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| Friday, August 1, 2003 |
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Will mass litigation change them? 
| | Larry Solum suggests copynorms as a neologism for the informal social attitudes about the rightness or wrongness of duplicating material that is copyrighted. |
| | Check out his "three scenarios." Be interesting to see what a futures market in outcomes might predict, no? |
Explaining a few things
| | ...no campaign has ever gotten the Internet so right. They aren't just working the email lists and using the Net as a way to drive down the cost of mass politicking. From Joe Trippi on down they "get" the Net. They understand that it's about giving voice to the "ends" of the Net (AKA us), that it means they lose some control of their message, that they need to enable groups to self-organize, that it's about listening and conversations more than about center-out broadcasting. This is an end-to-end campaign. The staff is webby to the core. If you met 'em, you'd love 'em. |
| | I have met 'em — or some of them, anyway. And I love the ones I've met, including Dr. Weinberger himself, who "came out" in the same blog posting as the Senior Internet Advisor for the Dean Campaign. Modestly, the good doctor declines to give any credit to his very smart self for the campaign's Xtreme Net-savvyness. |
| | It will be interesting to see what happens when other savvy and lovable people get on board other campaigns. Because what we need now are more truly networked campaigns, not just one (Dean's) and a bunch of copycats. |
| | In the long run there should be no such thing as an "Internet candidate." Being engaged through the Net should be an obvious prerequisite for every candidate who wants to stand a chance of winning. |
Errorism
| | I think Karl Rove will love this technology. Why? One example. Karl is the master of leaking the false rumor about opposition candidates. Imagine a huge network of "dittoheads" and "moral majority" readers/publishers connected by e-mail and weblogs/RSS. It would be easy to "leak" a false rumor and have it go national in a matter of days. There is no easy mechanism or requirement for fact checking in this medium. There is also a huge thirst for new "dirt." By the time opposition forms to "out" the rumor, the damage would have been done. |
| | Tony Steidler-Dennison said |
| | I'm not at all certain which press conference Doc was watching yesterday... |
| | What I saw was the usual - a combative and arrogant man who is completely without restraint in talking down to the media. ("Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person. And America is lucky to have her service. Period." Emphasized with an impatient stare and a soft pounding on the podium.) |
| | He's also completely lost when speaking off the cuff. ("I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to [five second pause as he looks at his notes for the word 'codify'] codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.") |
| | His seeming singularity of focus is so obviously a result of coaching by his handlers that I'm surprised someone of Doc's insight and intellect would credit it to anything else. He's clearly given precise talking points prior to these incredibly infrequent press conferences. In other words, the fact that he can "project singular messages" has little to do with his intellect or oratorial abilities. He and his staff have sent conflicting messages so often that he doesn't now dare deviate from the scripted talking points. I don't find that to be an asset. |
| | Jeff Jarvis reports blog activity from Biden and Daschle. This is happening fast -- right on schedule. |
| | I think Doc¹s right that politicians may not understand the democratic potential of weblogs, and JRobb¹s right that money is just the tip of the iceberg in the political blogosphere. But politicians smell money like sharks smell blood, and so they¹ll all be looking for a weblog angle soon. |
| | What will be interesting is that weblogs are hard to fake. Stiff, staff-written blogs won't fly. Dave Winer has said all politicians will have weblogs, and I¹ve countered that some of them shouldn¹t. The lure of money may prove us both right. |
| | About the shutdown of the futures market in terrorism, Bill Seitz says |
| | This is so fucking sad. Shall we shut down the Open Source Intelligence efforts, too, since it involves reading negative things that people say about us? I think we should outlaw short-selling of company stock, too. |
| | More seriously, I think this could have been an extremely useful learning experience, not just for Military Intelligence but for the application of Idea Futures to Society Design problems. |
| | I'm surprised you didn't comment at all on this whole terrorism-futures market scheme being an extreme application and affirmation of the notion that "markets are conversations." What's more of a conversation than a whispered hint in a virtual futures-trading pit of an upcoming terrorist event, and a cash payoff if and when it turns out to have been a reliable tip? (Is Cluetrain perhaps required reading at DARPA?) |
| | I'm shocked that you dismissed this idea as stupid. In fact, on the occasions predictive futures markets have been tried, they have generally beaten the performance of human experts by a significant margin. Did you do any homework at all on this, or were you running on some kind of prejudice against the people involved with the idea? |
| | This is the first time I've ever seen you make a call on a technology-related issue that is 100% dead wrong. I suppose there had to have been a first time. |
| | I should add that I believe futures markets are extremely predictive. And I'm acquainted with the "Delphi" statistical effect, whereby averaged guesses by groups are reliably more accurate than guesses by any one individual. (Even at estimating the number of beans in a jar, which is a fun exercize in proving the principle.) I just thought the project was politically stupid. As it clearly was. |
| | I also think it's tragic that, of all the qualified candidates available for the job, Bush's people (Rumsfeld, presumably) hired the abundantly discredited John Poindexter to run DARPA's (renamed) Terrorism Information Awareness office. |
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