Memex 1.1

Interesting Guardian interview. The strange thing is that he hasn’t been offered the job.

If you read nothing else this weekend, read this essay by Howard Rheingold. And then perhaps Mike Wesch’s meditation on it.

Thoughtful post by David Robinson on Freedom to Tinker.

A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration's Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as "inappropriate" by other visitors to the site.

In less than a week, more than a million votes-for-particular-questions were cast. The transition team closed submissions and posted answers to the five most popular questions. The usefulness and interest of these answers was sharply limited: They reiterated some of the key talking points and platform language of Obama's campaign without providing any new information. The transition site is now hosting a second round of this process.

It shouldn't surprise us that there are, among the Presdient-elect's many supporters, some who would rather protect their man from inconvenient questions. And for all the enthusiastic talk about wide-open debate, a crowdsourced system that lets anyone flag an item as inappropriate can give these few a perverse kind of veto over the discussion.

If the site's operators recognize this kind of deliberative narrowing as a problem, there are ways to deal with it…

There’s an interesting parallel here between the mindset of Obama supporters and that of ANC supporters when Mandela came to power in South Africa. I knew several South African journalists who had been passionate opponents of apartheid and who found it very difficult to report frankly on the deficiencies of the new black government run by people who they had hither admired and supported.

Useful picture gallery from the Guardian.

This morning’s Observer column.

'Scorpions', says Wikipedia, 'are eight-legged venomous arachnids. They have a long body with an extended tail with a sting.' Staff of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the self-appointed monitor of 'child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide' and of 'criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK', may well find themselves in rueful agreement about the sting. Except that what they've discovered is that Wikipedia also has one.

Pause for a review of recent events…

A Fox reporter went to the everything-must-go sale at McCain-Palin campaign HQ. And, guess what?

We saw laptops ranging between $400 and $600 with logins like “WARROOM08.” We couldn’t log on without a password, but staffers assured us the hard drive would be zapped before it was sold, and the computer would probably work.

The hottest item? Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

We traced the Blackberry back to a staffer who worked for “Citizens for McCain,” a group of democrats who threw their support behind the Republican nominee. The emails contain an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.

But most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

We called some of the numbers.

“Somebody made a mistake,” one owner told us. “People’s numbers and addresses were supposed to be erased.”

“They should have wiped that stuff out,” another said. But he added, “Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.”

We called the McCain-Palin campaign, who says, “it was an unfortunate staff error and procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure.”

Source: McCain Campaign Sells Info-Loaded Blackberry to FOX 5 Reporter.

Rory Cellan-Jones has a thoughtful post looking back on the furore over the image of the Scorpions’ album published in Wikipedia.

Sobering piece by Jay Jeffrey Rosen exploring the critical role that Google’s corporate gatekeepers play in deciding what can and cannot be shown to audiences.

“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [Timothy] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

Source: NYTimes.com.

Ed Felten adds this:

Rosen worries that too much power to decide what can be seen is being concentrated in the hands of one company. He acknowledges that Google has behaved reasonably so far, but he worries about what might happen in the future.

I understand his point, but it’s hard to see an alternative that would be better in practice. If Google, as the owner of YouTube, is not going to have this power, then the power will have to be given to somebody else. Any nominations? I don’t have any.

What we’re left with, then, is Google making the decisions. But this doesn’t mean all of us are out in the cold, without influence. As consumers of Google’s services, we have a certain amount of leverage. And this is not just hypothetical — Google’s “don’t be evil” reputation contributes greatly to the value of its brand. The moment people think Google is misbehaving is the moment they’ll consider taking their business elsewhere.

The NYT is reporting that Obama will nominate Steven Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as his energy secretary. What’s interesting about that? Well, Mr Chu has a Nobel Prize for physics. Rather puts Gordon Brown’s feeble efforts to attract talent to his administration in perspective, doesn’t it. Who was it he appointed — a guy called Digby Jones?

Many people have been forced into having their own verbal and intellectual lenses for explaining the behaviors of George Bush.

He can’t just be insane, so — what is it? What explains his behavior?

Today, as Congress fished around for money to save the U.S. auto companies, in a pickle because they had not invested earlier in alternative - energy projects, George Bush gave a speech, suggesting that Congress take the money from alternative energy projects to prop up the dying carmakers.

Is he really an idiot?

Some day, in the not so distant future, several things may happen:

1. As laid out in Harper’s this month, the President, the Real President (Cheney) et. al may face domestic or international criminal charges for war crimes.

2. Not that George can not pardon himself or others for international crimes, as in the Nurnburg Trial. Even if he escapes domestic prosecution, he may end up like Pinochet, hounded worldwide by courts elsewhere, kidnapped, dragged around, arrested and jailed elsehwhere, etc.

3. The simplest way to understand the entire Cheney/Bush regime is to assume that family ties to the Saudis were more important than catching bin Laden, that oil in general was more important than anything Bush swore to uphold on that Bible during his inauguration, and that Bush et. al (the heading on future lawsuits, ad infinitum) were embarked on an intentional, planned, consistent program of looting taxpayer monies for their personal and private benefit.

It is impossible to forget: We still have a month and more to go. There are plenty of miscreants on a master scale who would like to have a parting shot at screwing everything up for normal people in return for private gain, at the cost of a single large check to the Bush Library (Bush doesn’t read books; what a joke).

Bend over, and Get ready. George never cared for us then, and he still doesn’t today. He serves only his family, and a few close “friends.”

Source: Mark Anderson.