MediaBerkman

The “Walled Garden” is an oft-used metaphor to describe an area of the web that is somehow closed off – think AOL in the 90s, or any site that lives behind a paywall. To some, these areas of the net are exclusive avenues to brilliantly curated content. To others “Walled Gardens” are threats to the open nature of the net.

Elizabeth Goodman, a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a design researcher with Intel, has taken the metaphor of the Garden back to its roots (so-to-speak), to see if we can’t reimagine web communities through the lens of these physical spaces.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

CC-licensed music this week:
Duckett – Another Girl (instrumental)
_ghost – Ice and Chilli

The Reference Section:
Elizabeth Goodman on the web
Audio and Video from Elizabeth’s recent talk on the Walled Garden metaphor

Subscribe to Radio Berkman

See a partial transcript after the jump.

Are the “walled gardens” in the real world at all like the “walled gardens” we think of when we consider the web? Or is this just a case of a metaphor gone wild? The answers to these questions and more on this week’s Radio Berkman.

====

You might picture a Victorian Garden. A beautiful, landscaped garden enclosed by a solid brick wall or wrought iron gate. Idyllic, yet protected. Bountiful, but sealed off, made available to some, but not to all.

Those in Information Technologies adopted the metaphor of a Walled Garden to describe areas on the net where users and the user experience are in some way quarantined. You might think of America Online in the 1990s – a subscription service that controlled access and created its own version of the web for its users. The iPhone, is a more current example – the iPhone’s app store may have single-handedly invented the marketplace for talented independent coders to homebrew interactive mobile utilities with the best of them – but Apple still has a bouncer outside the app store, kicking out applications like Google Voice to keep their user experience pure.

Walled gardens are generally frowned upon by advocates of a more open net. But today’s guest encourages us to look back at the metaphor of the Garden and listen to what it can tell us about how we construct our experiences on the web.

Elizabeth Goodman is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a design researcher with Intel. She sat down with David Weinberger to talk about her research.

=====

Elizabeth Goodman is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a design researcher with Intel. You can find her on the web at www.confectious.net.

You can also find video and audio of a recent talk by Elizabeth, and a back catalog of all of our episodes, at the Radio Berkman site at blogs.law.harvard.edu

This episode was produced by me, Daniel Dennis Jones, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 http://www.confectious.net/