Doc has a nice post about the fact that everybody is miscellaneous (to use his phrase), and why being lumped with others gives him aggregaphobia (another nice turn of phrase). [Tags: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/02/10/aggregaphobia/ ]

Of course, this is a little past tense this morning — with an emphasis on the tense — but here’s a very cool mashup of election results, Google maps and Twitter.. It’d be more useful to me if it would only show me tweets from the people I follow, but, well, maybe next election…[Tags: twitter election politics mashup ]

Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talked about the three orders of order, “meta-business,” Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here’s the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous]

Misc. Podcast interview: Arianna Huffington

The latest in my series of Everything Is Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Harvard Berkman Center and Wired, has been posted. I talk with Arianna Huffington about whether the Huffington Post is what the news is going to look like as reporting itself enters the swirl of the miscellaneous. (Along the way I learn not to use the word “revenge” even in a light way with Ms. Huffington.) (Disclosure: I sometimes write for HuffingtonPost; I don’t get paid for it.) [Tags: arianna_huffington huffingtonpost podcast media newspaper politics revenge]

Larry Lessig has a great post asking us to call upon the Republican and Democratic parties to insist that all presidential debates ("at least") be made free for use after their initial broadcast.

Abso-freaking-lutely! [Tags: politics copyright copyleft creative_commons lawrence_lessig everything_is_miscellaneous]

The Conversations Network (a non-profit from the same folks who bring you IT Conversations) has just launched Podcorps, an all-volunteer team of "stringers" who will record the audio and sometimes the video of public events that matter to people.

Once you register, you can search for events near you that you can sign up to record. Or, if you know of an event you'd like covered, go stick it into the calendar. (The FAQ says that some stringers may want some help covering expenses, but this is intended to be an entirely non-profit enterprise.) The stringers can then publish the media where they want, although Podcorps expects most will post them at OurMedia.org and the Internet Archive where they are freely available to anyone.

I hope this takes off. More is better than less. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of the Conversations Network.) [Tags: podcasts politics events everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Matthew Burton has developed a site — ReadableLaws.org — as a thesis (under the estimable Prof. Jay Rosen) where we can translate legislation into understandable English and discuss its implications. The first bills posted include one to broaden Fair Use, one that criminalizes hiding information about video games to skirt the ratings, and an expansion of Internet monitoring to prevent child pornography.

I can see the implications pages getting bogged down because the site has no built-in way of handling disagreements, but the translation-into-understandability pages look like a great idea. (And maybe the implications pages will work out, too.)

This is all part of Jay's NewAssignment.Net project. [Tags: laws wikis media legislation matthew_burton jay_rosen everything_is_miscellaneous]

Jon Udell suggests the government have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund (to complement the already-existing Presidential Campaign Fund) to pay for the aggregation and tagging of raw video footage of the candidates so that citizens can "slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis." Every question and every answer ought to be tagged, as Jon suggests elsewhere.

I of course like the prospect of having a huge pile of well-tagged candidate videos — it's so miscellaneous! — but I think there's zero prospect of this coming through the government. Nor should it. We've got the pile, thanks to YouTube and the candidate's own sites. If we get it tagged well enough, someone will build a site that lets us search through them and cluster them. And if someone builds a site, we'll tag 'em well enough. It could be a citizen group, a media site, or YouTube or Technorati. One way or another, this is likely to happen no check-off boxes required. [Tags: elections politics campaigns jon_udell everything_is_miscellaneous ]

On March 21, at 6:30, I'm holding a Berkman "Web of Ideas" discussion of whether and how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. The discussion is open to all. (The Berkman Center is at 23 Everett in Cambridge: Map.)

It's not obvious that just because we're participating in our culture more, our democracy will also change. Certainly, politics and culture are not distinct realms, so our expectations in one should affect the other. But not necessarily. Take some prototypical objects of cultural participation. What would you choose? Wikipedia? Blogosphere? File sharing? Second Life? Delicious.com? AssignmentZero ? What is our participation in those and what does that participation teach us? How much of that is political? And do the lessons transfer? For example, Wikipedia teaches us — well, those of us who think Wikipedia is awesome — that credentialed authorities are not the only ones who can be trusted. But does that apply beyond building encyclopedias? Does it affect our view of, say, policy experts in the government? What are we learning and does it apply?

I don't have answers to these questions. I'm not coming in with an hypothesis. I'm hoping you'll come and remind us of what Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler have to say on the topic. And who else?

So, let's talk. [Tags: culture politics participatory_culture participatory_democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]

I did the "wrapup" at BeyondBroadcast, and tried to talk about the thought I keep coming back to but am never able to articulate. At least it was brief - under 10 minutes, I think. Here's the outline of what I said:

1. What's the thread between participatory culture and participatory democracy? Why think one has to do with the other? How can participatory culture be "transformative," as Henry Jenkins suggested in his terrific opening talk. (Digression: The mainstream media are focused on including "user-generated content" on their sites as their response to participatory culture, but that's not transformative.)

2. Well, what is democracy. There are bunches of definitions: Majority vote, society of equals, government that gets its authority from the people. But most important, it's ours. The government isn't theirs, the way it was the king's.

3. So, what does "ours" mean? Again, there are bunches of definitions: What the law gives you control over, on our side, of our nature or essence. But, when it comes to culture, look at the difference between your study of a foreign culture and your participation in yours. Culture is ours because it makes us who we are; we are indistinguishable from it.

4. But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It's ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we're inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it's not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours. 5. So, how does this new ours affect democracy? (And it's more likely to affect democracy before it affects politics since those folks have a death grip on power.) How does this ours get turned into an us that operates politically? I dunno. I.e., this talks makes no progress on the question it raises :( [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 culture politics democracy media everything_is_miscellaneous ]