Odd that he doesn't mention slashdot. (Not odd that he doesn't mention Sterling's _Distraction_, with its rival confederations of nomadic biker-gangs, oriented around competing reputation systems.)

"I'm doing a short talk at SXSW tomorrow, as part of a panel on Creating the Internet of Entities. Preparing is tough because don't I believe it's possible, and even if it was I wouldn't like it. Opposing better semantic tagging feels like hating on Girl Scout cookies, but I've realized that I like an internet full of messy, redundant, ambiguous data.
"The stated goal of an Internet of Entities is a web where "real-world people, places, and things can be referenced unambiguously". We already have that. Most pages give enough context and attributes for a person to figure out which real world entity it's talking about. What the definition is trying to get at is a reference that a machine can understand.
"The implicit goal of this and similar initiatives like Stephen Wolfram's .data proposal is to make a web that's more computable. Right now, the pages that make up the web are a soup of human-readable text, a long way from the structured numbers and canonical identifiers that programs need to calculate with. I often feel frustrated as I try to divine answers from chaotic, unstructured text, but I've also learned to appreciate the advantages of the current state of things."

To put it a bit more kindly than Tom does, the _cognitive_ value of traditions like Turkle's is "heuristic" in the older sense: they _make up_ speculations and conjectures, but do not combine them with data in a way that has any real force as evidence.  In the case of psychoanalysis, the track record even as heuristic is not exactly encouraging...

"Przeworski and Teune ... called for comparativists to ‘replace country names with variables.’ In other words, they wanted political scientists to stop maundering on about the differences arising from the ineffable national characters of Germany, France and Italy, and instead to formulate hypotheses about the relationship between variables that might be seen or not seen in different national cases (e.g.... a trivial and obvious example, to test the hypothesis that states with powerful left parties are more likely to have extensive welfare states). I’d like to see people who study the ‘Internet’ and ‘social media’ stop studying them, and instead start focusing on the role of causal mechanisms that might (or might not) be associated with specific technologies in explaining political outcomes, i.e. to start replacing technology names with mechanisms. This would, of course, require Real Research. But it seems to me more promising than the likely alternatives."

Look at this later and re-consider the to_teach tags.

What search can and cannot predict. They mention, but I think could have stressed even more, that the search data is generated _automatically_ as a by-product of now-ordinary social life, rather than a deliberate construction on the part of public or private data-collecting agencies, so it is very, very, very cheap.

"Duke shut down its Usenet server yesterday, which is significant because Duke's server was the original home of Usenet. I think this means that Usenet is now available only to about a dozen people with panix accounts.... So long, Usenet. You will be remembered fondly, and in jokes that nobody gets any more."

I like his vision; I just don't see anything here remotely like a consideration of how it could be implemented. Tech reviews can be done on a hobbyist basis because the skills required are supported by other industries, and the extra time invested is not super large. (Basically, day-jobs pay people to keep up with compilers, or whatever, and so they can afford the small extra time to write up their understanding.) Similarly for political _commentary_ (he punts completely on political _reporting_, other than the "clinging to guns and religion" line). Serious reporting, on the other hand, is extremely time-consuming, not so much in writing or in acquiring technical knowledge (though there ought to be more of the latter for many beats) as in acquiring historical knowledge about the beat (and remaining current), cultivating contacts, and developing and running down leads on stories. --- This is not to say that newspapers currently do a great job.

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead."

"much of the discussion misses the fact that large assemblages of code, and so the net, that are supposed to run indefinitely, are in some ways like biological systems than like the simple, exactly describable engineered systems of the past. ... Still, every large long-running software system I have known resists attack and improves through incremental replacement of parts, with lots of trial and error, not by wholesale redesign. The internet "fixers" goal is no more realistic than anyone's goal to avoid disease by redesigning their genome and rebooting their body." Application to transhumanism left as an exercise.

"Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want."

Comparing claims that electronic media make us stupid and distracted to the reality of life in a poor, low-tech community: "For people trying to work and run a family at the same time, not only are the consequences of missing something more important and potentially more dangerous, but it's impossible to take a break. A break means your kids are in danger, your family doesn't get fed and you're losing money that buys the food. Now, think about the fact that the majority of the world live just like this, and not in not in the world of email, tweets and instant messaging. Until about 100 years ago everyone lived like this. In other words, the ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development." Well-said, but misses the fact that the _rich_ could concentrate, because they had servants. (This is part of why Aristotle said leisure was a requirement for learning.)

Breaking up newspapers, and making actual reporting into non-profit enterprises. (This reminds me that I should read Zellig Harris's book on non-profit market economies.)

Preach it, Brother Yglesias!

"The United States isn’t a poor country dealing with some objective shortfall of national resources. And yet across a whole variety of dimensions—from broadband speed to train quality to the cleanliness of streets to life expectancy to the crime rate—we fall far short of standards that are reached elsewhere. What we do have, on the other hand, is the richest multi-millionaires in the world. And an awful lot of people’s first instinct is to try to explain these things away or explain why it would be impossible to bring some of these quality of life features to the United States. It seems to me people would do better to get more upset."

Speaking of responding to technical change by going "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

"publishers seem to be taking the music industry's lead on how to respond to this whole online thing, which goes something like this: "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU." "

Possibly the longest set-up for an groaningly awful punchline ever to appear in the New York Times.

Some good points, but surprisingly bad history (Chinese printing didn't take off, "The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981"!) from a professional historian. Not material to the mostly-sound recommendations.

Ans.: The CIA, of course. (OK, a _retired_ CIA officer. Still.)

Over-simplified social history, but --- right on, Brother Clay, right on!

Maynard makes a nice point about Wikipedia vs. traditional encyclopedias in his post.

Bruce S. in fine form. Interviewer, maybe not so much. "An educated citizen is not a friction-free technocratic philistine myrmidon with an ISO rating. Those guys exist, don't get me wrong, but they bear the relationship to education that the Ron Paul c

"we no longer need books telling us that the Internet is a big thing. It is time to treat that fact, as Shirky sometimes does, as the starting point for a discussion rather than the conclusion. The questions then become ones of what kind of structures wil