Musings & Meanderings

I may be a foreigner, with limited knowledge of the details of American politics, but I recognize propaganda when I see it.

Lawrence Lessig has been one of my reads since I joined the blogosphere because of his work in the copyright arena, and I consider his contributions to freedom in online publishing valuable. I approached his introduction of a new and different area of study and specialty with interest.

The hour I spent yesterday listening to the Corruption Lecture - Alpha Version was an emotionally turbulent one. I listened only once, and do not have a transcript; the following references to the content represent my personal impressions.

The presentation opens with, and is wrapped in, an (unpaid, I assume) advertisement for Al Gore’s book. This is followed by a paean to the cause of global warming which does not state openly, but leaves the listener/viewer to draw, the conclusion that refutation of global warming is a symptom of corruption. Throughout, images of prominent Democrats glow like angels while those of Republicans are offered in a demonic light. Visages of America’s founding fathers which are shown are as stern, forbidding, and authoritarian looking as any I’ve ever seen. No criticism is cast on these venerable personages directly; there is only one non-laudatory but essential statement (which hooks to the conclusion) proposing that those gentlemen would never have envisioned the world we live in today, with its specific challenges. The conclusion is that “re-making our constitution” is the work which Professor Lessig (and whoever else is included in his plural ‘we’) considers important and will be undertaking over the next 10 years.

All of this political dogma is wrapped around an introduction to the topic of corruption. This topic is initially presented from a view of personal and societal responsibility, in a very powerful way, a way which should lead naturally to a focus on morality. Instead, the flow is jarringly interrupted by the substitution of the word money for morality. We are treated to images of the long suffering proletariat, in the form of elementary school teachers and firemen, alternating with oppressor images, which include the sugar and pharmaceutical industries as well as Cliff Richards and Disney aka Mickey Mouse. There is a pointed statement to the effect that this study of corruption will be only about money. After this statement the focus shifts to defining political corruption in terms of indirect influence. Eventually it skips across a small menu of specific issues, such as the limited influence of politics on the Supreme Court, and campaign finance reform.

At the end, I am left with a feeling of betrayal and my abiding concern about schools and education.

I am hardly surprised by Lawrence Lessig’s political beliefs, nor is this the first shameless propaganda I’ve heard from any faction of the political spectrum. If I was interested in reading political views, however, I would be at RedState or DailyKos.

Were I an American, I’d have a difficult personal challenge in voting. Both political parties have held power through my lifetime, and both have increased government spending, as well as inappropriate involvement in the private affairs of individuals. I believe that a non-partisan study of corruption and political influence could have value, and also that both of these factors are directly tied to morality and personal responsibility, and therein to freedom.

The issue that disturbs me deeply is that this piece is presented as an embarkation point for scholastic study by a prominent academic. It isn’t a new issue either, and is intrinsically related to censorship, the banning of books, and the re-writing of history. My support of free speech, freedom of public information, and open access is fervent and based on classically conservative views, which include social responsibility and respect for the public trust. We are accustomed to the concept of betrayal by politicians, yet often oblivious to the same concept in regard to teachers.

What we don’t know can hurt us.

About 15 years ago, I bought a slew of fancy electronic equipment from a big chain. After walking in and listing the functionality I wanted very specifically, I was sold products that, it turned out, couldn’t do a single thing on my list. Insisting on a refund, I was told that the store policy excluded them. They definitely got that I was angry, but had no idea what to do. My back up plan was to literally go picket the store with a large sign and my two sons in tow. It would have been onerous time-wise, but I would have done it.

The back-up plan wasn’t needed though, because, after a few hours of furious telephone work, I had the name and private number of the owner of the chain in his chalet in some mountain resort. I’m sure that my call didn’t improve his holiday, but I got my refund. Sitting at this computer, I know that the same task would be even easier today.

Yesterday, I read about Jason Calacanis fighting for, and getting, an apology from Wired.

Jason’s a well connected guy, you say? You couldn’t accomplish the same thing? Yes, you could. Some of it might take longer without the shortcuts afforded by a powerful phone book, but you could do it. All you need is the determination and perseverance. When I tracked down that big chain owner, he didn’t know me from Adam. We weren’t in the same business or community, and didn’t live in the same city or even country. I was simply an angry woman and mother.

What is different than it was 15 years ago, is that we are all now publishers, just as I commented on Jeff Jarvis’s post pointing to his column in the Guardian today about Google becoming a content provider.

The Calacanis Wired scenario is one to take note of. Traditional media has been wrapping itself up in knots for quite some time now over their potential loss of control and authority over the news we consume. There have been many references on weblogs to the NY Times ignoring the pointing out of errors and requests for corrections. In print, newspapers could tuck retractions and corrections into an inside corner below the fold in small print, where hardly anyone ever read them. This can’t be accomplished the same way online. The prospect of apologizing publicly to a reader, let alone one who can talk back, must be the stuff of nightmares for them.

Most individuals publishing online aren’t journalists or reporters, but more of us could and should be advocates for ourselves and each other. A truly free press is a cornerstone of every aspect of freedom.

Next time you are faced with an injustice, stand up …you can do it. If it affects a lot of us, then we have to learn how to join our voices together more effectively, and we can do that too. The better we learn to use our voices, the more we’ll be able to achieve.

In answer to the capturing traffic question on yesterday’s post and comments, I have new traffic here from SezWho.com but not from Read/WriteWeb.

As to Jitendra’s comment that one’s profile information can be edited, I clicked on that link on my profile and discovered that I needed to create an account with SezWho first. Not wanting to do this, I am only going to guess at what I’d expect to find, which is the ability to enter profile information for the benefit of anyone viewing my comments. If I could actually see the profile of who rated me, and also delete personal conversation (as discussed in yesterday’s post), I could better understand the incentive to sign up.

SezWho’s News/About Us page has links to lots of recent blog posts and articles about the service. You can also search SezWho on Technorati for another list, which is possibly how Jitendra arrived here. It might also be an interesting current search for anyone comparing search engine results.
to balance the positive coverage posts linked to on SezWho’s page above…
Geoff Livingston, a new Twitterer, tweets, “Not a good idea.” after his first encounter.

My trial comment was rated just over 2 stars. 3 is a good comment and 4 is a great comment and you can use that rating criteria to view only the best comments according to SezWho.

Objectively, I can understand why my comment, from a consumer and also business perspective but with no tech content, was not of ‘use’ or interest to the average Read/WriteWeb reader. I doubt, though, that most people will actually read all the commentary on an interesting post/topic and connect it to the star rating to form their own opinion. The comment immediately prior to mine said only, “This is such an interesting take on such a simple thing.” and received a rating of 3.5 stars. The commenter’s profile indicates that they might have been a SezWho beta tester (or closer).

Commenters who have (I assume) signed up have their website or url posted on their profile. If SezWho is actually capturing every linked posters’ traffic, though, why wouldn’t they display those posters’ websites in the profile also?

The potential of abuse with anonymous rating is what bothers me. SezWho requires entering an email address to submit a rating, but you can enter anyone’s. Being rated on Digg is not particularly invasive for those of us bloggers who aren’t mavens or seeking major traffic, although I still believe it affects all of us. Blog comments, however, or what remains of them, are somehow more intimate, and still the best potential for conversation in the public part of the blogosphere.

Last week, in a post about reputation systems, Dinesh Tantri said, “Reputation needs to be portable across the enterprise information ecosystem - a SezWho kind of distributed system for the enterprise.”

Imo, reputation also needs to be portable/aggregatable by its owner, which is related to the topic I commented on yesterday in my try out of SezWho.

—–
update added July 31st, 4:30 pm et

Although Jitendra posted here, I did not receive any direct or further communication, however…
The hover link has been removed completely from my name at the top of my comment (although you can still see the SezWho url, inside javascript, on the footer bar in either IE7 or Firefox)
The hover link over my name at the foot of the post has been changed completely to read verabass.blogspot.com. These changes appear to have been applied across the board.

Dear Jitendra and SezWho,
I may be just a blip of traffic in your stats, but I’m still an actual human being using services that you guys develop and promote. Respectful behavior is appreciated by people like me. It wasn’t optics that I expressed concern about, and transparency is usually a better policy.
Vera

Not a topic I typically dwell on, but lately it keeps coming up. Normally I love it when a theme develops. This one, though, is hardly melodic.

For example, yesterday I tried on and off to find a proper attribution for the quote about classes and masses. I found none in books and disturbing ones online, in that someone would use the saying in a post or article and then be quoted with attribution. This was described to me as an old saying in the 1970s when I first heard it.

Then I came across these 2 articles, one after the other:

On July 11th 2005, Roy Williams wrote this column on Entrepreneur dot com.

On May 22nd 2007 Jane May posted this on Career Ramblings dot com.

This is only one of several such examples I have come across in the past few days, all by happenstance.

Finally, I started reviewing the recent conversation in various blogs and publications. Seems that conversation on this swells up about twice a year. The issue has become somewhat contentious as concerns blogging, with some marketing types vigorously defending word of mouth and viral marketing as free speech, but that isn’t really what plagiarism is. It is theft, pure and simple, and the more of us say so in no uncertain terms, the better the possibility that many new bloggers with little or no experience of the issue will understand better. Internet research also has, apparently led to an increase in plagiarism by students. The clearer we are on the ethics of this, as well, the better we will be able to educate our children on the matter.

You can read up on the legal aspects if you need to (careful about believing whatever you read on the web, though, if you really want to understand a legal position you must consult an experienced and reputable lawyer). Common practice, if you are quoting another’s words, is to make it clear you are doing so, and make the attribution to the original author. Legality aside, this is civil and respectful conduct of a sort that each of us appreciate from others. Most blogs and websites have a Creative Commons license or other notice of permissions given and withheld by the author. Read it before you copy anything.

A good place to start is this article titled The 20 Best Free Anti Plagiarism Tools by Jonathan Bailey on Blog Herald. Jonathan also writes a blog called Plagiarism Today, including a good post titled 5 Practical Reasons For Fighting Plagiarism. Search ‘plagiarism on the internet’ on any search engine, and you’ll find more people and organizations if you have the need or interest.

I’ve also learned that there is a category of software developed specifically for finding plagiarism. My first thought was, oh, someone should get these guys together with the relational search guys, but after further reading, I get the impression that it is perhaps still quite limited and clunky. Nevertheless, it is heartening to know that there is activity against plagiarism and plenty of conversation about it. Even though not all bloggers are professional writers, the better we understand the subject, and keep up with new definitions as they develop in relation to the internet, the better a contribution we can all make to this place of ours.

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Thinking out loud here. In the open space between aggregation and formal registration.

Is there already such a thing? Specifically for internet and web publishing, where formal copyright is not appropriate? If not, it can’t go on my future projects list (as that is already too long), but I’d add part time input and/or assistance to get one going.

What I am picturing is a sort of reverse RSS subscription to a public record, where the feed address is listed and the content cached. No anonymous subscriptions. Call it something like ‘For the Record’.

Attribution and copyright issues are important not only to traditional and professional publishers, but also to many freelance and aspiring writers and other content creators. Many a starving writer used to rely on the old standby process of sending his/her work to themselves via registered mail.

There are also internet and web publishers who aren’t professionals, but who still care about whether their words are misused or abused or quoted out of context.

Those who publish on the web for purely personal and social reasons aren’t the subscriber base, but many or most of them are also the readers.

Then there is linkage. I’ve occasionally found links to my own content that never did show up on Technorati, or on search engines. The unseen links area is not something that would be directly addressed by an attribution database, but would be much easier to address based on it.

Speaking of secondary applications, here’s the hidden ’social web’ nugget. The subscriber base would divide naturally into professional publishers, academia including scholars, institutions and students, freelance publishers, and amateur. A bit of further categorization could organize the data into forms that are relationally compilable, whether by topic, date, subscriber category, or whatever else you decided to build into an advanced search. Mind you a simple button widget for all current web posts and conversations on the same topic sounds awfully attractive by itself.

What do you think?

Would this be an ISOC, EFF, Creative Commons type project?

An opensource prototype by someone creative?

A traditional publishing industry initiative?

A combination private enterprise and non-profit paid subscription model? (say $10 per year for amateur publishers and a variety of schedules for businesses, groups, institutions, etc.)

Certainly the potential congruence (depending on how the db is set up) with relational search development is interesting, but the inherent conflict between private competition in search and the objective nature of the ‘record’ is problematic, unless a search developer was only one funder/founder of the primary information depository.

Quite a mix of public and private interests.

Comments? Ideas?