Blogpulse says that Rebecca MacKinnon’s post about the Chinese blog censorship issue
is the most linked-to in the blogosphere.  With good reason. 
I was ashamed not to be one of those links earlier!  On a related
topic, here’s an article in Ethical Corporation.

Big props to Scoble for his take on it. 

Read also what MSN Spaces Product manager Michael Connolly has to say
about it: “In China, there is a unique issue for our entire industry:
there are certain aspects of speech in China that are regulated by the
government.  We’ve made a choice to run a service in China, and to
do that, we need to adhere to local regulations and laws.  This is
not unique to MSN Spaces; this is something that every company has to
do if they operate in China.  So, if a Chinese blog on MSN Spaces
is reported to us by the community, or the Chinese government, as
offensive, we have to ask ourselves: is this blog adhering to our code
of Conduct?  In many cases, the answer is ‘yes, this site is
fine’.  But, in some cases, the answer is ‘no’.  And when an
offense is found that actually breaks a national law, we have no choice
but to take down the site.” 

An extraordinarily hard ethical problem, worthy of close study.

So, true confessions: it took me a while, even with Dave and other true believers as fellows at the Berkman Center and us hosting the RSS 2.0 spec, to “get” RSS and why it was going to be (and now, already is) so powerful.

I’ve been going through the same slightly slow process to “get” OPML.  The promise seems obvious enough, but I haven’t yet had an epiphany around it.  Dave’s back in Cambridge this week, and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with him a fair amount (including lunch with 6 Harvard College students earlier today, the usual fun romp through a series of topics), and I figured maybe I’d work on getting OPML this time. 

Five minutes ago, I had my a-ha moment on OPML.  The best expression I’ve ever seen of its power is the rendering of the OPML file of all the Top10 Sources reading lists that we’ve been compiling (on a non-Harvard project).  Dave’s got it linked now from Scripting News here.  It’s such a dynamic and striking way to organize knowledge.  There’s a critical mass issue to work out, but even with the 150 or so Top10 sites, plus the 1500 or so sources, and down to the most recent posts from those sources, it’s an amazing way to organize citizen-generated (or MSM-generated) information. 

Wow.  I have more to learn, but this was a good day for getting into this technology.  Now imagine if we got all our course syllabi, course PowerPoints, lists of sources reached by journalists, etc. into this format…  Imagine connecting it all up, either in an open-to-the-world kind of way or even a within-the-corporate-firewall kind of way…

(Disclosure: Top10 Sources and various experiments underway with RSS Labs, part of Newsilike Media Group, in which I hold an equity interest, are working on OPML-related developments.)

(Oh, yeah, and Evidence.)  Now that’s a class.

Charlie says: “Come January 3, 2006, Zittrain and i open our internet
school. We start with the idea that our three week winter semester is
like camp and we are camp directors. Welcome to cyber school. We would
like our students to engage with us in an intense and absorbing
learning and teaching experience during the three weeks that is ours.

“I start each day with light calesthenics, breathing and stretching and
such, at 8:30 a.m., all welcome to come, Evidence class begins sharp at
nine and runs til noon. Z teaches Internet Law starting at 2 p.m. I
hope he will allow me to attend his class, blogging all the way.

“Cyberspace is a rhetorical place, virtual, made of message. Internet is
the wiring of cyberspace. Internet Law has so far been conceived as the
law that affects the routing of message in the space. But focus first
on the space itself and the concept of message. What new capacities
does this meta space bring? How will we learn and teach and create in
it? What new forms of legal and social organization with this new
environment permit to evolve and thrive? What will grow, what will die.”

There’s a fascinating story to unravel related to the made-up account of
a UMass student who claimed to have gotten a visit from the Department
of Homeland Security as a result of having borrowed Mao’s Little Red
Book via interlibrary loan.  After a fair amount of ink on the
matter, the student admitted recently that it was a hoax.  There
are no doubt some enduring lessons to be learned for many people
involved.  The record ought to be set straight.  Hopefully,
this false narrative did not lead anyone to make a decision they
otherwise would not have made.

So, fair enough: it’s embarrassing for anyone who used what turned out
to be a phony example as an instance of the over-reach of US law
enforcement via the Patriot Act.  Those of us who think there
ought to be a carefully struck balance between civil liberties and the
empowerment of law enforcement officials to learn things about us ought
to be accountable when we make mistakes.  It’s imperative, where
life and death is literally at stake every day, that we only make
decisions based on facts.

But for those who would gloat in the aftermath of this unfortunate
event, I’d urge just the same accountability and restraint. 
There’s a rant at redstate.com on this topic in which I am implicated. 

Part of what’s said in this rant is true: in an article
in the Harvard Crimson, I said I was skeptical that the DHS would visit
a student just based on the interlibrary loan information alone, and
that, if the student had indeed received such a visit, that there must
have been other factors involved. 

The author of the blog-post
cites my and another person’s skepticism of the original reports, but
in response goes from there to say:

“Anything jump out at you there?  How about two Harvard law and
history professors 1) think this was ‘extremely unlikely’ and 2) have
never heard of any related incidents?  Now of course Professors
Palfrey and Gordon have no doubts, either, about the story; Palfrey
assumes there was some other reason for surveillance…”

It’s pretty remarkable that someone would write a long post about how
civil libertarians jump to conclusions based on partial evidence, and
the goes on to jump to the conclusion that I and someone else have “no
doubts … about the story.”  After stating on the record that it
was “extremely unlikely” that DHS would have done such a thing, I’d
think that my “doubts” about the story were perfectly clear.  As
one might imagine, the reporter went on to ask, “How do you think such
a thing could have happened?”  I stated that, if such a visit had
taken place (I had no knowledge one way or the other on this matter),
the officials must have had other information that would lead them to
undertake such an investigation.

There’s no room in the debate over the extension of the Patriot Act
provisions, and the crucially important balance between privacy and
investigative powers, for hyperbole.  The only way to come to a
reasoned decision is to look closely at hard facts.  When someone
gets the facts wrong, we should correct the record and reconsider
whether we made the wrong decision based on the facts.  But those
who swing the pendulum back so far as to distort the narrative in yet
another direction are just fanning the flames and doing us all a
disservice.

It was several years ago this time, over the winter holiday break, that I first met Dave Winer.  He came well-introduced
and with an extraordinary record of accomplishment behind (and, as it
turned out, ahead) of him.  We met in the unheated Berkman
conference room in a dark building, with all the sane academics
burrowed away somewhere warm and outside of abandoned Cambridge. 
Dave’s fellowship gave rise to some of the most substantial projects
the Berkman Center has ever undertaken, including an ever-growing focus
on the rise of citizens’ media (blogging, podcasting, RSS, OPML, and
the like) and the impact of Internet on democracy, which led me to Dave
in the first place.  Fittingly, on this Monday holiday, I’m seeing
Dave again here in Cambridge.  Always a watershed.  Or, more
likely, a blizzard (like last year at WebCred, when I last had lunch
with him here).

J.D. Amer of Lopico and beyond writes:
“Perhaps this is what web2.0 really means, the building of an entirely
new information retrevial system based on humans and social
interaction. Old methods are new again.”

Truly excellent tellings and retellings of the events from Andy Updegrove and Dan Bricklin.  IBM’s Bob Sutor has posted his remarks.  Dan captured a podcast (2 hours, 20 minutes).  China Martens of IDG News Service had this take on it.  Martin Lamonica of CNet wrote it up, too.  Jeff Kaplan writes
from DC, appropriately set in the context of the Open ePolicy Group‘s
work.  If only David Berlind had been here instead of at Syndicate
in SFO…

A new Berkman/Gartner study on the power of recommendations and the impact on digital media sales, by Mike McGuire and Derek Slater, is to be published today.