Loving LeWeb: TED tries to grow online brain

Chris Anderson is interested in growing brains. In particular, a global brain.

“Everyone here at LeWeb is engaged in building a global brain,” Anderson said Wednesday in Paris at the second day of the annual gathering of European online startups and strategists. “You can measure it with Global IQ”.

Anderson is the curator of TED.com, a celebrated site featuring thousands of great thinkers presenting their ideas. He’s interested in brain content. Not brain science.

“People used to order one newspaper, now they read 20 at the click of a button. Information is everywhere, and absorbing it feels good,” Anderson said.

But Global IQ is not the average intelligence of the worlds’ people. Nor is it a measurement of how much information is available online.

“It’s the ability of the world to solve its problems,” he said. And “size isn’t everything when it comes to brain power.”

One quick glance at the day’s headlines reveals our IQ level could be higher.

Anderson agrees.

“Five million hours of humanity went into building the Empire State building. By spooky coincidence, that’s how much time we spend on YouTube. Every day.” Anderson said.

TED aims to make great ideas widely available. Anderson sees hope in the web in its ability to teach, but fears its capacity to misinform.

“The tools of the web empower the good guys but the bad guys too,” he said.

Alive&Well, a site created by avid AIDS denier Dr. Christine Maggiore is an example of what Anderson most dreads.  Dr. Maggiore refused to treat her daughter’s AIDS. So she died, at the age of 5, from complications of an ear infection.

“People gain comfort from these kinds of communities. The web gives these things credibility,” Anderson said.

There is hope yet, Anderson said. Now that the web has adopted a DIY style, new initiatives are starting every day to make the world a better place, growing the global brain.

“It is by acts and not ideas that people live,” Anderson read off the huge slide behind him, as he explained his excitement and new developments online that encourage people to teach one another.

The Charter of Compassion, for example, is an initiative Anderson celebrates. 

The Charter is a collaborative project started by Karen Armstrong to bring citizens of the world together “to remind the world that while all faiths are not the same, they all share the core principle of compassion and the Golden Rule,” the Charter’s website says. Anyone can contribute a story, an idea, or a few words to the charter, to be compiled and released as an official charter.

This is the kind of web that Anderson says is not available to “bad guys” because its based on social media.

“They can’t hide in a project like that,” he said.

Teaching one another, Anderson said is the most valuable “act” a person can do online.

“The web is reinventing what it is to be a teacher,” he said. “Anyone can do it.”

Anderson grew up in Pakistan in a desert town with few teachers.

“I was lucky to get educated,” he said while showing a slide of children recently taken in a city not far from his hometown. “These kids are not. In history the majority of people have been constrained by the fact by they haven’t had enough teachers in their town.”

Anderson strongly believes in the infinite capacity of human potential, and that teachers can shape and nurture this quality.

Attendees of LeWeb 2008, from videobloggers and startups to tech companies and media organizations, are increasing the ways in which people can learn and teach.

“To all of you out there trying to find ways to raise the Global IQ, thank you,” he said.

Watch the FULL Le Web 08 Chris Anderson talk here, courtesy of ustream.com here:
Video clips at Ustream

Photo Courtesy of Nitot (via flickr)
Photo Courtesy of Dotdean(via flickr)
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R. Spencer

Posted on December 10, 2008 by .
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Loving LeWeb: Google gets arty, releases Zeitgeist

Google is doing more with art than doodling these days.

Artists representing nonprofit organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and Save the Children have partnered with Google to design iGoogle template themes reflecting the work of their respective charitable causes. The templates, accessible via iGoogle gadgets, are available starting Wednesday afternoon, announced Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google, in Paris on Wednesday morning.

The templates will be easy to share and include a button making it easy for users to donate.

“We’ll also be running a promotional link on the Google homepage to drive more people to this,” Mayer said.

Wednesday was a big day for the notoriously secret American company. Google also released Wednesday this year’s gleefully voyeuristic glimpse into the most popular Internet search terms, the Google Zeitgeist. This year’s version includes country-specific breakdowns for 30 nations, a new feature for this eighth version of the Zeitgeist.

Sarah Palin was the fastest-rising search term on Google in 2008. The most Googled question around the world? “What is love?” The most queried how-to: “How to draw.”

Mayer, the VP for search products and user experience, engaged on stage with prominent tech journalist Michael Arrington in front of about 1,000 Internet entrepreneurs gathered at the Le Cent Quatre for LeWeb, an annual tech conference.

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K. Clore

Posted on December 10, 2008 by .
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Loving LeWeb: Having lots of X

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, says the easiest way to lure people to your social network is to promise lots of X.

“When you invite someone to your network you’re saying, ‘Come online because I want to do ‘x’ with you. The more ‘x’s there are to do, the more chances are that people will want to do join you.”

X, to Glazer, means applications. Applications essentially give people more to do online in any social media site.

His detailed at the Google Workshop at LeWeb on Monday why apps are the best way to improve any networking site.

iPhone’s application store exploded in 2008 when web developers flocked to its easy to use template and customizable price range.

Facebook is well known for its applications (The Compass, iLike and SuperPoke are among its most popular). Glazer says that while that’s all well and good for Facebook, other social networking sites, whether professional (LinkedIn, Xing) or social (Friendster, hi5), should also be benefiting from the draw of applications.

But they’re not.

“Right now social networking sites are islands of social information,” Glazer says.

Social networking sites operate entirely different from one another, and this complication discourages some programmers from learning more than one code specification.

Google wants to change that. 

“We want to merge the islands and make them more ‘webby.’”

In November, 2007, Google launched OpenSocial, a ‘container’ for web developers to develop social media tools that can be used on a wide variety of platforms. The OpenSocial foundation counts among its members some of the most popular social media platforms on the web..

Mashable.com calls Open Social the “backbone behind applications on MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn, Plaxo, hi5, and many more.” Mashable also features a compilation of Open Social educational videos here

With a reach of over 600 million users, there’s lots of reason for developers to flock to OpenSocial. OpenSocial also uses application templates so that developers can develop faster.

“First everyone wanted content for their sites. Now we have RSS feeds. After RSS feeds, people wanted applications. It’s the most important part of any homepage or networking site. Period.”

Glazer and the rest of the Google team want people to have as much “x” with each other as possible. But more than that, they want peoeple to enjoy different kinds of X.

The solution?

“Make applications more open and social. And that’s why we’ve called it OpenSocial.”

David Glazer was also featured in the panel discussion “Platform Love: Getting Along”. Watch the discussion in full below:
Free live streaming by Ustream

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R. Spencer

Posted on December 9, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

Loving LeWeb: MySpace unveils new box of tools

MySpace users never have to leave their space again as long as they stay online, the site’s chief operating officer Amit Kapur announced Tuesday in Paris.

The social networking behemoth launched a MySpace Toolbar for PC users surfing with Internet Explorer and Firefox.  Kapur said the toolbar, which stays open on the desktop when MySpace users are away from their pages, allows them to constantly update their status, examine the goings-on in their networks and instant message friends.

“You never have to be away from MySpace even for a second,” he said.

Michael Arrington, the CEO of the obsessively updated tech news platform TechCrunch, interviewed Kapur in front of about 1,000 listeners at the cathedral-esque Le Cent Quatre.

He has written about the networking platform’s developments.

Prior to the announcement of the new toolbar, the two talked about MySpace ID, another recent debut. It’s an open-source tool third-party websites can integrate into to their sites in order to allow MySpace users to more simply link up their activities online. The tool is similar to Facebook Connect, which launched earlier this month.

The difference between MySpace and Facebook’s approaches lies with the programming: Facebook uses proprietary software tools.

“We’re addressing a similar challenge but have a different philosophy for implementation and how to allow access,” Kapur said. “We have built MySpace ID all on top of open standards… By building on top of open standards you work with an extended developer community, which leads to better products.”

Arrington and Kapur also discussed MySpace Music, a music streaming tool for MySpace Users. It launched in October, 2008, in the United States after MySpace negotiated licensing deals with the four major music companies there. The music player has not yet made it across the pond.

“We’re working on rights deals but it’s a very complex rights landscape internationally,” Kapur said.

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K.Clore

Posted on December 9, 2008 by .
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Loving LeWeb: David Weinberger and the end of the information age

The age of information is coming to an end, Harvard University fellow David Weinberger said Tuesday in Paris.

Weinberger, with his nasal Boston accent sounding in sharp contrast to host Loic Lemeur’s thick Parision introduction, equated the fading information age with a scarcity of information - for example, the lack of diverse personal information typically entered into most form fields.

So Weinberger’s “information age” is not the same as the age of information. Social networks Facebook, MySpace or even services like Google, do not characterise the information age, he says.

The information age is being superseded by an era of abundance characterised by reels of information accessible via hyperlinked networks, the author of Everything Miscellaneous, said to an audience of around 1,000 listeners gathered at Le Cent Quatre for LeWeb2008.

Weinberger spoke in 2007 in Amsterdam after publishing Everything is Miscellaneous and stopped to do the following video interview with the EJC.

“Hyperlinks are the opposite of information,” said Weinberger, author of Joho the Blog. “Hyperlinks connect things and join things in rich ambiguous ways. Which is why the age of information is coming to a close.”

The era of abundance includes, of course, an unfortunately large amount of crap - or merde, as the case may be in France.

This is no problem, Weinberger said.

“We know how to deal with an abundance of crap,” the Boston-based author said. “It’s the abundance of the good that’s really throwing our culture for a loop.

Our culture isn’t ready for that. Our institutions aren’t ready for that.”

Weinberger called on the concept of corporate leadership to illustrate his idea. In American corporate culture, he said, CEOs are lonely cowboys wont to hoard information - creating an artificial scarcity - from lower-ranking colleagues. They access the input of other colleagues in order to make decisions.

“It’s incredible how we’ve heroized this flawed power system,” Weinberger said. “Using phrases like ‘it’s lonely at the top’ to somehow canonize these leaders. We act as if this kind of isolation is something positive.”

A simple mathematic equation proves how lacking the system is.

“I’m amazed when I meet CEOs at how much work they do. They are product sellers, financial wizards and people managers. They are geniuses, sticklers and everything in between. It’s impossible for one person to do all the work. It’s ineffective.”

The alternative? Crowdsourcing.

Organizations would do well to rely on networked groups of colleagues. In the era of abundant, rich information, Weinberger continued, decision-making is a failure of leadership.

“It is a failure of the abundant networked environments we are in,” he said. 

Sacristy can also be seen in the strategic plans laid out by and for CEOs. Weinberger lobbied against strategic plans because, he said, they are written with only one future in mind.

This kind of planning is also done by government officials, Weinberger continued.

Then he praised the online efforts of the Obama administration - prompting applause at the mere mention of the US president-elect.

Although Obama is a strong leader, he acquired his position through an acknowledgment of other thought leaders. Following the lead of 2004 candidate Howard Dean, Obama uses the blogosphere or other self-referential networks as his launching pad . He and his staff acknowledge the existence of multiple leaders — and their importance to leading a successful group of informed individuals.

“Much of his strength has come from strong understanding of the network,” Weinberger said as he mentioned Change.gov, the site for the “transition” of American government.

Obama’s approach to government, the way his team has facilitated dialogue with the American audience, sets up a style of leadership that can take on the best properties of networks, Weinberger said.

This embrace of connections facilitates abundant leadership. It is a means to hyperlink beyond ourselves.

“The way we get our meaning is in a hyperlinked world,” Weinberger said.

Read Weinberger’s blog here

Watch the full Weinberger talk below, courtesy of ustream.com
Webcam chat at Ustream

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K. Clore and R. Spencer

Posted on December 9, 2008 by .
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From the lawn: More vocabulary lessons at Picnic

If there’s one human tendency as common as homophily, it’s limerence.

And so the vocabulary lessons continue at the European Bloggers’ Conference.

Limerence, as presented by Heike Sperling, is an “involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person.”

Sperling, a designer and professor from Cologne, Germany, is at the beginning of a journey to study limerence, creating a project in the process. While not sure where it’s going to go, Sperling, 43, is able to say where she’s starting.

Tenants of limerence: A radical state // Love is called a madness // Limerence conflicts with the idea that human beings are free, rational and therefore responsible creatures.

The topic is quite tied to Sperling’s work with linking music and pictures in creative projects. Approximately 85 percent of popular music concerns love and limerence. Commercially, it is a profitable idea.

Three areas to be examined:

• Identity: Limerence as a cognitive question. Are “obsessed” humans a danger to society?
• Society: Romantic love has been incorporated into the culture of consumer capitalism. How is it used to make profit?
• Interface: Limerence and music are strongly connected. How so?

Check out Sperling’s personal blog for more information. And feel free to e-mail her to dialogue about the subject.

Posted on September 26, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

From the lawn: Sperling on the processes of communication and creation

We communicate because we do not understand each other. Or, said backward, lack of understanding necessitates communication.

A designer who instructs and coaches students of music and media to produce creative works that meld sound with images, professor Heike Sperling is particularly interested in processes of communication and creation.

The managing co-director at the Institute for Music And Media addressed the European Bloggers’ Conference in Amsterdam at Picnic on Friday.

“To me, the most interesting part of teaching is that I learn a different language,” she said. Her teaching - and own projects - require a constant dialogue about forms of expression, particularly image and sound.

Within this dialogue, all sides are given equal weight and taken seriously. Conflicts obviously arise, and care must be taken to prevent anyone from becoming a dictator within the discussion or creative process.

“Conflict is not something negative,” Sperling said. “It just depends where the conflict evolves.”

Additionally important for Sperling’s work at the IMM is the development of confidence.

“To study means developing assertiveness, self awareness and communication skills,” she said. The ability to trust the unconscious to do the brainstorming process is an essential development of great import.

Sperling discussed two telling demographics: Her students are all male (engineering ... ) and tend to be hip to new tools (Web 2.0) but less schooled in the fundamentals of craftsmanship.

Music students, though, she discovered, tend more toward discipline, perhaps an influence of the rigorous studies required to master an instrument.

For more information about Sperling, visit her website.

Posted on September 26, 2008 by .
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On the lawn: Ethan Zuckerman gives vocab lessons at Picnic

Homophily can make you stupid. But learning the word itself can help make you much smarter ...

Social scientists use the vocabulary word Ethan Zuckerman taught the European Bloggers’ Lab on Thursday to describe the intrinsic human tendency to relate to others like them.

The tendency of “birds of a feather” to “flock together” happens at lunchrooms, on the playground and online.

“This is something that comes up again and again as we come into this new media,” said Zuckerman, who is affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He is also the co-founder of Global Voices.

It is a phenomenon to be avoided, he continued.

The Massachusetts resident briefly profiled the user demographics of social news site Reddit, one of many news aggregation sites that allows users to vote on the contents of its pages. Its users: 92 percent male, 70 percent based in the US, 68 percent students or IT workers, 43 percent democrat, 29 percent libertarian and 6 percent Republican.

The problem? Well, for Zuckerman, an unobvious one: He described himself as quite similar to Reddit users.

Consider a maxim your mother may have told you: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”

Ditto for reading.

“If you always hear the same things from the same people you are going to become dumb.”

Zuckerman called the fight against homophily the attempt to engineer serendipity.

How to engineer some new connections online? Look at sites like Evgeny Morozov’s Polymeme (another vocab word!), he suggested. Try to find bloggers with whom you don’t necessarily have a lot in common. Zuckermen mentioned Saudi Jeans and Mahmood’s Den, out of Bahrain.

Posted on September 25, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

On the lawn: Keller addresses European Bloggers’ Lab at Picnic

The Internet has become the site of a giant record store, one in which nearly any recently produced music, records and photography are available. Whether the creators of these works like it or not, actually. And everything is always on sale: For free!

“And official businesses can’t compete because it would be too burdensome to get the copyright for every single thing,” Paul Keller said Thursday in Amsterdam at the European Bloggers’ Lab. “No real record store could have the necessary permission… So it’s pretty easy to get access to pirated material and fairly difficult to find a source for legal access to music.”

And what’s great about the endless record bin that is the Internet, Keller noted, is that there’s a diminished need to ask anyone’s permission to visit or purchase anything.

“If someone has to ask permission to use something, they probably won’t use it,” he continued. We are not in a permission-based culture anymore, though. The current digital culture, rather, encourages the free sharing information and creative works.

The revolution of the Internet, said Keller, a German copyright expert living in the Netherlands, is that it enables all of us to access the same distribution platforms available to governments, corporations or other big “official” sources of information.

And actually, its the “unofficial” users of these platforms who are most successful at mastering the technology behind them. Gone are the days of student activists bandying about with badly copied papers handed out at a demonstration, Keller said. Anyone who wants to participate in civil society can now do so - and do so well.

But, when it comes to distribution, everybody has to deal with copyright law - which has evolved into such a complex, ineffective system, one that it is no longer useful. Copyright law, after all, was never meant for ordinary people, but rather trained lawyers.

Creative Commons, for which Keller is working in conjunction with other projects at Knowledgeland, offers a solution which builds on top of copyright law. It allows creators of various works to label their work with permission for various kinds of reuse.

By Keller’s count, more than 250 million items are license under CC online. A quick search for items liscenced under Creative Commons on Flickr yields a virtual stock photography shop.

Keller offered an overview of the principles behind basic copyright law during his keynote presentation Thursday. He pointed out that every work created with sufficient originality is automatically under copyright, belonging to the original author (as long as another arrangement does not exist). This is true on the Internet as well.

But what’s different about the Internet is that its viral nature has itself become a motivation for the creation of creative works. “You put something on the Internet and it gets copied right away - and that’s the intention,” Keller said.

This is a phenomenon not seen offline. Newspapers which offer today the content of yesterday’s newspaper - but for a cheaper price! - will not sell.

“You wouldn’t buy that even if it is cheaper. The point is not access to the information, but the access to exactly the relevant information you want, the specific selection.”

This is a major shift away from traditional thinking, which presupposes that copyright itself - and the monetary rewards it promises - is the foremost motivation for the creation of works. Obviously, this has changed.

“Most of the people here at Picnic, their problem is that their work is not watched or listened to enough,” he said.

A study of various mediums offers copyright scholars dynamic insight. Keller considered the business model of radio stations. It would be impossible for radios to arrange copyright agreements with each artist and with each work. So instead, artists instead give the rights to their music to royalty societies, which in turn distribute songs to be played over the airwaves. Artists then collect royalties, tailored to how many plays their song god, from the societies.

Keller said some scholars think such a model could be applied to the Internet: Paying EUR 5 extra to Internet Service Providers would grant users the right to download as many works as desired.

“But it’s not well thought-out yet,” he added. Privacy implications arise over the necessary record-keeping. Concerns about how to distribute fairly also arise, among other logistical concerns.

Posted on September 25, 2008 by .
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GIJC Summit 2008:  How to fund your project

For many journalists, the chance to work on investigative projects stirs feelings of excitement, passion and romantic ideas of changing society. But the chance does not come along often - in large part because investigative reporting is fast becoming entirely outside the core business of daily newsgathering operations.

A panel of speakers at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference addressed the ins and outs of raising funds for investigative work. Some highlights:

• Ides Debruyne of the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism:

  - The idea is the most important part of your project. “It’s a pity for those great ideas nobody besides you is crazy about,” he said.

  - Think internationally. “Investigative journalism is added value, it is not the core business of the mainstream media,” he said. “When you choose for investigative journalism you are in no man’s land. Only a fistful of journalists are busy with it. ... However, it’s becoming more important.” ... In this globalized world, power is increasingly shifting to international groups like the UN and EU.

  - Investigative journalists do not cover the EU. There is room for work here.

  - Work in teams whenever possible, particularly for cross-border efforts.

  - Think about budget and business models. This plays a major role in success and long-term success. Consider new ideas: Micro-financing, tax shelters.

  - Some useful links, from Debruyne’s Delicious account.

• Rana Sabbagh of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism:

  - Reporters working in the Arab world are at a disadvantage because the law makes it impossible to get documents.

  - Her group is an NGO based in Jordan. The group helps fund investigations and goes a step further, assigning mentors to its reporters. It publishes (in Arabic) reporters’ and mentors’ notes during the reporting process for other journalists to learn from.

  - Sabbagh’s group has not earned tax-exempt status, so it is still paying taxes.

• Drew Sullivan of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Program:

  - Four keys to fundraising success: Filling a real need, financial sustainability, standards and quality, quality management and programmatic sustainability.

  - Financial sustainability: How do you plan on surviving? Dose the program have a business plan that offers an opportunity for success? What is the long-term goal for getting money? What competitive advantage do we have over other programs?

  - Have a track record of success.

  - Be focused on your core area. Too many people chase for grants everywhere.

  - Don’t wait for someone to offer something. Go out and find grants. Understand their limitations, needs and “code words”. Apply for grants wherever you can but keep the same simple core vision. Go to places that don’t always give money to journalism.

  - Quality, quality, quality. Be the best. Have passion for what you do. Don’t promise what cannot be delivered. A good fundraiser is a good investigative reporter.

  - Be relentless.

  Posted on September 15, 2008 by .
  Filed under blogging.