Vasilis Kostakis is working on his thesis, “Laser Theory and Peer to Peer: Redefinition of the Society in the Information Age,” in public at a blog. Lots of big ideas there.

Google has posted the video of my talk there.

John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]

John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he's interested in how virtual worlds "allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities."

The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is "highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged." Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. "It's more a reflex." He points to our "mirror neurons," that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but "our identities are socially embedded." And we all have multiple selves.

How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. "But the Web was born without an identity layer." We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. "How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc." John refers to biological signalling theory — there's a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That's essential to any kind of trust network, says John.

In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They'll want to have a persistent identity. They'll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They'll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they'll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.

Over the past two years, John's been working on a project called "Higgins," an open source interoperable identity system. (It's called "Higgins" because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)

We are getting "new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine." This is a kind of "social physics": there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for "evolutionary stable strategies."

There's an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China's interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]

Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems?
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn't mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.

Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust?
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there's another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.

Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I'm interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.

Q: Do you see a role for government?
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.

Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer?
A: The layer won't be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.

Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it's insecure to have a single number encode so much...
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can't get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.

Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel.
A: They'd be persistent, not consistent. It'd be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.

Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they'll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not?
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.

Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn't know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it's ham-fisted. It's either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That's the new generation of social technology we now need.

[Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an "identity layer." And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]

[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]

We've all got a real problem. On some sites comments are so nasty that they are driving people off the Web. Even if the comments on your own site are always respectful and sweet-natured, the verbal violence on other sites is your problem. Our problem. It's not as bad as some in the media portray it, but when Kathy Sierra gets over a thousand messages, mainly from women, saying they've been stalked or bullied, it's an issue we can't ignore.

Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. A Blogger Code of Conduct goes down the wrong path. Codes only can play a role if they're plural. Very plural.

Lisa Stone puts it all well when she explains why a "one-stop-shopping" code can't work for all:

Images that are appropriate for a blog devoted to the war in Iraq would never work on a parenting site, for example. They shouldn't have to play by the same rules. And we all know how I feel about the First Amendment. :)

So, here's a longer way around to the same point. (More of Lisa here.)

The first and least debatable Blogger Code of Conduct is the body of law that sets limits on what we can say in public. Death threats, libel, and giving away state secrets are all out. But when we try to get more specific than "No death threats! No nuclear secrets!" what do we really all agree about? A Code of Swimming Pool Conduct that says "Swim safely!" is of little use. The only code worth posting poolside says things like "No diving. No swimming without a buddy. " But what's the equivalent for blogging, that is, for talking together in public? A single code of conduct would need to drive down into specifics about which bloggers disagree.

Further, no single code could cover all the different ways we want to talk. Conversation shapes itself to its topic, venue, goal and personal relationships. For example, if I'm arguing with a like-minded friend about politics, my social group's norm allows me to be more interruptive and use more curse words than if I'm talking with an acquaintance from the other side of the fence. Our norms tell us exactly how much bad language we can use with our family, at work, at the sports stadium, and when meeting our future in-laws for the first time. We know how loud we can talk whether it's sermon time at the synagogue or South of the Border Night at the bar. There is no possibility of coming up with a single code of conduct because there are too many circumstances in which we conduct ourselves. We are left, ultimately, with our judgment.

Behind the drive for a single code of conduct is often the idea that there is one particular type of conversation at the pinnacle of all conversations: The rational discourse in which two people who disagree work toward the truth. Civility is important there. I'm thrilled to be at an institution — the Berkman Center — where those sorts of conversations happen every day. But those are not the only sorts of conversations we should, could, would, will or do have. Some conversations should be raucous. Some should get people red in the face. Some should have us leaving muttering under our breath. Polite, respectful civil conversations are not the only ones worth having because conversation is about much more than the mutual discovery of truth. Conversation is how we're social, and thus is as rich, ambiguous, implicit, and multipurpose as we ourselves are. Yes, as Tim O'Reilly says, "Free speech is enhanced by civility." Definitely. We need more civility. But free speech is also enhanced by healthy doses of incivility. In our drive to limit harmful speech, we need to be careful to preserve risky speech.

Of course, that's assuming a particular model of civility. If, instead, by "civil" one means only that the conversation should be respectful, then I agree that many more conversations need to be civil. But: (a) Respect is not always the highest value of a conversation. (b) What constitutes disrespectful or injurious speech depends upon the target, the speaker and the context (again, ruling out posts that cross the boundaries of the law and our shared sense of decency). (c) A code of conduct that says that, for example, we should be "respectful" will founder on the details of implementation since there are so many norms about what constitutes respectful discourse — sitting in a quiet room with our hands on the table and our heads cocked attentively being only one scenario. Without the implementation details, the code is as useful as the "Swim safely" poster at the pool.

But then we come back to the problem: People violated - threatened, bullied and stalked - by thugs wielding keyboards. When those comments cross the legal boundaries, there may be legal recourse, although usually that's not practical. It is a problem with no easy or short-term solution. When the comments are posted on the victim's own site, there are tools for dealing with them, although none works perfectly. A blogger can moderate the comments, perhaps add a reputation system, or even forbid anonymity. A code of conduct is one more tool in the box. Such a code makes explicit the rules already implicitly governing a comment space. As we come across blogs more and more randomly, it often doesn't hurt to be told that a site won't tolerate bad language or wants commenters to stay on topic, if those are the local norms. Bloggers can of course state that already — there's an infinite supply of sentences — and many do, but coming up with standard ways of expressing the rules would encourage their expression.(That's what I was suggesting 1.5 wks ago, and it's what I like in Tim's idea.) Transparency generally is good.Posting rules of the pool that make explicit the existing implicit norms can be a worthwhile tool...although pasting a long list of precise rules can indeed inhibit free swim.

As for encouraging civility: Absolutely. I like civility. Truly. I encourage it on this blog's comment pages, and I even try to model it on occasion. But I also like a good fart and a high five now and then.

[Tags: blogs civility kathy_sierra bullying cyberbullying convesation free_speech lisa_stone tim_oreilly everything_is_miscellaneous berkman]

Usually the first economic argument presented for the importance of the Long Tail is that the area underneath the tail is far greater than the area underneath the Short Head. And since that area represents people with whom the point on the curve communicates, the Long Tail represents a far greater economic opportunity. But, that argument thinks of the points as mini-broadcasters and markets as homogeneous aggregations of consumers. Such a simplistic vew misses the knotty nature of the Long Tail. The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too.

Britt Blaser puts this differently and quite nicely in his most recent post: The People Law trumps the Power Law. Here's how it begins:

There are five principles I'm playing with lately:

1. The size of your audience confers limited power

2. A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)

3. Network nodes are significant only when they're verbose

4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes

5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

He goes on from there...and ends it with a nice motto:

Where there's folk, there's fire.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that's entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.

It's a nicely done piece, although I'm not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —"Hey, listen to me!" — and I'm not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people's events.

I don't have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we're constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Seb Schmoller notes a research project by Steve Graham at Durham University exploring how many institutions now routinely use software to sort customers/users/citizens. Stephen writes:

...in the UK, software now organise everything from call centre phone queues, the prioritisation (and stalling) of Internet traffic, the identification and tracking of those deemed ‘risky' or ‘threatening' on commercial shopping streets, people's access to premium (electronically-tolled) areas of urban roads, the allocation of financial and insurance services, the geography of shops and bank branches, and the experience of energy markets.

His project will explore how software is being used to sort us, the social assumptions behind it, how those assumptions are embedded in the code, and the practice's social and political implications.

Great topic.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy seb_schmoller steve_graham sociology ]

Politicopia, a wiki for Utah citizens, is up. It'll be very interesting to see if Utapians make use of it. (If not, some other site will arise.)

By the way, the Wall Street Journal has an article on the parties' embrace of online activism. It says the Republicans are only a little behind the Democratics in this regard. [Tags: politics utah politicopia democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]

danah notes:

Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.

This is so fascinating. Us middle-aging bloggers who think blogs are about building selves in the new public are apparently not speaking for anyone other than us middle-aging bloggers. Maybe Web presence for the young’uns has little to do with building selves or maybe the nature of that public self is so different from the corporeal one the middle-agers have imported from the real world, or maybe something else entirely is going on. And maybe—although I think this is less likely—when the young’uns age to the middle, they’ll feel about their Web selves the way us current middle-agers do.

Damn, this is an interesting world. [Tags: danah_boyd self web everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Slashdot has a thread about a debate over whether Internet abuse counts as a true addiction. (Yet another taxonomic question!) Here’s what I posted in response. Since it was rated 1 (out of 5), you’re not going to stumble across it unless you have your filter set to “Masochist.”

Thank God!

I myself have been showing disturbing signs of being compulsively human. I’ve noticed that I feel an urge I simply cannot control to be social. This really began to scare me when I tried not to talk and found that after a mere seven hours – seven hours! — I said, “Howya doin’?” to the bagger at the supermarket. I didn’t want to. It just slipped out. I couldn’t control myself. Ever since, I’ve given in to my urge – yes, I know, I’m sick – answering the phone when it rings, responding not only to questions but to mere pleasantries, and even initiating conversations when they weren’t strictly required.

It’s a nightmare. And it gets worse.

it’s not just that when I’m with others, I – ugh! – participate in destructive social rituals like caring what people are saying. Even when I’m alone, kind thoughts about other people invade my consciousness. I feel an impulse to wonder what they’re thinking and what matters to them. I try to focus on computing pi or to remember the 1955 Dodgers starting lineup, but I just can’t shut out those images and feelings.

Sometimes – and I’m so ashamed to admit this – I use the Internet to sate these shameful urges.

Admitting all this in public is, I can only hope, the first step towards healing. [Tags: internet addiction humor everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy ]