The Longest Now

You can bookmark this post as the Final Resource for WebCred
transcripts.  I’ll get .ogg versions of the last few audio files
converted and linked soon, and then final text up.  The difference b/t “unofficial” and “official”
audio is that the former were recorded by people listening to the live
webcast, and the latter was recorded on site with higher
fidelity…  unofficial audio is still fine.  Pro transcripts
have come in; will be linked from here once they are cleaned up.

IRC
transcripts : Friday | Saturday | Post-conference

See also a compressed attendee list, the followup posts and articles after the conference, and another kitchen sink.

Somewhere between my machine and Google [and a whole chunk of domain
names], something in the vicinity of DNS went wrong.  I
don’t know how widely or by whom or since when, but since yesterday
night, I haven’t been able to access any of a wide variety of google
IPs from my machine without an explicit entry in my hosts file.  
Labs.google.com worked, for instance, but google.com, www.google.com,
google.us, google.co.uk, google.de, google.fr, etc. have not. 
Neither hotmail, aim, gmail…

The annonying thing about maintaining my own hosts entry for google is
that it changes… 216.237.57.99 worked earlier today, but now it
doesn’t.  Right now I’m using 216.239.59.99, a subtle
difference.  Now google itself works, but if I accidentally follow
a link to google.de, my browser times out unless I actively ping
google.de and then insert a new line for it into my hosts file..  What’s going on?  Clearly DNS itself is working, since ping and whois can resolve their IP addresses…

Google HACKED ?! …

2. I know what you’ve all been wondering.  What will the future
bring, how will it be tamed, without the guidance of young innovative
leaders?  Luckily, philanthropist Klaus Schwab foresaw this problem,
and envisioned a thousand points of light to address it.  One
thousand one hundred and eleven avatars, that is, in the form of  Young Global Leaders
devoted to five-year terms of participating in initiatives and
activities, supporting and respecting others, interacting and
collaborating to initiate projects, striving for consensus but
accepting diversity of opinion. 

Each of these avatars gains various attributes upon successful completion of this task:

1. + Leadership (through interaction with mentors and peers)
2. + Insight (The best insights into key global challenges and
   underlying forces…  “[you are now] equipped to understand the
   world much better”).   
3. + Understanding (great understanding of different cultures, people, and stakeholders of global society)
4. + Social Status (Belonging to the most powerful and exciting global network, continuing on as an alumnus)
5. + Influence (through meeting those who shape the political, social and intellectual global agenda)  
6. + Personal brand (part of a life-enhancing brand)

This is an ongoing quest.  ~225 avatars are chosen every
year for a five-year commitment.  Any global player from the
High-tech, Corporate management, Government, Media, Arts or Academia
classes is eligible.

Daaaaavos 2 …

1. Anyone convinced that Davos (webcasts) is a playground of the elite, joyously squandering money to impose their offensive presence on the quiet Swiss countryside,
will be comforted by the fact that their website is just barely
functional.   It’s site map and use of javascript
“error-window” popups to replace the expected Hot Link Action for the events schedule made me smile.

Daaaaavos 1 …

There will be an IRC discussion of wikinews and how it can best
integrate with the blogging and online journalism communities.  It will take place in #wikinews on irc.freenode.net (or a channel linked from there) this
coming Saturday, Feb 5, at 22:00 UTC.  I hope those of you interested in news, credibility, and grassroots content creation will join us!

Wikinews discussion …

Remember how you felt the first time you realized someone had beaten
all of Quake – All 30+ levels of it – in fifteen minutes?  Well,
it turns out that 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cubes are pretty hard to solve; they
take almost 90 seconds.  A standard 3x3x3 is easy, though.  You could solve it in maybe 30 seconds, even if you were down to one hand.

Where the one-handed man is king …

I was thinking today, that real-time audio transcription is the kind of
effort which clearly benefits from simultaneous editing
of a single file… even more strongly and obviously than, say,
developing a whitepaper or encyclopedia article, or working on a puzzle
hunt.

At the same time, I’ve been looking for translators who can do
real-time interpretation for the Wikimania conference
this summer; it turns out that they tend to interpret in pairs, with
[say] English-German and German-English interpreters sharing a
sound-booth.  What I’d like even more than this, would be a
few
different German-English translators all speaking into the same
sound-stream.  One would do the primary interpretation, and
the
others would be kibbitzing for all to hear :

I want to thank my brothers here ... for 
                      friends or colleagues                            

supporting me through these cruel times and events...
                              vicious                                 
                                 no, oppressive times 

The IRC backchannel chat is now online, all 400Kb of it.
 
Friday | Saturday | Post-conference chats … or get it all in one file.

This crazy guy from Chiba spliced together a theme song for the next wikipedia event. You all have to listen to this… unless you’re allergic to Monty Python. First one to correctly guess who’s saying “fabulous!” gets a cigar.

Wiki Wiki Thing …

Archive.org is one of the great organizations around.  They aim to
provide pure services, aren’t afraid of trying out new and daring
projects for improving public access to information, and stand for all
of the right ideals of openness and advancement through sharing.

But they seem to suffer from quirks like any other organization; they
have a confusing and complicated website, which has only grown more
confusing since two years ago, when I recall giving up trying to use it
to find out what I wanted to know about their content archives. 
Today I tried to upload some audio file to the site, and found that
their project nomenclautre was as inconsistent and
confusing [was I uploading “live music”?  No.  But that was
the only link I had to follow for information on uploads], and their
changing color schemes and profusion of navbar-like elements as
distracting, as ever…

Joi tried to explain how easy it is to upload content to archive.org :

Well!  That might be pretty easy compared to downloading and
compiling your own software, but it requires seven+ steps, two logins,
and two pieces of software. And this is a task that one presumes
non-geeks are supposed to be able to do.  From an efficiency
standpoint, this is a disaster… consider that the basic task at hand,
uploading a file from your
machine to a remote machine using a browser, is neatly handled by the
two-step “Browse…” form with which every Windows user and most web
users are familiar.

So I want to know how this could be allowed to happen?  How can
all of the brilliant people who I know both visit archive.org often,
know its developers and supporters, have excellent design sense… how
can these people let the site slouch around in its current state of
confusion?

This post is deprecated.
You can find more updated text and audio here.

All transcripts and some audio files are now out.
Status: basically formatted, not proofread. Don’t use yet for direct
quotes; word-for-word transcripts coming late Monday.  

Let me know if you see anything wrong… or have good quotes to add.

• Friday morning   | text | audio (26MB) | All manner of things, keyed off of presentations.
• Friday afternoon | text | audio | Ditto, with big media finally starting to speak out in the last third of the day.
• Friday evening    | text | audio | Weinberger’s brilliant “stand-up philosophy” on a trio of subjects
• Saturday morn   | text | audio
  (32MB) | On podcasting, and an open discussion about scenarios by Dan
  Gillmor and Jimmy Wales and (at the very end) tools.
• Saturday lunch   | text | audio |
• Saturday open session | text | audio
  (22MB) |  Final session.  Informal, moderated by Dave Winer in the
  spirit of the BloggerCon wrapups, with audience members from the
  community.  (Only 5+ people from the community came… and half of
  the invitees had to leave after the previous session, partly due to the
  incoming blizzard).
• Many short podcasts from Andy Carvin, before, during, and after the conference.

I began to say on IRC that I wasn’t going to post the last session’s
transcript right away, b/c it needed editing… couldn’t believe myself
🙂  The trouble was just that the two Dave W’s got a bit
confusing, and one or two sections were out of order.  Smoke that
in your reliability pipe… I did a quick 5-min pass
over the file to correct glaring confusions, but take the last
transcript with an extra grain of salt.

I will clean up the transcripts a bit later tonight, but they should be referencable now.  And I’d like your help:
there are a few sections of the transcripts where a speaker’s name is
unclear (for the new speakers at the open session), or where a
paper/website is referenced but not spelled out… if you can tell me
what those are, I would really appreciate it.  I’d also love to
know about early news articles on the conference… anything before
tomorrow afternoon counts.

Transcripts: conference wrap-up …

(See the trancript list here.) Here’s the morning’s 2 sessions, on podcasting and an open session on scenarios and tools moderated by Jimmy Wales and Dan Gillmor.

Okay, transcripts!   WebCredTrans Day 1, and David Weinberger’s dinner talk.

A few people seem to already have started blogging the conference, creating programs for the attendees and pre-linking to this blog
as a resource for transcripts.  I don’t know if I’ll have time to
upload transcripts during the day, however, so barring finding a good
log-bot, you may have to actually be on IRC to read the
proceedings. 

Here’s an annotated list of attendees of the Berkman conference; it lists many but not all of the attendees.  There are also 10-15 observers at any time, from the K-school, law school, and media, and me.  The room is laid out with the invited speakers at a central rectangular shell of tables, all facing in at one another; the others are seated around the periphery of the room, along the walls.  There are lots and lots of outlets, and a mic for every two seats…

The list above is a condensed and slightly enhanced version of the official one.  If you have images of people not imaged there, let me know.  Sandhill has a similar list with excerpts from each person’s opinions on blogging, and reposts an interesting open letter to the conference organizers from someone anti-Jarvis.

I had an epiphany after the end of the conference last Saturday. 
I was pacing – as I inevitably am when they strike – thinking
about the last session of the day, where Dave Winer had asked everyone
what more they wanted out of blog software beyond title, attribution, and
date.  ‘More options for configuring my main page,’ said
one.  ‘More than just chronological ordering,‘ said another,
‘that’s what we spend all day working on in the newspaper editing
room‘…

It came to me that no-one, not the hotshot designers, not the
interface gurus, not the luminaries in the room, not the blog-happy
grandmothers with surfeits of common sense, had an inkling of what an
ideal interface would look like, even for their own peculiar needs. 
Where I grew up [TwenCen Earth, for those of you following along from a vasty distance],
we weren’t raised to think this way.  We’re lucky to see one or
two ideal interfaces in our lifetime that we recognize as such (of
course our bodies, the natural world, even those man-made constructs we
take for granted, often qualify).

I could go off on what kind of ideal interface I would like – in fact I
feel somehow obligated to answer the catalyst question – but that’s for
another time.  It’s enough to note here the thought that even
clever and skillful craftsmen are rarely working towards an Ideal. 
And most people don’t know what their ideal interfaces, tools, or
toolchains would be like, wouldn’t recognize their blueprints, wouldn’t
know quite what to do with one them until they picked it up, walked
through one, saw someone next to them on a subway or airplane using it
with ease…

I also saw for an instant the steady progress of my own criticism of
the world : the progression of classes of idols whose feet I’ve watched
melt and run in the warm rain
when I began to know a few personally.  Public school teachers;
doctors;
lawyers; professors; city boards and mayors; venture capitalists; my
parents (despite remaining, respectively, the most brilliant and most
sensible adults I’ve ever met); international political and media leaders… and now technologists.  It comes
as a physical shock each time I realize that another class of [expert,
brilliant] people don’t generally know or even feel that they could know
what the next
fifty years have in store; don’t know of or feel obliged to find a
coordinated approach to coordinating the efforts of a thousand
colleagues in their field; don’t have access to conceptual blueprints
which, however difficult to realize, make sense of the chaos of the
present.

I have known a double-handful of geniuses whose analysis, perceptiveness, and sense of direction and place – a balance of local and nonlocal Tao? – I would follow
anywhere.  But they are rarely the models or idols in their
fields; more often they are the eccentric success stories.  (And
the last time I did follow one, the rain washed out their foundation if not their feet…
so I don’t look too closely.)

More surprising to me — I have yet to meet a class of people who
recognized one another for those capacities, and collectively sought
out that lasting marble clarity as they pressed forward with their
life’s work.  For a while I thought technologists and inventors
epitomized this capacity, despite inefficiencies in the notion of
capital markets.   But I realize now that there is rarely
social or financial advantage in this.

There’s been a big hullabaloo about credibility and blogging this past week, sparked by a recent Armstrong Williams/Ketchum/Department of Education scandal.  Right on its heels came a detailed post about blogger ethics by Zephyr Teachout, and publicity of this week’s WebCred conference here at Berkman.  Subsequent articles (in the WSJ,
et al.) have tried to compare Williams’s lack of disclosure with Kos‘s
partial disclosure, generally to the Blogger’s discredit. 
Contributors to the melee include pro- and
anti-disestablismentarian bloggers and journalists (look how un/conflicted the interests of bloggers are!  Clearly they can/cannot be trusted!), politicians buttressing and bashing Howard Dean(for-DNC-chair) (look how clean/corrupt his campaign was!), political bloggers for and against Kos (look what a blog-god/whore he is!),  campaign groupies for and against  (look how open and moral / calculating and vituperative she is!), and even more restrictive subsubgroups, such as bloggers for and against the Berkman Center (look at what actively idealistic people / kitten-eating cyborgs they are!).

Someone I know has a great picture of the lot of them eating kittens, but is holding back in the hopes of blackmailing a free parking spot out of John Palfrey.  And for the record, I think every last one of the individuals and institutions mentioned in the previous paragraph is simultaneously decent and human. Yes, even the DoE.