The Invisible College

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Tour-de-force of an entry over at Monkeymagic on the echo-chamber hoohaa:

“Echo Chambers have a valuable pedigree in the Invisible College. Just as with the Invisible College, by allowing like-minded individuals to argue over, agree over, and develop new ideas, Echo Chambers facilitate new thinking and specialism. But Echo Chambers do more: they are visible, open access versions of Invisible Colleges, and as such allow generalism. Their visibility allows those same like-minded individuals to look out and see where their thinking lives on the landscape. Their open access allows others to look in and appraise and critique.

Nuking Echo Chambers is, to use an -ahem – gentler phrase, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How about giving people the benefit of the doubt, allowing for them to be curious? Why not just concentrate on building tools for better visibility and access?”

Last year I wrote something while at the BBC for the Aula Exposure book on what seems to have wrapped itself in the memeskin of the “echo-chamber”:
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Downing Street says

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The first (?) mysociety project goes live: Downingstreetsays.com. Some of the prolific democracyhackers behind Faxyourmp.com were involved, including Tomski, who introduces the site thus:

“Downing Street Says turns the online-but-deeply-hidden transcript of each day’s briefings for lobby journalists into a blog where we can all read and comment upon No.10’s official line.

It got built in a couple of weeks by half a dozen people. All in different locations. In their spare time. Co-ordinated almost entirely via mailing lists.”

This is great. The prime minister’s statements permalinked, trackbacked, commented. Taking buried-but-public stuff and turning it into seeds for discourse and deliberation.

The excellent FAQ makes the point better:

“Q. Remind me again, what’s in it for me?

We let you:

  1. Read and search through what the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman actually said at each lobby briefing, in context.
  2. Leave your own comments on what was said, and to read other people’s.
  3. Find out what people across the web are saying about government policy, via those funny trackback links which appear at the bottom of every answer.”

And on how it was built:

“Running a website, contrary to what most highly-paid Net consultants will tell you, can come in very, very cheap. If you can get enough people to volunteer their time and expertise, you can create even quite complex internet projects in double quick time for almost no money. A large proportion of the Internet consists of volunteer projects like ours.”

Finding something like this when one wakes up makes one almost optimistic!

Well done all who built it… and of course well done for launching it on such an auspicious day.

New reading

moleitau
  • Kobot: “News on interaction design, HCI, mobile internet, robots, and much more.”
  • Standanddeliver:

    “Meanwhile, a lot of other music lovers have subsequently started to come to their senses, realising that there is more to recorded music than just the music: there is also the packaging, and the sentimental value invested in it. While Japan has begun to reissue CDs in miniature replica album sleeves, complete with facsimile inner sleeves and posters, there are people who are keen to just own their favourite records again, with the cover art and sleevenotes they don’t have to go blind trying to enjoy, and – if pressed to admit it – the ‘warm’ sound.”

Location, location, location

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DigiPsychoGeoLudiLinkage:

  • In-Duce: Mogi, item hunt

    “What makes the game so exciting to me?

    • It uses the GPS in my phone, and that’s so cool.
    • It maps a virtual data layer onto Japan and brings a fresh new way to look at my map of Tokyo.
    • All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me. I get a chance to discover parts of the city that I ignored, a motivation to check out that parallel street I never took.

    You can try out Mogi’s web interface here, using username and passwd combo of “test, test” [Via many-2-many]

  • Heathcote says “Annotate the planet” with his geowanking meets Jet-Set Radio Future pirate RFID-spraycan crews: “rdf as barcodes, and geowarchalking”
  • Technology for strangers: from the wonderfully-unorthdox Angermann2


Which leads me to one of my current (many) disillusionments (is this a word?) hungover from EtCon – since when does all this social software stuff have to be about bleedin’ friends? What about cooperation between strangers…

Oh, Auntie…

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Via 2lmc, The beeb announced they are going to do their (pseudo?) p2p time-shifting media player using Microsoft DRM (at a meeting for designers…).

I sigh – Slashdot, predictably goes bonkers.

If you have a tolerance for /. you can find some nuggets in there like this one, which makes a good point about a public corporation that sets great store by it’s perception as a ‘trusted brand’ but seems to have little trust in its users:

Why consider all the Internet users/customers as thiefs? [sic] Imagine a shop where you are systematically checked walking out, will you come back?

and this one

…there’s a much deeper issue here. The BBC has been in existence for most of the 20th century and their archive includes a very detailed log of global history throughout that time as well as entertainment programs. The value of that archive cannot be underestimated as a historical, social and political eductaional resource for future generations – therefore, if it is to be “opened to the public” then it must be done so in a manner independent of DRM enforced by an American software company! Otherwise, the public ends up paying Microsoft to access information that should be accessible to all, no matter whether they can afford to pay MS for a DRM license.

…the core issue here is maintaining the right to free information. Just as anyone (in the UK at least) can stroll into a public library and have free access to important historical books, the factual BBC archive must be handled in a similar fashion, even to the point where there’s a PC in every library to be able to get to that archive also.

Sigh. I guess they could spend some of that post-Hutton goodwill.
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UPDATE: to the second quote from /., Tomski points out that he’s conflating the iMP with the creative archive, which will be DRM-free and be as close to a creative commons as possible. Fair enough. Still not sure about Tom’s assertion that “Of course the iMP will have DRM”…

Grey Tuesday: talking all that jazz

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as in…

“you said it wasn’t art, so now we’re gonna rip you apart”

Unless you read this with a feedreader, I guess with my design I’m already in by default. Has anyone created a snapshot gallery of grey tuesday sites around the web? Matt Haughey is right – The Grey Album is one of the best bits of hiphop in years.

One of my favourite groups, The Avalanches create incredibly rich and dense sampled soundscapes. The legal constraints they came up against in the release of “Since I left you” mean we will never get to hear what they consider their best stuff…

“as word spread about The Avalanches, they found themselves in some surprising conundrums.

“I think if we thought it would be so widely listened to, we wouldn’t have sampled some of the things we did,” Chater says laughing.

Oddly enough, the roadblocks to sample clearances didn’t include Madonna, who allowed the group her first legal sample in the form of the bassline from “Holiday,” but rather from other, seemingly innocuous sources.

“It was frustrating when Rogers and Hammerstein were like, ‘You can’t use their stuff, you have to take it off the record,'” Chater says disappointedly. “There’s lots of stuff that didn’t make it. There’s a much longer version of the album that we’ve got that no one will ever hear.”

What a shame.