Lingua Franca Why the West?

"The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation can be stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent burst onto the world scene in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth century become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth? Until recently, two responses have dominated. The first is that something unique in the European past lay behind its eventual economic development and power. This something unique is often seen as a universal good - such as reason, freedom, or individualism - that first developed in Europe but ultimately relates, or should relate, to all human beings."

"The second response is that there was nothing particularly special about Europe until at least 1500, and probably not until 1800. In this view, Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional qualities but to its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in the New World and create other forms of wealth through colonial trade."

redux [10.05.01]
The American Prospect Terror and Liberalism

"The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror."

The Nation Against Rationalization

"Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon."

The New York Review of Books Notes on Prejudice

"Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do - & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree."

"The only cure is understanding how other societies - in space or time - live: and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates, John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas & free minds."

Fortune Great Leap Forward: Techies vs. Telcos

"It's been a grim time for the tech industry. Executives from companies that sell hardware, software, and Net services watched their stock prices and company sales fall off a cliff. Now, increasingly, they're starting to point fingers at one group they think is responsible for their troubles: the giants of telecom. At the usually upbeat Agenda conference held this October in Scottsdale, Ariz., Bob Metcalfe, the legendary network pioneer, took the stage and summed up the undertone of discontent when, on a panel about networks, he described the big regional telephone companies as "scumbags." Nobody objected or disagreed."

redux [06.01.01]
MIT Technology Review Web Behind Walls

"At stake is the future and form of the Internet for millions of Americans whose access to the online world comes through the set-top portals of cable television. Instead of the multivaried pathways of the World Wide Web, these users will be provided easy access to a much smaller subset of items and options that reflect the network owner's online programming, as well as the offerings of its content partners. Dubbed "walled gardens" by supporters and skeptics alike, these new "managed-content areas" will therefore offer the illusion of online choice, while leading subscribers down well-worn paths of proprietary content and affiliated programming?in stark contrast to the great diversity of expression the Web seemed to promise in its heyday, way back in, say, 1997."

redux [05.25.01]
Bob Frankston Content vs. Connectivity

"The consumers' connections to the Internet are controlled by companies who are in the business of delivering content and services funded by advertising. Consumers who wander the Internet represent lost revenue. Customers who use IP telephony no longer make phone calls. Customers who experiment with creating new services are called abusers.

As long as these companies control connectivity, we do not have a marketplace for the connectivity services vital to the growth of the Internet and necessary for innovation and the benefits we have come to expect.

We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity. It is a dramatic case of conflict of interest and antitrust violation. We cannot afford to tolerate such behavior. It is allowed and abetted by accepting the self-serving fallacies of the existing players. We must challenge their claims and create the opportunities so necessary for our continued prosperity."

redux [06.06.01]
Gilbert & Tobin Internet Connectivity: Open Competition In The Face Of Commercial Expansion

"As a consequence, the rules for Internet interconnection are still in the process of being worked out - and in this uncertain environment, Internet interconnection is an inherently risky business. The new technology presents its own interconnection complexities, with multiple layers of virtual networks built one over the other - so that an operator at any layer of the infrastructure will have its costs determined by the prices charged by the virtual network below it, while its prices, in turn, will determine the cost structure of the layer above. Furthermore, while commercial principles would suggest that money should flow towards those operators which produce value, this does not always happen in practice (a hangover of the historical expectation that Internet access should be free for all). The uncertainties of the environment are aggravated by the fact that there is currently no consensus on the issue of how to attribute "value" to the various elements of Internet interconnection."

The New York Times Companies Move Away From Centralized Offices [requires 'free' registration]

""Corporate America is developing a different strategy of place," said Charles Grantham, chief scientist of the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work. "The bottom line is a hard-core business logic — you're better positioned for business continuity if you're distributed. But Sept. 11 also crystallized for a lot of people that they want a better balance between their personal and professional life, and managers are going to have to confront that in the coming year."

Such revolutionary zeal may be premature. After all, the longstanding conviction that a centralized workplace is essential to enforcing corporate culture, loyalty and hard work has been behind big real estate investments in corporate campuses and towering headquarters buildings. Those expenditures can make it prohibitively expensive to switch to a distributed workplace."

redux [09.26.01]
OpenP2P In Defense of Cities

"Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column of last Saturday, makes the case that in light of the attack on New York City, "...the logic of decentralization has never been more clear." He notes that the Internet's decentralized architecture performed well during and after the attack. He goes on to call for a similar Internet-style decentralization of populations away from cities, predicting that the attacks should or will precipitate a migration away from cities into more decentralized patterns of living.

He is right about data infrastructure, but he is wrong about cities, because cities are not cause but effect. (Full disclosure: I am a long-time resident of New York, and have spent the better part of two careers working in cities of various flavors.)

Cities are not isolated things so much as the large-scale intersection of countless small forces, forces which in aggregate give cities the kind of homeostasis and adaptability that have made them such surprisingly long-lived features of human life."

redux [02.28.01]
Context Magazine Location, Location, Location

"The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo.

Does this mean the diaspora of urban professionals now will push beyond suburbs and exurbs to remote hideaways, mountaintops, or places such as Venice, selected merely for their beauty? "

"For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap?perhaps using a laptop at the piazza café instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo."

redux [09.20.01]
LATimes Firms Turn to Meetings Without the Traveling

"The economy and corporate budgets are in sharp decline, new safety checks have made moving through airports slower than ever, and there's a general reluctance to travel in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks.

If corporate America is to attempt some semblance of normality, there must be meetings with customers, suppliers, far-flung co-workers, bankers, lawyers and distributors.

To keep things going, many companies are turning to videoconferencing, the technology touted years ago as the movement that would end corporate travel. It never did and it never will. But videoconferencing is on the rise, and experts said last week's events will further accelerate its use."

redux [07.11.01]
MIT Technology Review Work the Problem, People

"While researchers tap Internet2 to extend collaboration between universities and push the limits of new Internet technologies, another group of social scientists is looking at how Internet2 is affecting those who use it - in effect, researching the researchers."

"Still, human beings clearly prefer working face to face. Teasley says that although scientists at each CFAR site can meet and examine data from their own PCs, they still tend to cluster around a single computer. "Their biggest complaint was that it was too hard to see that small screen," says Teasley. "I told them they should buy a projector. That was my high-level PhD advice.""

Alertbox Beyond Being There

"Beyond Being There was a research project at Bell Communications Research in 1991 and 1992. Its key insight was that computer and communications technology cannot in the foreseeable future achieve the same quality of human interaction as that afforded by PPR (physically proximate reality - our somewhat obscure term for meeting in person). Thus, while most other projects aimed at every-higher communication bandwidths and higher-fidelity video, we aimed at making computers help people communicate in ways that cannot be done in PPR (for example, anonymous interactions). In other words, we wanted to be better than reality and move beyond being there!"

Scott Klemmer scott's thoughts on: Beyond Being There

"Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f. "For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to automatically archive communication.""

"Google is considering creating subscription versions of its popular search engine that could target academic and corporate clients, a source said Thursday."

"Placing additional diversification pressure on Google is its ad strategy. The company only sells text advertising anchored to consumer search terms, unlike traditional banners and graphic-rich online advertising. Because the advertising is contextual and targeted, it sells well to direct marketers such as financial services and e-commerce companies. But the company has been hard-pressed to sign on traditional brand advertisers such as consumer package goods, a set viewed as the Holy Grail for online publishers and portals."

BusinessWeek The Keyword at Google: Growth

"Even if Google manages to surmount these hurdles, the market potential for the search sector is tentative. Collectively, the largest search players have only $2 billion in valuation. Worse, many search companies have seen sales decline, as consolidation in the Web space has put significant downward pressure on pricing and the tech slump has reduced IT spending.

While that trend has affected the entire search sector, the hosted search business that Google plays in has been hardest hit. According to JP Morgan H&Q analyst Jack Ripsteen, Inktomi has seen declining revenues in the hosted-search business where it most closely competes with Google. "I can't imagine the pricing [for hosted service] is anything but under pressure. This is a shrinking market," says Ripsteen."

redux [07.25.01]
Online Journalism Review Search Engines and Editorial Integrity

"Many of us in the new media industry have watched in despair during the past few months as several major search engines have abandoned all pretense at editorial integrity by adopting deceptive, misleading advertising practices at the expense of their users.

""The problem has become acute lately," says Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director. "Search engines have become essential to the quest for learning and knowledge in the Internet Age, and we don't want such an important platform to be used to deceive the public and skew search results on behalf of hucksters. They've chosen crass commercialism over editorial integrity.""

redux [07.17.01]
MSNBC Consumer watchdog accuses search engines of deception

"Attacking an increasingly popular Internet business practice, a consumer watchdog group Monday filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asserting that many online search engines are concealing the impact special fees have on search results by Internet users."

"The eight search engines named in Commercial Alert's complaint are: MSN, owned by Microsoft Corp.; Netscape, owned by AOL Time Warner Inc.; Directhit, owned by Ask Jeeves Inc.; HotBot and Lycos, both owned owned by Terra Lycos; Altavista, owned by CMGI Inc.; LookSmart, owned by LookSmart Ltd.; and iWon, owned by a privately held company operating under the same name."

ClickZ Can Portals Resist the Dark Side?

" "Quicker, easier, more seductive" is what Jedi Master Yoda called the Force's Dark Side. Changing over to using paid-placement listings certainly must seem that way to portals strapped for cash. Why expend effort developing editorial-style listings when you can make guaranteed money by using paid placement listings? The answer: to keep your audience.

Your audience turns to search engines expecting to get good information in response to queries, and pure paid-placement results simply do not always provide that information."

"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"

"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

redux [08.31.01]
Fortune Inside the Revolution: Smart Mover, Dumb Mover

"In reality, of course, first-mover advantages proved illusory. For most dot-com startups, being first was simply a way to lose more, faster. Many pundits began to argue that being a fast follower was a better strategy than trying to be the leader. Old-economy CEOs, eager to avoid the hard work of strategic innovation, seized upon this diagnosis to justify their instinctive fear of novelty. Suddenly, timidity was heralded as a virtue.

But the fast-follower advocates had it wrong as well. Most Internet companies failed not because they were first movers but because they were dumb movers. What companies should learn from the Internet debacle is not that being first is a dangerous form of hubris but that being dumb seldom succeeds. When it comes to trailblazing, there are at least three ways to be a dumb mover--none of which is unique to Internet startups."

redux [06.01.01]
MIT Technology Review The Myth of "Internet Time"

"However, being first-or even one of the first-doesn't necessarily confer an overwhelming advantage. Just consider the early personal computer pioneers, such as Atari. Where are they now? Even the recent history of the Internet abounds in counterexamples to the thesis of first-mover advantage. Look at the market for Internet search engines. Five years ago, AltaVista achieved a technical breakthrough that propelled it to dominant status on the world's desktops. Today, AltaVista is a distant also-ran."

" The main reason the first-mover advantage is much less potent than is commonly claimed is that Internet time, the dominant theme of the dot-com bubble, is false. Yes, product development cycles have become noticeably shorter. This is true not just in software, but also in such old-economy products as cars. But consumers do not operate on Internet time. Novel technologies do not diffuse notably more rapidly than they did in the days before dot coms strode the earth."

redux [02.17.01]
Internet World Nielsen on Usability: First-Mover Advantage Is Overrated

"Most of the successful Internet companies were not anywhere near the first to market. There probably is some first-mover advantage, but it has been much overrated and used as a poor excuse for foisting poor-quality services on the public."

"I do not advocate delaying release until you have the perfect design, but I do think that history shows that it is not necessary to rush low-quality products to market as the only way to win. Higher quality that takes a little longer can often be a better strategy."

redux [11.07.00]
Fortune Getting Beyond the Innovation Fetish

"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.

"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""

"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.

"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."

Inc.Com Best Beats First

"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."

"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.

"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."

"For all the recent inflammatory talk of supposed 'anti-science' tendencies in contemporary culture, a critique of scientific knowledge is not the same as criticism of modern science. Greenberg is utterly unconcerned with the status of scientific knowledge: he's not a sociologist or a philosopher and he's quite content to take it for granted that science is true, powerful and frequently productive, just as scientists often say it is. Greenberg loves science, too. But, like very many scientists, he is fiercely critical of many aspects of current financial, political and ethical arrangements bearing on the conduct of American science, arrangements which, if unchecked, have the capacity to undermine the integrity and authority of scientific knowledge."

redux [09.05.01]
The Third Culture Science and the Psychology of Beliefs

"The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else."

redux [07.21.01]
The New York Times Coming to Blows Over How Valid Science Really Is
[requires 'free' registration]

"Sometime in 1962, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, the world changed. That year a physicist and historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, did for conceptions of science what Copernicus and Einstein did for astronomy and physics. He led a revolution, at least if one accepts the analysis in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," which has sold over a million copies in 20 languages."

"Despite the assertions of some of his followers, Kuhn insisted in "The Road Since Structure" that the world had an objective existence, that it was "not invented or constructed." Indeed, he said, scientific exploration is bound by the nature of that world. But Kuhn's attempts to reconcile those views with the implications of his earlier views created their own controversies."

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn

"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

"A PC industry executive said a range of copy-protection technologies are available to prevent video piracy and that a single solution will not work and won't be embraced by consumers. "It's a myth to say that there is a magic bullet out there" to protect all content, said Jeffrey Lawrence, an Intel Corp. executive and member of the Copy Protection Technology Working Group, a cross-industry group working on copy-protection standards.

The Hollings bill is "an unwarranted intrusion by the government into the marketplace" that would mean a "snap-shot approach" to digital rights management, added Ken Kay, executive director of the Computer Systems Policy Project, a PC industry group based here. "It will freeze technologies in place.""

redux [10.09.01]
Dan Bricklin Copy Protection Robs The Future

"Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

Stanford Technology Law Review The Case Against Open Sources

"The Article is dedicated to what is currently one of the most contested topics of cyberlaw: the proposition that software should be "open." After briefly describing the nature of software and how intellectual property law presently applies to software, the Article points to an ostensible inconsistency in the application of copyright law to software that might be responsible for legal academia's favorable reaction to the open source movement. Thereafter, the Article critically evaluates a number of policy reasons for affording software various types of legal protection, including those developed by Larry Lessig in his works on cyberlaw. Its conclusion is that any move towards more openness would be highly undesirable from the perspective of society, as it would destroy the market-based incentive structure that currently encourages software producers to develop code that consumers find attractive. Finally, drawing on two widespread theories of intellectual property law -- the utilitarian incentive theory and the Lockean labor-desert theory -- the Article shows that the perceived inconsistencies identified earlier are in fact no inconsistencies at all and that there is hence no compelling reason why the current legal framework should change."

redux [09.04.01]
First Monday Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility

"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

redux [07.27.00]
Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property

"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy

"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the '90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers?not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

"I have seen that even a small village like mine can benefit a lot from the internet.

We can use it to generate money for the village, to provide quality education for our children, to provide information about our culture to children all over the world, and to invite volunteers to come to our village.

If everything goes well, I plan to build a college in my village and provide computer courses to the students. This will open a door for us to produce computer programmers in the village, and produce software for the big firms around the world."

redux [09.05.00]
Sustainable Development Dimensions The first mile of connectivity: Advancing telecommunications for rural development through participatory communication

"AS DEVELOPMENT THINKING has shifted towards sustainability and participation, there have been remarkable and rapid developments in computing and communication technologies which offer exciting possibilities for rural communities to move into the information age. For this to happen there needs to be a concerted, multisectoral approach to information technology with a focus on rural populations as communicators and contributors to information and knowledge, rather than passive consumers. There also needs to be a move from looking at technology and asking, "What can we do with this?" to looking at people's needs and asking, "Which technology might help here?"

Critical and analytical work on the introduction of information technologies has to be drawn largely from reports of urban projects. In most countries this is where the introduction and use of information technology takes place. However, if we are to consider pushing the use of information technologies out to the rural areas there are lessons to be learned from these projects, and also from the introduction of technologies (e.g., video, radio, drama, print media) used to support communication in rural development."

redux [04.10.01]
Feed The Three Stooges Play Zunil

"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.

Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."

Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet

"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

redux [04.23.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture

"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

redux [02.18.01]
The Third Culture The Globalization Debate

"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."

According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."

redux [09.13.01]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]

"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites."

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

"Rather than tear down organizational walls, you can make them permeable to information. You can synchronize all your company's data on products, filtering it through linked databases and applications and delivering it in a coordinated, meaningful form to customers. As a result, you can present a single, unified face to the customer?a face that can change as market conditions warrant?without imposing organizational homogeneity on your people. Such synchronization can lead not just to stronger customer relationships and hence more sales but also to greater operational efficiency. It allows a company, for example, to avoid the high costs of maintaining many different information systems with redundant data. By creating the equivalent of a HotSync button for your company, you can enhance your market responsiveness while at the same time reducing your costs."

Argus Center for Information Architecture Information Architecture and Business Strategy

"Business strategy and information architecture are closely inter-related. For most organizations, the days of slapping a web site on top of an existing business strategy are gone. Web sites, extranets, and intranets play key roles in defining relationships between a company and its customers, investors, suppliers, and employees. The structure and organization of these sites is critical to success.

For this reason, it's silly to get caught up in the chicken-and-egg problem. You don't need a fully-formed business strategy to begin developing an information architecture strategy."

"As the days and the weeks pass after the attacks of Sept. 11, an interesting development is taking place: American media is being beaten, and beaten solidly, by foreign competitors in the hunt for the stories of the new war against terrorism. This is particularly true of electronic media, whose shortcomings -- especially in terms of international coverage -- are on view for all to see. While American media seems fixated on the anthrax threat, the rest of the world is receiving better information about the larger, more complex issues."

"The limitations of other media -- time, space and depth, in particular, in various quantities -- mean that the Internet is becoming the one medium where Americans who are interested in getting the 'real facts' of the story can go to find them. Even most American media also recognize this -- witness the regular exhortations to audiences and readers to 'go to the Web to get more on this story.'"

ABCNews.Com Internet Grows as News Source

"A new ABCNEWS poll finds that nearly half of Americans now get news over the Internet, up by 11 points ? perhaps 22 million individuals ? since mid-1999. And just over a third of Internet news consumers say they've been going online for news more often since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

redux [09.13.01]
The New York Times Web Becomes Global Support Forum
[requires 'free' registration]

"Internet discourse revolved Wednesday around trying to fathom, cope and communicate. Web sites and discussion groups urged blood donation, posted prayers and debated whether civil liberties may be curtailed.

"The Internet has proven to be a remarkably good way to form relationships and communities," said Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "We go online to try to make sense of what happened, who to blame, who's in charge, et cetera."

Initially, Internet users went online to find out what had happened. Later, they used e-mail and other tools to find out about how friends and family were doing. The third phase -- finding meaning -- followed shortly."

Online Journalism Review Internet Performs Global Role, Supplementing TV

"The difference between June 1914 and September 2001 isn't merely one of scale, or of potential consequence. Many of those who fought in WWI -- from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and myriad other nations -- had never heard of the Archduke, or his murder. But every soul bound for the battle surely followed the American attacks today, within minutes of this strange new war's beginning."

"Why were chat rooms a major focus for people seeking early information? Because many of the Net's major news sites were quickly crippled by massive traffic. The bigger the news event -- as if anything like today's nightmare could ever be reduced to such a term -- the less the major news sites are able to cope."

nut'so Down

"With help from Dave and the Blogger Search Page , I've spent much of the last two days reading first-hand accounts of the horrible events in NYC and D.C. and personal reactions from people all over the world. Thank god for personal journalism because the coverage we're seeing in the mainstream media is painfully repetitive and barely scratches the surface. It feels very restrained and controlled to me which is probably best for the country at large right now. But it has been helpful for me to get a sense of what real people are thinking and dealing with."

The New York Times Web Offers Both News and Comfort
[requires 'free' registration]

"The major news Web sites were quickly overloaded. Many links to the not-so-major news Web sites stopped working. But more than news, what people all over the world craved in the wake of yesterday's terrorist attacks was connection to each other, and many of them found that most easily achieved by going online.

"The need to connect is intense," said Donna Hoffman, a professor who studies the Web and Web commerce at Vanderbilt University. "While the network TV stations blather, the Internet carries the news and connects the masses in a true interactive sob.""

"Corporate research labs have traditionally been called too narrowly focused, existing solely to turn a profit. Also, the argument goes, corporate labs don't have the broad mandate or intellectual freedom of university labs to delve into what might be considered "far-out" concepts, otherwise known as "disruptive technologies.""

"To the chagrin of pure-research advocates, corporate labs are now more willing to look at 'far-out' science - if it has possible practical applications.

redux [08.16.01]
Business 2.0 How Big Blue Plays D

"Bell Labs invented the transistor, the laser, and Unix, but it never invented a way for its parent, Ma Bell, to cash in. Xerox (XRX ) PARC presented the world with laser printers, Ethernet computer networking, and the point-and-click interface; the world capitalized on the technology.

Lucent (LU), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Eastman Kodak (EK ) also employ brilliant scientists who win patents for big discoveries. But like the other storied R&D operations in corporate America, they have succeeded far better at R than at D. "We invented everything and developed nothing," laments Xerox PARC's founder, Jack Goldman.

Then there's IBM Research."

redux [05.30.01]
The New York Times Bell Labs: A Bit Abstract and Always Curious
[requires 'free' registration]

"Bell Labs and its parent company, Lucent Technologies, are still giants of innovation despite recent management fumbles and business failures, many industry experts say.

"Their technology strength is four or five times" that of Alcatel , the French electronics giant that was trying to acquire Lucent, said Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks companies' inventiveness by analyzing their United States patent portfolios and by tallying how often other companies rely on them."

"But for decades, critics have called Lucent and its predecessors slow in turning the bright ideas into market-leading products that produce a steady flow of revenue."

redux [03.28.00]
Business 2.0 Paradise Lost?

"Transmitting a pulse of light faster than the speed of light is the kind of mind-bending, prestige-building discovery that the NEC Research Institute (NECI) was built to produce. So when Lijun Wang actually performed that astonishing feat last year, no one seemed to care that commercial application of his research is probably many years in the future. The kudos from the scientific community and terrific publicity were justification enough. But with parent company NEC struggling to boost profits, that kind of payoff may no longer be sufficient."

redux [03.21.00]
The Standard Blinded With Science

"Bell Labs is the last vestige of AT&T's bygone phone monopoly. In the serene, uncompetitive days before its 1984 breakup, there was plenty of room for the company to engage in endless research, file countless patents and create enough technology to overwhelm any adversaries. It hired the best scientists and engineers, and let them loose to pursue their dreams. The results included many of the seminal advances in contemporary technology, from the computer chip to the communications satellite.

But that approach was already looking like a luxury a decade ago, and over the past few years rivals that leave the science to others have managed to outmaneuver Bell Labs. "Traditional research has its place, but it's much smaller now," says Marek Wernik, director of disruptive market and business solutions at Nortel."

BusinessWeek Research Labs Get Real. It's About Time

"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms."

Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.

Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the "R" to do more "D.""

CompuKiss Engines of Tomorrow

"Change is inevitable, especially in the corporate world. Robert Buderi believes the important factor is how a company initiates and handles that change. His book, Engines of Tomorrow, focuses on the research division of corporations and claims that a company's central research operation is the bedrock of corporate change. Buderi strongly believes that the research process provides the technologies that spur growth.

If you are interested in the history of corporate research as well as corporate development, you will find this book fascinating."

"Postmodernism holds that our concept of reality is always warped by the lenses of individual subjectivity and group power dynamics. Therefore, postmodern KM can't be about management at all, because management implies external control of some definable resource. Its goal is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people. Postmodern KM operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them.

Concretely, that means things like automatically parsing email messages and other internal content to draw out useful context and associations (an approach being pursued by Lotus and a bevy of startups including Tacit Knowledge Systems, Abridge, EcoCap, Krypteian and Neomeo); mining discussion content and user feedback on intranets (Newknow); adding workflow directly into email messages (Zaplet); and building on Weblogs as a powerful Web-native tool for knowledge sharing (Onclave and Slashdot derivatives). In other words, tools to help knowledge manage itself."

Amy D. Wohl Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM?

"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."

"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"

redux [07.16.01]
Seattle Times Knowledge-sharing platform proves wise move for AskMe

"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."

"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."

""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."

Release 1.0 Postmodern Knowledge Management

"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."

"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."

"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."

redux [06.12.01]
DigitalMASS First rule of knowledge management: Knowing who needs what

"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.

In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."

Outsights Knowledge Management -- Emerging Perspectives

"Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not."

redux [05.28.01]
The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
[requires 'free' registration]

""Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper

""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

redux [05.24.01]
Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.

"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?

"Knowledge is power.

"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management

"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."

"What can operators do to boost traffic and maximise transport revenues?

The answer seems obvious: person-to-person communication. The success of text messaging relative to WAP shows that people like to use their phones to communicate with each other, rather than to download information from content providers. In the words of Andrew Odlyzko, a former AT&T researcher who is now at the University of Minnesota, "Content is not king - connectivity is more important." Indeed, he argues that the killer app for 3G phones might turn out to be increased voice traffic."

redux [09.17.01]
The Economist The joy of text

"The success of text messaging is surprising given that it is fiddly to use a mobile handset as a keyboard - and that it costs an average of $0.10 to send a text message."

"The success of text messaging came as a surprise to operators. But they should now learn from their mistake. Mobile users will not use their telephones like PC s, to browse for information. They will use them to communicate with each other, and occasionally to request valuable chunks of information. The good news is that they are prepared to pay for it."

redux [03.19.01]
Slashdot Clay Shirky Explains Internet Evolution

"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."

"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.

Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 g