The New York Times begins the year by giving an update on such a modest proposal: Officials at U.N. Seek Fast Action on Rights Panel. Paraphrasing the article, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan explains thus: some countries participate “not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others” with the consequence being that “a credibility deficit has developed, which casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.” The position of the United States, according to Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Kristen Silverberg, is “to improve the membership criteria so that countries like Zimbabwe and Sudan were not eligible.”

I’ve been promising this story since Monday, but I must disappoint for now as I’m still waiting to hear on a couple of key source that I only contacted late in the week. If I haven’t contacted you, and you think you need to improve upon the historical, shoot me a message, or post yourself. If you want to scoop me, be my guest, but here’s what you have to reach for: you’re going to need to come up with the particular faults of RSS, and also illustrate a model of how it could be completely re-imagined. And you also might want to deliver something on the order of 5,000 words, which is where I’m at right now. It was longer, but I’ve cut out many parts where I was just quoting directly five-year old quotes– as in years ago, not the age of the quoted person. I’d like [As for this little game? Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek floated such an idea this past Monday. I was skeptical then, but under the circumstances, I accept.] Whatever you got, tag it rss+quest.

To be a Six-part series. Two parts completed so far.

In March 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape introduced RSS as alternative way of bringing content to users; it stood RDF Site Summary or subsequently, Rich Site Summary. Just how “rich” it would be– how much structure through the RDF Resource Data Framework to employ– was open to discussion. The basic premise of syndication was to deconstruct web content content into its logical components: headline, title, publication time, author, content, in order to be re-assembled by the user. It was a bit of a fluke for its time: websites were trying to be ever more flashy and interactive, and RSS undermined that experience somewhat.

Today, a typical publisher demonstrates their RSS savvy by the amount of flavors they support, including RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom– not by the depth of richness of metadata that comes with the feed. None offer support for categorization, threading, discussions through RSS. Blog posts represented in RSS feeds remained really simple. And that was Winer’s vision. Most of the personal publishing that reached millions on the web derived from his style of weblogging (the pure journaling/diary-writing developed independently later, according to chronicler Rebecca Blood).

[This post is a response to a thread on the ONA discussion list. It got too long to email.]

When talking about the best use of technology for uses like computer-mediated communications, a skeptical philopsophy is invariably voiced along the lines of "technology can't solve all problems; humans can." This is sensible, but the statement is problematic due to a different understandings of what exactly "technology" means in this sense.

This essay defines the concept of social data within social media software systems and issues a call for users to recognize its need to be made available for public research.

[This is a letter sent to the Boston Globe in response to the horrid Op-Ed contribution “When Librarians protect terrorists” by Richard L. Cravatts on February 6^th, 2006. I called the paper to see what follow-up they planned on this, but learned nothing. This is obviously much too long to be a letter, now. I’ve added some links here for your viewing pleasure.]

But being as I’m writing about Shirky, I thought I’d look at the ol’ bear’s list before it goes into permanent hiberation.

It was eleven months ago that I published the New Gatekeepers series. I’m still learning. Just last Friday, Elisa Cooper of Berkeley, CA, posted a comment informing me about the concept of rankism, and its supporting website, Breaking Ranks. The concept Rankism has been coined by Robert Fuller, a past Professor of Physics at Columbia and President of Oberlin College. He had come to realize that all of our old scourges of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry had a common root– an -ism called rankism— but it was not until he left academia that the idea coalesced. He told Publishers Weekly: "Lacking the protection of title and status in the years after Oberlin, I experienced what it’s like to be taken for a nobody."

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.

It inevitably follows that in becoming a man of letters– a title which should encompass both "personal publisher" and "freelance researcher"– one has to keep in mental shape by going to a conference every now and then to meet and greet. This impulse is checked only by the need to anchor oneself at the home office to actually get some work done. My home office shared my interest in my going to this particular conference, the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, so I ventured to San Francisco for the opportunity to do so.

Since Ronald Reagan, U.S. Presidents have added "signing statements" onto laws to indicate how (or whether) they expect to enforce them. Two weeks ago in the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage reported on the 750 signing statements of the current President Bush, which have come at a pace several times that of his father and President Clinton. This story has caught on, but perhaps not as quckly as one might think, for a couple of reasons. First is that it has been just one of many troubles battering the current Administration. Second, and what interests me, is that the phenomenon has yet to win a pet name. The common name for the effective veto as described by Article I, Section 7 has been popularly known as the "pocket veto." This I’d like to call the "sock-it veto."

One of the more damning things about evidence is that there are usually parties who want it removed, such as by the accused.

Here’s a write-up of what I learned in the sessions at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco two week ago.

It is not a complete account for a number of reasons. First, I was unable break the laws of physics and attend every session. Second, I didn’t take as detailed notes as I should have, but this exercise should encourage me once again to do so. Third, I’m reserving some information for the entity that sponsored my attendance to the conference, my employer.

This describes an exercise in building a constructive media process.

Let’s begin by saying that an organization has policies, bylaws, guidelines, position papers which govern the behavior of its members; for this exercise we will use “policies” as the generic term covering all of them. The organization has two main responsibilities: publish the policies, and understand how they are actually being employed by members.

Two weeks ago, Alaa Ahmed Seif Al Islam– an activist, blogger, Cairene, Drupal developer, Egyptian, and fairly good husband to his wife Manal (in alphabetical order)– was beaten and arrested, along with ten other demonstrators, as part of ongoing protests in Egypt in suppport of an independent judiciary. What followed was a smattering of global protests, online and offline to free Alaa and other hundreds of jailed protestors. These helped in part to generate media stories, and even the U.S. State Department has called the actions of the Egyptian government were a "mistake."

Alaa had won an award last November by Reporters Without Borders for his Manalaa.net Drupal site, an aggregator Egyptian blogs. He was participating in ongoing protests for an independent judiciary, when he was arrested along ten others; Now a mighty wind had blown across the the plains of the blogosphere to raise support for one of their own. The wind also carried seeds of activism: as a protest measure, bloggers were invited to link to the new Free Alaa website, but using the link text Egypt. Doing so, on a massive scale, was supposed to effect a googlebombing.

Now that I was committing money to buy a Google AdWord for Alaa, my cause was his. I realized I ought to spend a little more time to learn about him.

The thought crossed my mind that he might have different politics than I, and that somebody might pick on me later for this. Whatever were his thoughts on Israel, I wondered. I searched his website, and found some topical entries– but couldn’t find any actually written by him, only by the folks he was drawing in. I figured if I ought to draw the line somewhere: I couldn’t support anybody who advocated aggression against U.S. or Israeli interests. Anything else he had to say– well, it was up to him, I was defending his right to say it.

Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices project and longtime blogger on Africa and development issues, had considered the use of Google AdWords for awareness campaigns in a post some 18 months ago. Several aid NGOs have been buying AdWords– ads that would show up based on a given search term– for different countries, so he wondered what it would really cost to enter this market. By getting involved with the campaign for Alaa through this series (see previous part), I set myself to find out.

In looking at the attempted googlebombing campaign to support Alaa, I wanted to first consider a theory about how activism works. Activism needs to be both disruptive and constructive, offering a new narrative or a new artifact of reality for people to accept. Campaigns that are only disruptive tend to be unappreciated, or simply defined as illegal, even in this country.

Suppose you’re a state judge, like Conrad Rushing of the Santa Clara-based 6^th Appellate Court of California. Where do you go if you need to cleave the difference between words like “blog” and “webzine”? You could seek the opinions of any number of experts from law school-affiliated “Centers of Internet and Society” in Palo Alto or in Cambridge. Or you could have asked my opinion. But perhaps citing me directly would not have been very impressive in the footnotes. So instead, the Appellate Court cited Wikipedia, where my words were published, semi-anonymously. (Until now.)

Badges are graphics that bloggers and website publishers representing generally affiliations. Traditionally, they are image references which point to graphic files, such as GIFs.

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.

A brief sketch of the ideas going forth for constructive activism. I see three parts:

Guide – aka the "how to" part. Note that questions like "How to start a blog" have many answers already on the web. The questions I’d like to start answering are "How do we get the prolific bloggers on the topic to contribute here and not exclusively on their own blog " One of the challenges in the Free Alaa campaign was that the actual blog was not updated regularly enough, so readed had to hunt around SandMonkey, the Arabist et al for updates.Granted, I expect that next-generation aggregation will be able to handle synchronized postings.

The entry I edited: the one for the word wiki.