Hard, Die Free is a two-fisted memoir of how The Anchorage Daily News — a newspaper he helped found and then edited — went on to win two Pulitzer prizes and defeat the established major daily, which was, according to Howard, an oil industry mouthpiece. It’s an entertaining story of scoops, legwork, [...]

Reddit’s awesome crowd-sourced April Fools

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 11:18:27 EDT

Reddit’s Timeline lets you see reddits from the past and future. This is crowd-sourced humor, and whole bunches of it are pretty damn funny. Of course, some, not so much. Many of the posts are in jokes about Reddit — e.g., in the ’30s, someone posted “Ron Paul born – Great Depression to be ended [...]

[2b2k] The commoditizing and networking of facts

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:50:04 EDT

Ars Technica has a post about Wikidata, a proposed new project from the folks that brought you Wikipedia. From the project’s introductory page: Many Wikipedia articles contain facts and connections to other articles that are not easily understood by a computer, like the population of a country or the place of birth of an actor. [...]

The Gettysburg Principles for keeping your customers

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:25:59 EDT

I’ve got a post at the Harvard Business Review site about what I’m calling (not too seriously) The Gettysburg Principles. The point is that you can keep your customers buying from you if your business is of your customers, by your customers, and for your customers. “Of” means that your business is made up of [...]

[misc] Thesaurus of metaphors

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:08:51 EDT

Or maybe it’s a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. In any case, The Mind is a Metaphor you can look up metaphors by keyword and facet the results by date, genre, nationality, gender, etc. (Note that these are facets of the speaker, not of the metaphor.)

Kew Gardens adopts Web principles for real-world wayfinding

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:23:15 EDT

In a paper Natasha Waterson and Mike Saunders describe how Kew Botanical Gardens in England are adopting mobile technology to help visitors become “delightfully lost.” From the abstract: In October 2010, Kew Gardens commissioned an in-depth study of visitors’ motivations and information needs around its 300-acre site, with the express aim that it should guide [...]

What you see animates into what you get

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 10:00:32 EDT

I spent too much time yesterday debugging a table in the Wikipedia markup language (on a different Wikimedia wiki). This would have come in handy:

Birthday Girl: The Story

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 10:09:00 EDT

My friend Evelyn Walsh’s short story “Birthday Girl” is the Story of the Week at Narrative Magazine. It’s a carefully observed little tale of norms and ethics embodied in a sleep-deprived suburban mom’s desire to do the right thing by everyone. From my point of view, it’s about how difficult it is to negotiate a [...]

VisiCalc: The first killer app’s unveiling

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:02:42 EDT

VisiCalc was the first killer app. It became the reason people bought a personal computer. You can read a paper presented in 1979 by one of its creators, Bob Frankston, in which he explains what it does and why it’s better than learning BASIC. Yes, VisiCalc’s competitor was a programming language. (Here’s Bob reading part [...]

Harold Feld’s explanation of an FCC issue you probably are paying no attention but that is likely to determine the fate of telecommunications in ths US

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:49:50 EDT

In fact, Harold’s post is so long that I’m only half way through it, but I have to leave for a plane. In it he explains in some detail the history and ramifications of… well, here’s a taste from near the beginning: …Verizon graciously offered to buy out Cox’s AWS spectrum so that Cox could [...]

[2b2k] 14 reasons why the Britannica failed on paper

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:31:04 EDT

In the straight-up match between paper and Web, the Encyclopedia Britannica lost. This was as close to a sure thing as we get outside of the realm of macro physics and Meryl Streep movies. The EB couldn’t cover enough: 65,000 topics compared to the almost 4M in the English version of Wikipedia. Topics had to [...]

Those darn kids and their texts — and their not geolocating

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:22:08 EDT

Here’s Pew Internet’s bulleted summary of a new survey of teens and their texts: Texting continues to cement its place as the central communications tool of teen social life – the frequency and overall volume of texts are both up since 2009. Voice calling on both mobile phones and (in some circumstances) on landlines is [...]

Local libraries are the 99%

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:31:36 EDT

Yeah yeah, not everyone uses them. But they could. Libraries are a statement of a community’s commitment to the 99%.

Love thy neighbor by disrespecting his faith

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:13:33 EDT

My monthly column at Kmworld is about how the digital network has changed the basics of curation…. Here’s a sentence from the first paragraph of a long email solicitation I received today: Truth Unlocked: Keys to Reaching Your Muslim Neighbor (www.truthunlocked.org) is a project that we feel God inspired us to create to help Christians [...]

Berkman Buzz

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:32:01 EDT

This week’s Berkman Buzz Ethan Zuckerman unpacks ‘Kony 2012′ [link] The metaLAB introduces the world to Biblio, your new library friend [link] The CMLP explores the First Amendment issues surrounding the Fluke/Limbaugh incident [link] Mako Hill encourages greater communication about DRM [link] Aaron Shaw reviews a new paper on “wiki surveys” [link] A Global Voices [...]

Little Mac trick

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:10:00 EDT

I learned a little Mac trick a few weeks ago and find that it has saved me, oh, probably close to a full minute. More important, it keeps me from the annoyance of fiddling with Finder unnecessarily. Let’s say you’ve just finished working on a slide deck in Keynote — but the beauty of this [...]

Least likely Theory of Cheney ever

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:52:40 EDT

William Safire’s 1994 anthology of columns about language, In Love with Norma Loquendi, reprints a column from during the George W.H. Bush years about then Secretary of Defense Cheney’s over-use of the word “bogie.” The column begins with a reference to the devil being in the details, and it concludes (as was typical for Safire) [...]

Time for the Patent Office to move off of TIFF?

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:36:43 EDT

Look up a patent at the US Patent Office site, click on “Images” to see the image, and the chances are very good that you’ll get the sense that people are patenting white paper over and over and over again. The images generally do not show up. (Example) A little exploration (which you shouldn’t have [...]

[2b2k] Information overload? Not so much. (Part 2)

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:50:06 EST

Yesterday I tried to explain my sense that we’re not really suffering from information overload, while of course acknowledging that there is vastly more information out there than anyone could ever hope to master. Then a comment from Alex Richter helped me clarify my thinking. We certainly do at times feel overwhelmed. But consider why [...]

[2b2k] No, now that you mention it, we’re not overloaded with information

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:06:21 EST

On a podcast today, Mitch Joel asked me something I don’t think anyone else has: Are we experiencing information overload? Everyone else assumes that we are. Including me. I found myself answering no, we are not. There is of course a reasonable and valid reason to say that we are. But I think there’s also [...]

Contentious hermeneutics

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:08:48 EST

My friend AKMA has posted part I of his research and reflections into the “Old Testament” writings about death. AKMA is a friend, and a truly learned, open-minded, and open-hearted theologian. It’s fascinating watching him doing his preliminary research, sorting through the death references from within his Christian frame, although AKMA being AKMA, he’s mainly [...]