Back in 1999, in the Web 1.3 era, I posted a survey of existing web annotation tools on the web, and was cited (twice!) in academic papers for that minor amount of scholarship.

This article takes a brief look at basic web findability guidelines, how they are addressed by federal guidelines in the United States, and how the FCC, an agency which most commonly deals with Internet issues, fails some basic tests of such guidelines.

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 bunch of merry pranksters have had some fun with the phrase anti-social networking over the last few years. (“You can use Nemester to: Find out the enemies of your enemies and conspire with them Denounce your enemies… Make new enemies… Help your enemies meet their demise…”; Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.”)

As promised, I took the server crash of two weeks ago to be an oppurtunity. Previously, I had subconsciously stopped updating my “civ” Drupal extension modules as I was several revs behind. So this site was getting dull to read and navigate.

While re-designing the archives, I needed some icons to help illustrate the different story types.

There’s a limited market for the Facebook privacy beat, since most problems can be solved by young Zuckerberg flicking a particular switch. After all, one key aspect of a well-designed technical architecture (and Facebook has demonstrated that it is one) is the ability to reconfigure it without much difficulty. And sometimes it’s as simple as cleaning up the user interface.

Communications law in the United States is a little peculiar at times. If I buy time on for an advertisement on television or radio to reach thousands of people over the public airwaves, I have to abide by one set of rules. If. If I use an auto-dialer to reach thousands of people in their homes over the telephone (“robocalls”), I abide by a different set of rules.

Four years ago, I picked the hometown favorite for the Democratic primaries, albeit very late in the game,  long after he was all but crowned as the presumptive nominee.

I’ve implemented OpenID on this site. My friend Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) has been helping this effort for a number of years, and when she passed along the news that Yahoo had joined the effort, I decided to get with the program.

Obviously, the word that Harvard’s FAS faculty has voted tonight on a measure to ensure open access to their published papers — and passed it — is fantastic news.

Back in 2005 I found myself looking through the Dean blog archives and noticed that they’d gone missing for a time (they’re back now– with some comments missing here and there– I know because I have a 500MB copy of it.) In 2006, I poked around the early DailyKos/MyDD archives, and was frustrated with how difficult they were to navigate (compound by the fact that the early MyDD posts are onl

Maybe it’s a cruel conspiracy of the makers of WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, et al that make blog archives a disaster of design.

Now that a federal judge has cleared Wikileaks.org to have its domain restored, it perhaps might behoove the free information zealots to actually look into the substance of the story which instigated the takedown. Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank, has a Cayman Island subidiary apparently serving as a tax shelter for the rich: Perhaps top reporters are working on it?

I’ve recently spent many hours using the data on Wikileaks to produce some original analysis on the Bank Julius Baer story.

Wikileaks is not out of the woods yet. The full hearing for the suit brought by Bank Julius Baer is scheduled on May 16, with motions, countermotions and briefs due at some intervals until htn (see the details from CNet’s Declan McCullagh, who was the only reporter to pass it along.) [UPDATE 3/6/08: BJB has vacated the lawsuit.

[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.

Two updates in the jurisprudence of free speech online this week help shed light on one of our favorite pastimes, the search for truth. The lawsuit against Wikileaks (that “entity of unknown form” according to the district court) was dropped.

Yesterday I received an 750-word from the Wikileaks email address (@sunshinepress.org) in response to my critical article about the service. I’d love to reprint it, but the author had the temerity to preface it with the request “off the record.” There are journalists who support the notion that a unilateral request of “off the record” need not be honore

It’s about time someone mentioned the elephant in the room– the locker room. A professional sports locker room has limited space. Does it have room for bloggers? Here’s one media mogul who says no:

This is a collection of pieces I’ve written recently on Wikileaks, the anonymous document dump website. There are interesting documents being made available on the site; I don’t dispute that. I merely wanted to cover some of their foibles along the way.

I’ll be presenting Thursday evening to the Berkman Blog Group. It’s kind of an honor, since I really don’t see myself as one. I associate with bloggers, I befriend them, I research their methods… and I hope they don’t mind if they accept me as different.

Rudolf Elmer, the key source in the Wikileaks/BJB story, has created a website Swiss Whistleblower. Some of the information he’d been posting at Wikileaks will now be posted to the new website.

The engineer looks at the law and asks, why is it so sloppy? Take the DMCA-CDA disparity, or the fact that anonynous political robocalls are legal in many states while anonymous political commercials are not. The software engineer wonders why this all can’t be straightened out.

The excellent HBO biopic John Adams inspired me to catch up on my period reading. This past weekend I bought a recent biography of perhaps the most famous of the founding fathers left out of the miniseries — Thomas Paine, by Craig Nelson (2006).

It’s been a number of weeks since the last substantive post, so I wanted to provide an update on some of the planning I’ve been doing for a couple of conferences this spring.

First a quick review the elements of my grand unified theory of media:

Newspapers have sections; magazines have departments; weblogs have neither. All of these publishing forms carry content of interest to readers, yet none use the same name to describe the essential nature of that content.

[Note: this was originally on the cover page of this series; it was split off to add new information.]

A year ago, I articulated the Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting (PONAR): a framework of icons, forms, and processes which could be deployed to help mitigate the effects of injurious speech online.

Some of my recent research led me to a book by Tom Rosenstiel, Strange Bedfellows: how television and the presidential candidates changed American politics 1992.