Blogs at Harvard

Dave Winer is working to start blogs at Harvard Yard.  This note suggests he is running into the normal campus suspicions as he does so.  Breaking old habits on campus is very difficult.

John Palfrey: "Harvard has always operated as a bunch of highly productive but rarely well-integrated stove-pipes." [Scripting News]

2:39:30 PM    

Blogs as dynamic peer review systems

Dave Winer picks up on the full conversation between Doc Searls and Chris Gulker which was linked here earlier.  Reading the whole piece, I agree with Chris Gulker's essay that blogs are continuing a tradition going back hundreds of years.  Instead of the postal service, we use the net as a medium.  Hence, with links to original documents, and added commentary, we have constructed a more dynamic form of asynchronous peer review than the postal service allowed.  The whole world can be part of the conversation in real time, instead of waiting for someone to publish those long lost letters in a scholarly collection.

Chris Gulker: "Locke and Galileo and Descartes began writing each other about their discoveries, and then scientific academies formed, where these letters would be read aloud to others who shared an interest." [Scripting News]

9:55:59 AM    

Lyrical Tributes

Columbia gem of the sky.

A friend points to the lyrics of "Fire in the Sky", by Jordin Kare. It was while reading it that Buzz Aldrin, #2 man on the moon, broke down on TV...

Prometheus, they say, brought God's fire down to man.
And we've caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we're going back to heaven just to look him in the eye,
and there's a thunder 'cross the land, and a fire in the sky.

The lyrics in my own head were from Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush"...

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun

... and Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky."

On a less musical (but more useful) note, Dana Blankenhorn has some interesting stuff to say about Space Elevators.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

7:17:46 AM    

Excellent Thoughts as Blogging Matures

Journalizing Journalism.

Chris Gulker:

In my mind, the rise of Weblogs parallels events in the 16th Century when one of the first networks - reliable postal service - appeared. Shortly after people like Locke and Galileo and Descartes began writing each other about their discoveries, and then scientific academies formed, where these letters would be read aloud to others who shared an interest. The world has never looked back, since. Think 'Renaissance'. Think 'Industrial Revolution'.

I make no claim to be on a par with Galileo, or Locke, or even Doc, for that matter, but I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks like Weblog communities.

This is a good thing, and you saw it operating last Saturday morning, when the Columbia foam-strikes-wing theory emerged on numerous Weblogs, hours before NASA and big media outlets made mention. That theory was stitched together through Weblogs talking, and branching, and picking up informed opinion, eyewitness acounts and media clips. The theory just emerged as interested, thoughtful people put the pieces together: it was like a human parallel processing machine.

Bonus links: Craig Burton's The Web Renaissance. That was two years ago, almost exactly. And one year ago, Phil Wolff's Craig Burton wants the world to dance.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

As I worked on the Shuttle Lost page Saturday and Sunday, I was amazed at the myriad of sources available and how quickly one could get differing opinions and points of view.  Most of the links were "professional" (i.e. reasoned opinion that respected other's opinions) and only a few were crass or childish.

7:15:50 AM    

TIA continues to raise concerns

Bush's database faces privacy, not technical, concerns [InfoWorld: Top News]

...But data-mining experts Ramakrishnan and Piovoso agreed that such a data-mining system could raise privacy concerns. "Certainly there is the potential for abuse," Piovoso said. "You're putting a lot of faith in government that it's not going to abuse that power.

"It's a sad situation, in my opinion," he added. "We're asked to give up some of our freedoms in order to gain more security, and one of the dangers of that is you may never get it back again."

7:08:26 AM