John Palfrey

One of the great treats of co-teaching with David Weinberger is getting to be a student on the days that he leads discussion. Today, we’re taking up blogging, something he knows a thing or two about. You can also follow along with the class notes on The Web Difference class blog. A few of the issues that drew heat, and a bit of light:

- The early discussion has circled around the issue of whether news is tending toward the gossipy, whether on HuffPo or WaPo. The class members disagreed as to whether or not this trend is OK.

- David says that the HuffPo has two things that the printed version of the WaPo doesn’t have: 1) links and 2) people talking back, right there on the “paper,” in real-time. (I wonder whether the difference is so important on the second score, given that a) many papers have letters to the editor and op-eds, b) increasingly, most papers have web sites where one can post comments, and c) maybe some people prefer to have editors choose the letters to run rather than having to wade through 742 comments on the latest HuffPo story.) I agree with the follow-up insight that the difference is that people who read HuffPo and submit comments regularly feel more as though they are in a social setting, in a social network, while those who submit letters to the editors have this feeling less acutely, if at all.

- I’ve been looking forward to see if the students have any reactions to the Boston Globe’s article, by Irene Sege, on Saturday about girls and why they blog. One of the issues we took up earlier in the course, very briefly, is whether there’s a gender difference in terms of how people use the web.

Also: Some excellent students in the class have also created a meta-blog — a blog on blogging — for this class, yet another way to follow along.  The class bloggers pointed to a helpful video reference for those interested in the most basic question: “what is a weblog?“  One might also consider Dave Winer’s classic, “what makes a weblog a weblog?“

Total blue sky, inspired in part by a wonderful gathering pulled together by Jake Shapiro at PRX and Vince Stehle at the Surdna Foundation, picking up on thoughts from various contexts:

If I could start (or otherwise will into existence) any non-profit right now, what it would do is to develop and apply code for non-profit organizations that are under-using new information technologies for core communications purposes. The organization would be comprised primarily of smart, committed, young coders and project managers, primarily, who know how to take open source and other web 2.0-type tools and apply them to connect to communities of interest. (Perhaps some coders would volunteer, too, on a moonlighting basis.)

There are a bunch of problems it would be designed to solve. There are lots of non-profit organizations, such as public media organizations or local initiative campaigns or NGOs in fields like human rights, for instance, that would like to leverage new technologies in the public interest — to reach new audiences for their work and to build communities around ideas — but have no clue as to how to go about doing it.

I think the stars are aligned for such a non-profit to make a big difference at this moment of wild technological innovation. There are lots of relevant pieces that are ready to be put together. Ning and many others have developed platforms that could be leveraged. SourceForge has endless tools for the taking and applying to solve problems. Blogs, wikis, social networks (think of the Facebook open API), and Second Life (or whatever you’d like to experiment with in the participatory media space) are also easy to put to work, if you know how. Most small organizations know that Digital Natives (and many others) are spending lots of their lives online. There are others who do things like this — consider the wonderful Tactical Tech in the global environment, as well as those who do development for political campaigns, like Blue State Digital — whose learning might be leveraged here. There is plenty of “pain in the marketplace,” as venture guys might say. There are smart coders coming out of schools who want to do well enough by doing good in a mission-driven organization (think of the geekiest members of the Free Culture movement). The goal would be to take these technologies and making them work for carefully targeted customers in the non-profit space.

The non-profit would require a reasonable pile of start-up capital to get set up and to have ballast for lean times, but it would have a revenue model. It would charge for its services, on an overall break-even basis. It would not develop things for free; it would develop things for cheap(er) and with real expertise for non-profits that need access to the technologies. (One could imagine a sliding scale based upon resources and revenue and so forth.) It would also have a training services arm. Clients would be required to pay for some training, too, so that the organization would have an internal capacity to keep up the tool that’s developed for them.

I could imagine it loosely based in a big, open, low-rent space in Central Square in Cambridge, right between MIT and Harvard, with collaborators around the world. I suspect there are others doing something like this, but I am constantly surprised by the number of times I am at meetings or conferences where prospective customers tell me they don’t have a provider for their needs.

Charlie Frentz, Harvard College student and Berkman intern as well, recapped his summer with BzzAgent with his “first ever blog post.” Read also the great comments his post generated. Charlie’s clearly a natural born blogger, as well as entrepreneur. I read his inaugural post from Shanghai, a city buzzing with entrepreneurship, where Charlie would no doubt fit right in (and nope, the blog wasn’t filtered). Don’t stop now, Charlie; you’re just getting warmed up!

It’s extraordinary to me that, several years into the blogging-and-RSS phenomenon, we still have the issue of a lack of clarity around the permissible re-use of user-generated content, as reported by CNET’s Elinor Mills (”Please don’t steal this Web content“). Fair use is part of the answer; Creative Commons licenses are another part of the answer; social norms are part of the answer; but there’s a layer missing, on top of Creative Commons licenses, to allow for the paid re-use of user-generated content. (Previous posts on this topic linked from here.)  Mills points to Lorelle on WordPress for more.

Prof. Sunshine Hillygus is presenting about her study of the persuadable voter here at SDP 2007. She has a book coming out with Princeton University Press shortly on her research. I asked her what the most surprising/biggest finding of her book is. She said that she is trying to get away from the question of “do campaigns matter?” to a more nuanced view of how the various actors (including voters and the candidates) are using new information in such a way that they change their minds, and one another’s minds, over the course of a campaign. She also alluded to the conclusion of the book, in which she is “sounding the alarm” about the hyper-targeting of voters based on the aggregation of new data elements and the used of these data to target individual voters in ways that raise privacy issues. I am eager to read the book!

Lisa Williams is off and running with Placeblogger. It’s a wonderful idea and will no doubt be a terrific service. And she’s started with a Top10 list of Placeblogs.

The Personal Democracy Forum has published a compilation of reax from Internet & politics types about what the 2006 cycle in the United States can tell us. You should always listen to Ethan Zuckerman (”there’s always something to talk about in an election”) and Chuck DeFeo (a consistently insightful commentator on the GOP’s use of new technology), as Doc Searls notes.

But note also the insights of others, including Benjamin Rahn, an articulate and passionate young force in online fundraising: “If 2004 was the year of the online donor, 2006 was the year of the online raiser. ActBlue made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to fundraising for the Democrats of their choice. The result: $16.5 million sent to over 1000 candidates and committees.”

We’re delighted to welcome anyone blogging the vote today at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. The Blue Mass Group team have taken us up on it, live and in person, along with others swinging by, which is terrific.  Seth Flaxman of Demapples was here until he had class. Anyone and everyone of any political stripe is welcome. Just bring your laptop and we’ll provide the wifi and some things to eat and drink. Our address is 23 Everett Street in Cambridge, on the north side of the Harvard Law School campus. It’s a yellow-frame house. We’re up on the second floor. A map is here.

Each election day makes me rethink a hypothesis from 2004 on Internet & politics. There’s no doubt that more people are getting involved in politics through Internet activism than in previous cycles. The outstanding question, it seems to me, is whether or not Internet is making a difference in the political process. I’m inclined to say it is. And seeing those who are live-blogging the election here makes that case pretty clearly to me, anyway.

Our friends at the Center for Citizens Media and Stanford Law School have released an Election Guide for Bloggers, just in time to be useful.

This afternoon, we’re welcoming all those who are covering the 2006 Massachusetts campaign cycle to a reception in your honor at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The reception, totally informal, will run from probably 5 - 6:30 p.m. or so at 23 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA. No matter if you’re for Healey/Hillman or Patrick/Murray, or if you want yes or no on 1, 2, or 3, of if you’re still undecided, please join us!   To contact the Berkman Center, click here.

At St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s today, I’m talking with an extraordinary group of teachers at a NYSAIS workshop. The topic is using technology in teaching. We’re going to build a list of resources we’ve talked about today for posterity. Who’s first?

- Eduforge.org

A meta resource for technology and education, including sharing of information and tools and the like

- Digg.com

An RSS aggregator with a social component

- Rojo.com

Another RSS aggregator

- Delicious

A tagging service and search engine

- Moodle

A course management system or content management system, which is open source

- Second Life

A virtual world in which some classes are taught

- Wikia

A wiki service, related to Wikipedia

- JotSpot

Another wiki service

- Creative Commons search

A means of finding works online that you can re-use in the classroom, or that your students could use

- TechnologyBites

A new blog on tech and teaching

- H20
A best-of-breed, free/open source rotisserie discussion system

- H20 Playlists

A place to share reading lists, course syllabuses, and the like, with support for cool things like OPML