I like Jaiku both because as the second entrant, it learned from Twitter, the first entrant, and because Jyri Engeström is one of those brilliant, sweet people who make the world better in several dimensions at once. Besides founding Jaiku, Jyri has produced some quite thought-provoking pieces on the role of social objects in forming social networks.

It’ll be interesting to see where Google surfaces the UI for entering Jaiku microblog posts and where it surfaces the posts themselves.

And most important, of course, is whether Jaiku will be renamed Jaigoo or Jookle. [Tags: jaiku twitter google blogging Jyri_Engeström ]

I spoke with Lowell Anderson, VP of Marketing of SchemaLogic today. He called me because my book talks about a couple of their clients. Here’s what I learned:

SL helps companies figure out how their various knowledge silos connect by building ontologies that express the relationships among the terms they use. Thesauruses identify synonyms so people can continue using their accustomed vocabularies. SL thinks in RDF but end up exporting to non-RDF XML frequently in order to support applications such as Sharepoint.

They like to start with publicly-available ontologies and then enable the client to customize. Or, they’ll start with any existing taxonomies. For example, the Associated Press had 40-50K words in their standard vocabulary. SL sucked it into their system and then provided the tools by which “subject-matter experts” (e.g., editors) could identify weaknesses (using a graphical view) and make changes. Changes that affect another experts’ domain, even by linking to it, require permission from the other expert. The permission management system is configurable to each client’s needs and is one of the key advantages of the SL system.

SL provides no tagging tools for users and readers. It is a top-down system. Compared to the systems or lack of systems it replaces, however, it looks wild and loose. For example, the International Press Telecommunications Council had a complex taxonomy of topics (which I discuss less than enthusiastically in my book) that it stored in an Excel spreadsheet. The new ontology includes many more relationships. And at the AP, although editors have to fill in change request forms and get permission from other editors, the old process had a central committee making all decisions. From my point of  view, ontologies capture lots of information. They of course don’t capture all information. Bottom up adds information well. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for it all in the gigantic miscellaneous pile.

The Winnipeg Free Press in a review by Michael Stimpson thinks it’s a “good beach read for techno-geeks.” He thinks I make my case “persuasively and for the most part engagingly with anecdotes and side trips to illustrate his points,” although he found the sections on alphabetization and on Eleanor Rosch to be “excruciatingly dull.”

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. I saw an advance version of the changes, but otherwise had no direct influence. Also, although at some point I conceivably could make some indeterminate amount of money from Technorati, the fact that Dave Sifry is a friend influences my judgment more.)

Technorati has just done a major re-shaping of itself, which is interesting as a response to the increasing need for both pinpoint accuracy and broad context. Dave Sifry, the ceo, blogs about it here.

Technorati is driving down both roads simultaneously, which I think makes sense. On the one hand, if you want to do an old fashioned text search through blogs, the site has improved its engine and pared down the experience. If, on the other hand, you want to see information in context (and on the Web that of course means being able to explore that context further), the site has taken several steps:

1. The default search now is for tags, not for text in blogs. Tags are expressions of what the readers think a post is about, so some types of searches should return more accurate, relevant and interesting results. Of course, we also use tags in idiosyncratic ways, so only experience will tell whether and when tag searching is more satisfying than text searching. In any case, Technorati lets you click to search through text, if that’s what you want. (You can go straight to the text search page via s.technorati.com.)

2. Technorati continues to include more sources and more types of information. In fact, the home page no longer positions Technorati as a blog search engine. “Include everything” is one of the key recommendations of Everything is Miscellaneous, so I like its continuing inclusiveness :)

3. These changes seem to move Technorati towards embracing topics as a basic unit of meaning. For example, if you search for “ron paul,” you are taken to a page that assembles blog posts, videos and photos about the controversial Republican. There are tabs for music and events as well, although in this case Technorati didn’t find any. There’s also a “WTF” post, an explanation of the topic generated and voted on by users. (It’s displaying the WTF by siegheilneocon, which only got 27 votes, instead of the one by beckychr007, which got 61 votes, seeming to prefer the most recent to the most popular, which is either a bug or I’m not understanding it.)

Topics are an important way to cluster ideas. At the moment, Technorati has no concept of a topic apart from a tag, however. The infrastructure to do more is in place, because the site already displays a list of related tags. The results pages don’t bring in the content from those tags, though. For example, if “john mccain” were a related tag, it might make sense to bring some of that tagged material into the “ron paul” topic page. That would give us a broader view of the topic. Conflating topics with tags can increase the precision of results — but not for highly ambiguous tags such as “shot” — but can also reduce the context and thus our understanding. Granted, figuring out algorithmically what’s relevant and how it’s relevant is no small challenge. (Maybe if some topic pages were marked as especially worthwhile and stable, not all of the clean up and construction would have to be done algorithmically.)

Likewise, at some point it’d be good to start relating topics, so that the system knows that “ron paul” is (in some sense) contained by “republicans” and republicans are related to “politics.” This sort of information can eventually be gleaned folksonomically from the tags. Of course there’d be nothing wrong with using existing taxonomies and ontologies to help further refine the relationships among topics. It’s always going to be a messy, overlapping, shifting mass of connections, but, well, so are we.

This is not a criticism of what Technorati has done. In fact, I mean it as a way of expressing my excitement about where it goes from here.

I really enjoyed the bloggers Everything Is Miscellaneous get-together last night. About 30 people showed up at the very-inviting Yahoo Brickhouse offices. Some were friends, some were bloggers I read, some were people I was meeting for the first time.

After about an hour of everyone hanging around, Mary Hodder (founder of Dabble and the party’s co-host, along with Salim Ismail), dinged a bottle and I talked for about ten minutes. Since everyone there already had a copy of the book — we gave them away — I said I would tell them the non-marketing explanation of what the book is about: It’s an argument against Aristotle. That is, it’s an argument against the idea that there is a single, right order of the world, and that that order is defined by clear definitions. After I’d gone on for a while, someone (sorry, I’m bad at names) asked what really motivated me. Very helpful question. I said that the Aristotelian assumptions, combined with the limitations of paper-based knowledge, lead to authority over knowledge being placed in the hands of a few. The few tend to be highly qualified and often selfless, but it still is a power regime. Although I didn’t say this last night, that’s why I am so enamored of the idea that fundamentally the Internet is ours. In fact, another way to say what the book is about would be: Everything Is Miscellaneous is about meaning becoming ours.

Anyway, I had a wonderful time. I only wish I could have gone out to dinner last night with some of the folks, but I had to be in bed by 9:30 so I could get up for a string of radio interviews starting at 3:30am. All part of the glamor of a book tour. Yeah, that and the stomach flu. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous aristotle blogs]

Tom writes beautifully about whether the change my book points to is significant or just re-tagging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak. He uses this to try to understand Shelley’s negative reaction to the book.

I of course do think things have changed significantly. To put it in its least popular way, I think we’re seeing the final nail in the Aristotelian view that there is a way the universe is ordered, that there is a best way to order, and that that order divides the world neatly through perfect definitions. Order is guided by interests, and we’re seeing a remarkable change in the who, how and what of order. Since knowledge has traditionally been about discerning that order, the same sort of changes are happening with knowledge. And likewise with authority.

IMO. [Tags: tom_matrullo shelley_powers everything_is_miscellaneous aristotle ]

Steve Smith has an interview with Matt Colebourne, CEO of CoComment, a service that tracks comments across the Web so that companies can see what people are saying about them. “We are looking at how we can help a community find its own experts,” says Matt. He writes about the next version of the product:

So they can look at a conversation stream of tens of thousands of comments and say, I only want to see those answered by people that I know. But then it is useful if you can start to pick up on the individuals who have natural authority on the topic. So we are building a ranking system or a behavioral system where people rate other people. But after a while, once the experts start appearing, they in turn should be able to bring other people up quickly. So an expert on medieval history can see I actually do have something to say on it and give me a positive ranking. That will give me a much higher rank than someone else who knows nothing about it. So it is like a peer review and commenter ranking system, but against the taxonomy of topics that allows the natural experts to appear.

Interesting.

At the moment, the service tracks a mere 150,000 sources. <font style=’font-size:80%’;>[Tags:<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/berkman" rel="tag"> </a> <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/blogs" rel="tag"> blogs</a> <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/everything+is+miscellaneous" rel="tag"> everything_is_miscellaneous</a>]</font>

John Mayer, the Exec Dir of Center for computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk called "Subclassing the Commons." CALI is 25 yrs old, incorporated by Harvard and the U of Minnesota Law Schools. 204 US law schools and 23 international law schools are members. So are more than 100,000 law students. CALI makes lessons available on line. This year, there will probably be a million lessons run.

He points out that there are sites that aggregate material put into the commons via Creative Commons licenses. But there's not a lot there for law students. The commons by itself isn't granular enough for communities of users, he says. People post on their blogs, "I've posted a paper at SSRN and would appreciate any comments," or "I'm working on a project and was wondering if anyone else had," or "Where can I find...?" John says, "If we aggregated all answers to those question across all institutions, would that be a commons, and would it have amazing value?"

"We're best known for our lessons," he says. He shows a flow chart of a question. Law professors throw out a question, he says, knowing the ways the students will get it wrong. If one gets it right, the prof branches differently. It's a "pruned tree." CALI's authors write questions as a tree. There are about 600 lessons. Their model is to get 5 profs to write 5 lessons (25 mins each) over 8 months; the profs are paid.

He describes another project: Classcaster , a blog network using open source software. It's built on top of PBX software (!). "With classcaster, you can make a phone call, you can leave an hour message. Then it instantly podcasts it." But it was expensive paying for the phone call and the recording quality is crappy. Instead, they gave authors $1000 and a free digital recorder. There are now 60 faculty members doing podcasts that way. They're available for free as part of the commons. As a result, "students started to tell us that they have this crappy evidence teacher so instead they listen to this other evidence teacher's podcast." And faculty noticed in listening to themselves that they're skipping over some things, so it's helped them improve. Other faculty learned teaching techniques by listening to others. On the other hand, in some courses (e.g., family law) it can suppress class participation.

Lessons are tagged according to a "topic grid," based on how faculty describe their lessons, the "elevator pitch" of what a course is. CALI took a first cut at the taxonomy by looking at syllabi and then letting faculty refine them. They're now going back and tagging the podcasts.

Another project is Access to Justice. CALI designed an interface that asks one question at a time (audibly asks) to help people find the right legal forms. It uses avatars because otherwise you get hung up on providing avatars of every race and gender, in a wheelchair or not, etc. Instead, it provides a non-racial — "blank" — male or female avatar. [Looks pretty white to me.] It shows the avatar on a path to a jall of justice. There are people in eigh states working on the navigators for all the forms, but they reuse one another's work because the forms are generally 90% the same in the states. One of the federal courts is interested in doing it and sharing it with the rest of the fed courts. (It's all XML data and is written in Flash.)

ScholarshipPulse is in alpha. On the left it shows a paper. On the right is a comment system. It distinguishes comments as peers, professors or students. They're experimenting with having the font size reflect one's standing in the system. "I know we're playing in ego space here." But, John says, we not let people comment on their own blogs? Press a button and it'll take a capture of the paper and one's post, and post it straight into your blog.

eLangdell.org (named after Langdell Hall at HarvardLaw) pools syllabi, cases, podcasts, etc. so you can dynamically create case books and other course materials. You can print out your own materials via lulu.com AALS, CLEA ande Counseling Central do something similar, he says.

Q: Are you doing anything to help people who are not in law school?
A: At CALI's LearnTheLaw.org lets you pay for access to the CALI lessons.

Q: What's your business model?
A: 200 schools pay us $5K year. For that they give everything we produce, but I'm trying to give away as much as possible. Not the lessons. If gave them away, the law schools would stop paying us. Everything else, just about, is open and free.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) MIT's open courseware opens up syllabi. They've just started videoing classes — 21 of them. They've raised the question for us about whether there's an opportunity for Harvard Law to step into the video YouTube space, recognizing the Law School's mission as offering a legal education — not necessarily for credit — to the world. You've been at this for a long time Somehow there's a relationship between the profit and non-profit. Suppose a company came to you...
A: We don't need profit but we do need sustainability. The case book market is about $90M. Suppose you came in with uber casebooks that you could mix and match. We'd pay faculty to write those. That would put pressure on faculty to use the free PDF (or $18 lulu version) case book. A $90M market would become a $20M. That's what eLangdell is.

There are hard problems doing this, he says. One is metadata. "People just drop stuff in." They're going to have to make the contributors do it. "Maybe we can hire students," but for now they have to make it easy. In addition to the taxonomy, they'll allow tags. Charlie points out that tagging might be the fastest way to get it done and usable. I mention freebase as a model for mixing a starter-set taxonomy, a mechanical Turk approach, and a wiki for metadata schema. John says that with a critical mass, it'll get done.

Q: (Gene Koo) Charlie, you have a paper-based text book. Would you switch?
A: (Charlie) I'd love to. Unfortunately, my publisher owns the copyright.

A: It's a Clayton Christensen innovator's dilemma. We'll pick off the low-hanging fruit. And, maybe retiring professors will donate their teaching materials into the commons as part of their "legacy." [Tags: cali berkman everything_is_miscellaneous law education teaching commons creative_commons]

I'm at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting to give a lunchtime talk to the marketing folks.

It's in the Ritz-Carlton in DC, which tells you something about the industry. This is a well-dressed crowd. Maybe one-third are women. I'm the only one in the audience iwth an open laptop. (The Ritz provides wifi everywhere in the hotel for $10/day.)

I come in late to the morning panel. On it are Mark Robichaux (ed., Broadcasting & Cable Magazine), Mark Coblitz (SVP of Comcast), Laureen Ong (Pres, National Geographic Channel), Joseph Sapan (Pres, Rainbow Media), Michael Wilner (CEO, Insight Comms). Unfortunately, I don't know who is who, except for the woman, and Robichaux, who is moderating. [As always, my live blogging is deeply flawed and more unreliable the closer to quotes and details it gets. Also, in the broad themes and characterizations. Also spelling.]

Blogs

In response to a question about negative blogs, one of the panelists says that some of their operators actually have blogs. "We embrace it." Another writes them off as a few people who like to complain. "Everyone in this room should read blogs every day about their companies," says another. "If we're not listening as much as we're speaking to our constituents, we're not doing our job." [Then how about symmetric bandwidth up and down, hmmm?] Mark Robichaux, the moderator, says "Sometimes bloggers are canaries in the coal mine."

Laureen Ong of National Geographic says that bloggers and others online answer questions for them in a useful way.

A la carte tv

How about a la carte TV, asks Robichaux? Josh Sapan (Rainbow Media) praises the diversity of cable offerings, all the way from BET to National Geographic. "It's a great diversity of voice." [Hah!] Mark Coblitz agrees that's lots of diversity. Each person may only watch seven channels, he says, but the seven channels vary from person to person. Michael (?) says we need to argue against a la carte, just as we have to argue against Net neutrality.

Net neutrality

"What's Net neutrality?"

"That's easy: People should be able to go anywhere they want to, attach any device, and know what the terms of their service are." [He's implicitly citing the FCC's Four Principles, which isn't what most people mean by Net neutrality. And I left one out because I couldn't keep up.] "Isn't that that the Internet is all about?," says another. "Anyone get to do anything they want," he continues, I think sarcastically. The first says "This is all about sharing resouces so everyone gets the maximum out of them." The task, he says, is to communicate the technical reasons why Net neutrality is bad. "People said in the year 2000 that we need to save the Internet, but we don't want the Net of 2000. I want the Internet that's coming," the one that lets people do the new things they want to do." [The one that shows Time-Warner movies and requires a company to pay for competitively fast service? Or the one where anyone can create and innovate in any way she wants, on equal footing?]

They complain that they don't have the anti-net neutrality sound bite. "We talked about Net neutering, but that doesn't work too well. That's our own internal, because that's what it does." [Cool! "Net neutrality" works! We're so used to complaining that the anti-NN folks beat us at marketing that it's great to hear the same sort of whining coming from them.]

"The Internet is beginning to show the strains of its technology," says another. "We offer 10 meg down and one meg up, which is a lot." [Only compared to the pathetic speeds in the US, and only down, not up.] The geeks who measure it don't always get that." "The infrastructure can't handle what everyone's idea of what the Internet is unless someone starts to build it out." People won't be able to make the investment to enable, say, Netflix, to use the Internet effectively so that it works all the time and people have a good experience almost all the time.

Robichaux: "So the government would be handcuffing you."

"Exactly. And it's not just the last mile. It's all along the way."

Another: "Back in the lat 90s, there was a lot of fiber put in the ground. And guess what? We're using it up." [Most of the fiber is unused. And see Bruce Kushnick on the $200B of tax money the incumbents took to run fiber to our houses, but then forgot to.] "Net neutrality says everone should be able to go where they want and be able to pay. We don't diagree with the four principles. But as soon as you put them down in writing, they're open to interpretation. And that interpretation changes everything."

"You know who's making the money and making the NN argument? Little companies like Google." He cites someone who said that NN would kill innovation. "If you want Net neutrality, it should be Internet neutrality for all the elements." E.g., Google is too dominant, eBay owns its means of payment. [This is equivalent to saying that if you want free speech, you really ought to enforce all points of view in your dinner time conversation.]

Competition

Mark Robichaux: Satellite?

Ong: Brand counts. Viewers know that the facts on our channel are triple-checked.

Sapan: It's made us better via competitive pressure. E.g., IFC hosts small films, and we let you watch it on-demand simultaneously when it's released to the theaters

"Congress says the problem with out industry is that we don't have competitors. But we wake up every day thinking about how we compete in the marketplace. Every business we're in is extremely competitive on the distriution side." [Still, most of us don't have much of a choice.]

"We're all losing eyeballs to the Internet, and I'd go so far as saying you can lose your phone before you lose your video, and you can lose your video before you lose your online connection. It trumps everything. The younger generation is turning TVs off. They're on the Internet. They're watching the same content thanks to some of our friends [sarcastic] making it available." [Wow.]

User-generated content

Robichaux: "What's the best idea for using the Internet as a tool for your company?"

Ong: We have a tech savvy audience so the Internet is something we use to promote back to the channel, to put programming out that they can't see on the linear channel, and we recognize that it's making us rethink our business because no one is going to watch a full-length documentary on the Internet. [Maybe not, at least this month. But we'll move it onto our iPod our TV, if we're able.]

Sapan: The area we're messing with right now is mixing user generated content with video on demand and linear television. Not much has been done with that.

Robichaux: why is ugc important?

Sapan: The history of TV is you make something, copyright it, put it on TV and the max number of people watch it. Now each of those is violated: There is no owner, there is no copyright. There's all these people spending all this time looking at user generated content. From a purely mercantile point of view, if there's a lot of time spent on it, that one way or another will be translated into money. What intriques is how to connect what people are making with video on demand. In the case of indie films, we're asking people to submit their short films. We curate them. We would like to place those films on the servers of cable companies in the geographic areas from which they come, so there could be "the best of" films in that area, and the "the best of the best of" that would make it onto the channel. [Current.tv? Why do we need the cable companies to do this for us?] This is good because it gives them the fastest Internet connection to the video, video on demand, and a linear channel. We pursuing this on IFC and We TV.

Coblitz (Comcast): We've woven Internet into just about everything we do.

Q&A

Robichaux: Take-aways: Be honest. Keep it simple. It's about relationships. For example, when you're talking to a Congressperson... [And here I thought he was talking about talking with customers!]

Questions from the floor.

Q: What are you doing about Internet safety?
A: (comcast) We provide parental controls to people who want them. Our 12 yr old said, "Dad, block anywhere you don't want me to go...but then don't look where I go."

A: (Insight) It's up to the parents, but most parents don't use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??]
A: (Rainbow) The computers aren't in the kids' bedrooms.

[Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]

Dan Bricklin blogs about a talk given by Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Navy's Chief of Operations about pooling resources in a trans-national community of trust (The 1,000 Ship Navy). And Dan has a really interesting podcast interview with Vice Admiral John Morgan. Man, there's a lot going on! (Not to mention Dan notes Paul Carroll's joke about "pier-to-pier" communications.)

[Tags: dan_bricklin 1000_ship_navy social_software everything_is_miscellaneous mike_mullen john_morgan]