[A work in progress]

In the realm of Free Speech, there are the Absolutists and the Balancers. The abolutists read the First Amendment literally and without qualification: Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." As for the balancers, well, it's not universally clear that they have been represented by a cohesive philosophy.

In September 2002, Clay Shirky sent an essay to his mailing list titled Broadcast Institutions, Community Values. He suggested how the former could employ the latter, and in doing so, explained the difference between the two.

A couple of years ago, I offered a set of blogger archetypes. I came up with six based on the motivations of bloggers (singers, ringers, wingers, fingers, stringers, flingers). They didn't catch on very well, perhaps because there wasn't very much holding the set together beyond the rhyme. But I did want to distinguish those bloggers who didn't see themselves as playing any role in the news process and those that didn't take themselves to seriously (the “singers,” with a nod to Walt Whitman) from those that do.

Search Engine Orientation (SEOr) is SEO for Ordinary people.

Personalized Anchor Links are the heart of Search Engine Optimization, and as well, Search Engine Orientation.

I believe in Fair Use and the clear spelling out thereof: it's in my Copyright policy.

You may be looking for Fair Use Video.

The concept of a meme was coined by the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins suggested that it one can view genes as propagating through organisms, and not the other way around; similiarly, a meme propagates through minds and media.

Last year, in part 7 of the New Gatekeepers series, I introduced the term “peg” as a shorthand for an aggregatable declaration-- as I had no other way to contract that term. Suppose you make a declaration (a vote, endorsement) in such a way that it can be aggregated with others, or better yet, statistically integrated. This data becomes very meaningful. It's constructive. Think Zagat's restaurant guide, and you can peg.

When I started the civilities project over two years ago, my aim was to put forth a cohesive theory of communications media to underlie my software work. I called the theory constructive media. The ensuing research has helped me validate it, which, for the passing time, was more important than selling it. I have not till now revisited the original definition, so I will preserve that on its own, and replace it with the definition here.

Last night I stopped by the Symposium for Social Architecture, sponsored by Corante and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School (I hosted one of the panelists, and another one crashed on my couch following a red-eye flight from San Francisco). The “social architecture” up for discussion is really about social software, which has proved to be a very useful term for framing contemporary Internet technology. I was curious about how it should apply for businesses and other community of practice, and whether it is all-encompassing. But first, I wanted to make sure I had a complete understanding of what the term has meant over time.

Welcome to Civilities-- and the latest “about” page (this is a long-overdue update of previous versions).

My name is Jon Garfunkel and I've been publishing my research, observations, and documentation on Civilities since January 2004. By “publish” I mean that I stand by the words written in articles, and I keep a higher standard for what is written here than what I would articulate in spoken conversations or in private emails or in public online forums. Comments are open to registered users, and reflect the views of their respective writers.

The word “blogger” gets thrown around quite a bit these days, with shape-shifting definitions. Having studied this over the past year, I thought it best to cleave out four senses of a definition. (Note: The definitions have been updated with clearer names from the original post twelve days ago.)

This is a technical design document for the Webzine module for Drupal. It will be updated in an ongoing basis as I work with other Drupal developers.

It's hard to think of a world without news headlines as we know them today, but that existed before 1889, when Joseph Pulitzer stretched headlines beyond a single column and thus made them a more prominent part of the front page.

This is a brief introduction to the taxonomy, or classification systems on this site.

This describes the story types (akin to departments in magazines) used by Civilities to drive the layout, and help the reader know what's what. This is in contrast to the all-content-is-blog-posts mentality pandemic through the blogosphere.