Date: Thur, 8 June 2006 00:22:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - June 8


                            SuitWatch -- June 8
     _________________________________________________________________

  Mashing Up a Commons

   Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't
   have one yet? Or at least not a complete one?

   That's what occurred to me last Sunday night, as I sat talking with Claus
   Dahl http://classy.dk/ in a smoky Copenhagen bistro.  We were talking about
   public spaces.  Europeans have a deep appreciation of them.  Even in
   relatively chilly Denmark, there are plenty of outdoor cafés.  Narrow
   streets in the older quarters terminate in public plazas as big as football
   fields.  We also talked about how Americans seem to have a correspondingly
   elevated sense of private matters.  Private enterprise, for example.
   Perhaps, Claus suggested, that's why the Net was commercialized first in
   the U.S.

   Email and blogging, to name at least one more mostly-American invention,
   also serve to equip the private side of things.  The emails we send are
   personal: one-to-one, or one-to-many.  Blogging is personal too, even when
   companies do it.  Since blogs are published on the World Wide Web, they're
   public on the exposed side.  But they are authored privately, mostly by
   individuals.

   Blogs can be powerful.  Just ask Trent Lott
   http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2003/07/13/160876.html
   Howell Raines or Dan Rather. In aggregate, blogs may comprise a smart
   mob http://smartmobs.com/ (or maybe just a mob, in some cases), but each
   still expresses the thoughts and expressions of a sovereign individual.
   This is not a small thing.  As a blogger of long standing, I appreciate the
   sense of exclusivity in my blog.  It is mine alone, and I am my own boss there.

   But many blogs together do not comprise a commons.  Blogs are private and
   commons are public.  Many blogs are like many silos.  Not a farm.  Not a
   public plaza or a public park.

   This was made clear to me as I followed (as little as I could, given my bad
   luck with broadband connections in Denmark) the O'Reilly/CMP Web 2.0
   service mark controversy.  An enormous amount of pixels have been spilled
   on this subject, but here's one interesting bottom line to the whole thing:
   Tim O'Reilly apologized to Tom Raftery
   http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/web_20_service_mark_controvers.html
   for "the organizational failure that led to them getting a legal letter
   rather than a simple email query or phone call.". And Tom Raftery
   apologized http://www.tomrafteryit.net/sorry-tim/ as well, saying "I should
   have dropped him an email first rather than posting on the blog", adding
   "Frankly, it didn't occur to me.  Sorry Tim."

   Why didn't it occur to Tom to contact Tim before posting something on his
   blog? Tom writes, "I did the same thing to Tracy Sheridan
   http://www.tomrafteryit.net/almost-interactive-podcasts-on-waxxi/
   after I had problems participating in her initial Waxxi interactive podcast
   http://waxxi.us/blog/2006/05/25/waxxis-debut-interactive-podcast/ with
   Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.  I had her email address as well but I
   blogged.  Should I have emailed her? Possibly but blogging has become my
   natural response to events like this." Then he adds, "Maybe I need to
   re-think how I respond, in the future."

   Both Tom's and Tim's first posts on the matter were written neither to each
   other, but to the crowd.  While their posts were public, the sources of
   those posts were private.  They seemed somehow removed from the public
   space, even as the whole controversy played out in a public way.  By "public
   space" I mean one where once senses the immediacy of other people: not just
   the person to whom one is talking, but everybody else as well.  There is
   combination of intimacy and exposure one can only get in a commons.
   Back-and-forth blogging has some of that, but not all of it.

   So, how do we get that?

   I've said before that blogging is a way of sending emails that go
   "cc:world".  My point has always been about blogging's ease of use.  When
   people tell me they don't have time to blog, I ask them if they have time to
   email.  When they say yes, I point out that there's little difference
   between the two, at least in terms of time commitments.

   But now I think there is also another deep similarity: both are more
   personal than public.

   Think for a moment about how we sense personal space.  To illustrate,
   consider the differences in our behaviors as drivers and as pedestrians.
   We'll yell invective at other drivers that we'd never yell at other
   individuals in a theater queue.  One big reason is that, when we drive a
   car, we become the car.  Our senses extend out to the peripheries of the car
   itself.  Its hardware becomes "my fender" and "my tires" and "my bumpers".
   Pilots feel the same way about the wings and engines of the planes they fly.

   As personal spaces go, blogs are car-like.  They are an enlarged structure
   around our virtual bodily selves.  To some degree (less than in a car, but
   more than in a fully public space), blogs can combine the sense of
   separateness and power.  (Syndication especially can do this. Thanks to
   syndicated subject searches, one can participate in buzz just by blogging
   quotably about that buzz's subject, regardless of the "size" of one's blog.)

   Against corporate, political and media gigantism, blogs are a great
   equalizer.  I would be surprised if Tom didn't feel a bit like David when he
   got a note from a lawyer representing two media Goliaths.  Same with most of
   the rest of us who remarked on the topic.  Tim, naturally, was outraged.  He
   wrote, "The flap about the Web 2.0 Conference trademark has shaken my faith
   in the collective intelligence of the blogosphere.  Of all the hundreds of
   people who commented on this issue, only a few touched base to do a bit of
   fact checking."

   Claus suggested that Tom didn't call or write to Tim first because there's
   still something missing from the Net's commons.  What he said brought to
   mind what Craig Burton wrote  five years ago, in early 2001
   http://www.craigburton.com/stories/storyReader$19:

     We are in a deep state of Web Noir --a technological Dark Age obscured by
     the apparent brilliance of the Internet, as we know it. The dark -- that
     noir -- is what we don't see, what we don't know because it doesn't yet
     exist.

     What's missing is technology infrastructure.  I'm not talking about
     physical infrastructure here.  I'm talking about the logical
     infrastructure where both humans and devices live and do their work. It's
     the way we're all connected, and what we can do with --and through --
     those connections.  The real world of people and devices changes
     constantly.  Natures, functions, identities, relationships all change.
     Yet we have few if any truly useful ways to support that dynamism beyond
     the store & forward facilities of Web and email servers running over a
     worldwide TCP/IP network.  While what we have is a miracle-grade advance
     over what we knew a decade ago, it's still profoundly limited.  In fact,
     it's so limited that in some cases the best we can do is leverage the
     worst from bygone ages.

   In fact Claus has something in mind -- a nice piece of hitherto missing
   infrastructure.  I don't want to say any more about it, because he's not
   ready to talk about it yet.  But as soon as he gave me hints I realized the
   Net's commons is missing something that might have prevented a lot of
   unhappiness around this Web 2.0 flap.  Plus countless other
   misunderstandings.

   Claus and I had both just come from the latest Reboot conference,
   http://reboot.dk/ titled Reboot8.  As a tech conference its more about
   ideas and insights than about what's new and cool.  Right before Reboot
   I spoke at Samtalerne, http://www.samtalerne.dk/index.jsp?id=1 a one-day
   conference about conversation ("samtalerne" means something similar in
   Danish).  Two weeks from now I'll be at another conference where
   conversation and ideas are central: Identity Mashup,
   http://www.identitymash-up.org/ put on by the Berkman Center, at
   Harvard Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/.

   So I have some infrastructure-building ideas for the commons
   http://www.searls.com/doc/os2/docchapter.html that I want to explore
   there and beyond: with the folks at Berkman, with my colleagues in the
   Identity Gang, http://identitygang.org/ and with friends new and old
   in the Linux, free software and open source communities.  As briefly as
   I can put them, here they are --

     First, a handy way to sort out and understand what's happening in the
     virtual public places we call markets is to divide activities there into
     three categories: a) transaction; b) conversation; and c) relationship.
     For perhaps a century and a half or more, we've been filtering our
     understanding of markets through the first of those three.  But now the
     Net supports the other two as well.  We just need to build out the
     required infrastructure.

     Second, the matter of intention needs full respect as we build out an
     understanding of markets in the fully networked world.  I've written
     about this before in The Intention Economy, at Linux Journal
     http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000035.  There I said "The Intention
     Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding
     (or 'capturing') buyers." We lack an infrastructure for this.  If we build
     one, I believe we'll see an explosion of new business.  Building this
     infrastructure, I believe, will utterly disrupt marketing as we know
     it, and finally give customers powers they've lacked through the entire
     Industrial Age -- powers that are required to end Web Noir and create a
     renaissance for business and culture.

     Third, I believe this infrastructure can (not "must", but can) grow out of
     the efforts being made now among "user-centric", "independent" and
     "identity 2.0" development communities, many of which will be
     well-represented at the Identity Mashup.

     Fourth, I believe relationships in an Intention economy will require a
     legal framework similar in some ways to the one Creative Commons has
     provided for Net-native creative artists and the industries now starting
     to grow around them, and adapt to them.  Creative Commons licenses are
     expressions, after all, of intentions by artists in a world where users of
     that art have a great deal of choice and power. Moderating and utilizing
     that power requires agreements, even relationships.  Creative Commons
     licenses provide frameworks for these as well.

   Since Creative Commons grew out of work by Larry Lessig http://lessig.org/
   and colleagues at Berkman and Harvard Law, I'm especially interested in
   seeing what of the above makes sense to them, and how it can be, well,
   mashed up.

   And I wanted to get this set of ideas out there in advance of the conference
   so we could get a head start in talking about them.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Links:

   Blogs vs. Lott and Raines:
   http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2003/07/13/160876.html
   Samtalerne: http://www.samtalerne.dk
   Reboot: http://reboot.dk
   Berkman Center: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/
   Making a New World, from Open Sources II:
   http://www.searls.com/doc/os2/docchapter.html
   Identity Mash-Up: http://www.identitymash-up.org/
   Identity Gang: http://identitygang.org/
   The Intention Economy: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000035

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