Archive for September, 2008

A central question for policymakers this fall is:  What should be done with the white spaces?

It’s got all the elements of a great story.  It’s got twenty years of dramatic history behind it, as the broadcasters flail around protecting their destiny (“we need additional spectrum to go digital!”) and then realize that they will have to give up some of their old spectrum to make this happen.   They’re still fighting – now over the (non-contiguous) spaces between their old stations.  They’re willing to march on Capitol Hill about this, and often do.

It’s got religion and entertainment, too.  Mega-churches and Broadway shows have been hauled in, claiming their wireless mics won’t work if other entities use the spectrum they’ve gotten used to.  And it’s got delicious irony – it turns out that the majority of the wireless mic use doesn’t fit what the FCC thinks the wireless mic guys are supposed to be doing.

It’s got technology – lots of it – as prototypes fail (or do they?) and engineers say wise things about interference.  It’s all magic, in a sense, but the experts will be opining as to how much electromagnetic energy is too much.  Too much of the color red!

It’s got the future all wrapped up in one issue.  Broadcast dies, highspeed internet access bottlenecks abound, so why not use the white spaces to get around the bottlenecks?

And it has a ticking clock.  It’s time for something to happen in the white spaces.

Distributed opposition research is really coming into its own these days – thanks to Micah Sifry for that phrase.  It’s amazing what can be dug up using online comments, tweets, and the long memory of the electronic age.

When you’re inside a phase change, or a hurricane, it’s very difficult to understand what’s going on.  It feels, right now, like an important time for online political participation.  Yet *policy* itself isn’t being made online.  Maybe what’s happening is the growth of the great radar screen of being.  Lots of swarms and seething trails of information – too much for any one person to take in, but taken together and understood by machines and algorithms built for benevolent and other reasons, the radar screen is becoming visible.

The logical construct that is the internet doesn’t think for us. It can’t build anything useful.  But it can do a lot to make more of what is going on visible – graphically-enabled, networked screens can access that visibility and, in turn, change what the radar screen shows.

It was particularly gratifying today to see the uproar in the US over “community organizing.”  There’s a huge new Facebook “We are all community organizers” group, and a real online backlash.

I’d like to be able to do a search right now for that backlash and see it in visual form – like market data – in a way that would allow me to find the hotspots and click down into the picture.  I’d like to see that picture changing and growing over time.  A movie of the backlash – that would be useful.

Here’s the tie-in.  When people can use clips of these pictures as part of their attempts to persuade one another, we’ll be much closer to distributed policymaking.  Right now, it’s a war of words, and there are too many words to cope with. Pictures on pictures, used as tools, could be the phase change.

Fine story from Steven Levy here.

In the coming era of cloud computing, the Web will be much more than just a means of delivering content — it will be a platform in its own right. The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. “As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you’re always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken,” Fisher says. “And indeed, that’s what happens.” The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.

This is big.  TechCrunch loves the speed and ease of use.  Now we’ll have days of concern about Google-dominance.

Why not shake things up in the browser market. Google is sitting on so much cash – at least it’s developing something useful.

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First day of school – new students, new classroom (secret classroom!  somewhere in the library!), lots going on.  All of you in the working world are really missing out.

Happy Labor Day. Here are two great personal efforts:

Oliver Ding is looking for 92 more freesouls to give him material with which to create another freesouls slideshow.

Freesouls group on Slideshare.net

http://www.slideshare.net/group/freesouls

Freesouls 100 Master deck:

http://www.slideshare.net/OliverDing/freesouls-100-master-deck-20080828-presentation

Freesouls 100 Introduction:

http://www.slideshare.net/OliverDing/freesouls-100-introduction-presentation

You can reach him at swordi AT gmail.

Meanwhile, Carl Malamud is bringing a lot of public information to light.   Previously squelched OSHA films:

Making their public debut after 30 years are “Worker to Worker,” “Can’t Take No More,” and “The Story of OSHA.”

Link to YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=31E75CE43C7B93B5

Link to the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22public.resource.org%22%20AND%20subject%3A%22osha.gov%22%20AND%20mediatype%3Amovies

( http://tiny.cc/hdLvC )

And the building codes etc. of 50 states:

After a systematic survey of all 50 state fire marshalls, building commissions, administrative codes, and other authorizing legislation and regulations, we are pleased to announce that our code site has now gone national:

http://bulk.resource.org/codes.gov/

These codes are all critical for public safety, apply to us all, and the model codes and standards incorporated therein were all intended to be made into laws by the standards creators.  It is ironic that the laws that most directly touch our daily lives have been the least accessible, locked up behind a cash register.

In addition, the above-referenced directory features other laws of general applicability, including the California Code of Regulations and California local and county administrative codes.

Bravo to Carl.