Evidently, They still don’t get it. While the big brains running North America’s biggest newspapers have talked about the need for change and innovation in response to the challenges posed by the internet, they continue to cling to the idea that they can somehow isolate its influence and the minimize the damage it does to their bottom lines. While the foolish notion of erecting subscriber walls to monetize their online content has mercifully been put to rest, for the most part, they continue to look for ways to create enclosures around their product and charge for access to it.

Witness the discussion of a partnership between News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other papers across the Western world, and Microsoft, one that would remove News Corp’s content from Google’s search engine while continuing to feature it on Microsoft’s online properties such as the recently acquired Yahoo Inc. This proposed partnership is offensive to both the spirit of journalism, which seeks to disseminate useful information to the widest possible audience. More importantly, though, it offends the spirit of the internet, which seeks to liberate information rather than fencing it in.

If newspaper publishers need proof of this, they need only look at the way Plenty of Fish, a decidedly amateurish product, is utterly annihilating deep-pocketed dating companies like Lavalife and eHarmony. Despite its goofy-looking interface, Plenty of Fish is lapping the slicker Lavalife for one simple reason: it’s free. Where Lavalife charges, Plenty of Fish gives it away for free, and internet users have clearly expressed their preference for the latter, as they have in any other number of cases in which a free product competes with one that charges prospective users a fee. Frind, who was profiled in the most recent edition of Vancouver Magazine, has even managed to turn a profit on his online dating venture. Plenty of Fish generates an estimated annual revenue of $5 million, most of which ends up as profit given Frind’s low-overhead, low-staff business model.

This isn’t to suggest that newspapers should be trying to imitate Frind’s careless amateurism, or trying to make their sites look like half-formed blogs. Quite the opposite, actually, although that’s a subject for a future post. But they need to stop trying to apply old economic models to what is clearly, and unavoidably, a new environment. The music, television, and movie industries have all grappled with this challenge, with varying levels of success, but they have all learned in their own way that trying to build fences on the internet is both pointless and ultimately self-defeating. In W.P. Kinsella’s “Field of Dreams,” a disembodied voice in the cornfield tells Ray Kinsella that “if you build it, they will come.” That’s largely true on the internet, too, except for one not-insignificant detail: if you try to charge them for it, they’ll just go somewhere else. The sooner the publishers of newspapers figure this out, the better.

I don’t understand the science of global warming and, chances are, neither do you. Perhaps you have browsed Wikipedia or even the shelves of Barnes and Nobles in an effort to become better educated. I know I have. The basic claims of global warming science are familiar enough to us both: human activity – particularly the burning of fossil fuels – has caused an increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the earth is now warming at a pace not seen since the last ice age; unless we take swift action to reduce carbon emissions, seas will rise and glaciers will melt. Neither you nor I is in any position to evaluate such claims, so we do what we’ve always done: accept as our own the opinions of those we trust.

You do not accept global warming science, and I believe you are wrong to do so. But you are no more of an ignoramus than I. You just happen to trust the wrong people – or so I believe. Perhaps you are a regular Dennis Prager listener or a Wall Street Journal reader or a young earth Creationist – it doesn’t really matter which one. What matters is that you know that the Bible is literally true due to a personal encounter with Jesus Christ or that the Wall Street Journal shares your belief in the perfection of markets. So you accept the views of these trusted sources on global warming, a subject you don’t know too much about. There is nothing wrong with that — indeed, I do likewise with sources that I trust. One such source is the 2007 I.P.C.C. report, which describes global warming as “unequivocal” and “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Like you, I am often reluctant to jump on the science bandwagon. Which isn’t to say that you and I don’t accept valid scientific claims, but that we try to be vigilant, lest a wolf in science’s clothing comes along and dupes us: a wolf like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Herbert Spencer. Perhaps you would like to add Al Gore and Charles Darwin to this list. Here I think you go wrong: it is one thing to point out that there are many questions that science will never be able answer – whether or not God exists, for example – and quite another to deny the findings of science within its own domain. As recent popes have eloquently explained, the theory of evolution, while scientifically valid, never really touches on the religious question. So to reject evolution on the biblical grounds (or vice versa) is to confuse a religious with a scientific question. Nor does global warming science decide political questions (though it does help guide us).

Here’s where the plot thickens. As you may have already heard, hackers recently disclosed thousands of e-mail correspondences between prominent climate scientists, some of them calling into question the objectivity of climate change research. Green Inc. Blog reports:

The thousands of messages, some dating back more than a decade, shed unflattering light on a number of scientists who harshly questioned the scholarship and motives of other scientists who expressed some doubts about the causes and extent of global climate change.

The e-mail messages also appear to chronicle efforts to keep skeptical scientific opinions out of major journals and to prevent their inclusion in the studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that has provided the leading technical and scientific work on global warming.

Of course, it didn’t take the hacking of e-mail correspondences at a British university to convince you that global warming is a hoax — you already knew that. Nor do the e-mails budge my faith to the contrary. Sure, I am disappointed with these climate scientists, and the e-mails do to some extent undermine my confidence in scientific objectivity.

But not all that much. The desire on the part of some climate scientists to suppress dissent tells me very little, beyond the firm conviction of those scientists that global warming is true. To draw an analogy, Torquemada did not stretch heretics out on the rack because he doubted Catholicism, but because he was absolutely sure of it. (Which isn’t to say that he was morally right to do so or that Catholicism is true.) Like Torquemada, these climate scientists believe that the spread of falsehood presents a great threat to the public than intolerance of heresy does. To reiterate, I understand such zealotry — however reprehensible — to be a sign of earnest conviction on the part of climate scientists, and not a cover-up for their doubts.

One might, I suppose, argue that these climate scientists have suppressed “heresy” as a cynical means of pursuing their radical left-wing agenda. This is, I presume, the view of Senator James Inhofe of Oklamaha, whom the Green Inc. blog quotes as follows:

I certainly don’t condone the manner in which these e-mails were released; however, now that they are in the public domain, lawmakers have an obligation to determine the extent to which the so-called ‘consensus’ of global warming, formed with billions of taxpayer dollars, was contrived in the biased minds of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Inhofe’s use of the word “biased” here is peculiar. On the one hand, it might mean “incapable of looking at the facts objectively.” Climate scientists are, according to this interpretation, so steeped in left-wing thought – particularly the desire to grow government and punish business – so as to be rendered incapable of doing their jobs. (Presumably, if you put a right-wing scientist in a lab coat, he could offer a more objective account of global warming.) I suspect, however, that Inhofe means something else by “biased” – namely, that climate scientists know the case for global warming to be weak, but nevertheless suppress the facts.

I hate to be rash, but is it not it possible that the only “biased mind” exposed by these comments is that of Inhofe himself?

Neither of us can be sure as to the ultimate significance of the e-mails – which brings me to my second point. The suspicion you bring to global warming science, I bring to Dennis Prager and The Wall Street Journal. Which isn’t to say I question the motives of a Prager or the average WSJ op-ed columnist. Rather, it seems to me that global warming science challenges power business interests — particularly Big Oil. I am, as a result, skeptical of global warming skepticism. I find it troublesome, for example, that one of Prager’s trusted climate change experts, Christopher Horner, is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a “public interest group dedicated to free enterprise and limited government,” according to the website. The potential of a Christopher Horner to make bogus claims on behalf of cynical interests seems to me greater than the potential that an I.P.C.C. might muster the support of thousands of cynical scientists from around the world in order to advance a vast left-wing conspiracy.

But, then again, I could be wrong.

The Wall Street Journal recently gathered a large group of CEOs together to discuss the top issues facing the country. The broad theme was “How to Rebuild Global Prosperity.” Under that theme were four subsections, and in each subsection a committee of CEOs produced five recommendations. What was fascinating to me was how each set of recommendations matched up with generally liberal positions.

The Energy and the Environment committee recommended:

• Diversify U.S. energy
• Promote energy efficiency
• Cap-and-trade bill
• Federal plan for electric grid
• Diversity transportation systems

The Economy and Finance committee recommended:

• Sustainable job creation
• Bring back winning spirit in U.S.
• Build greater certainty
• Enact global trade pact
• Tax reform

The Educated Work Force committee recommended:

• Education is our top priority
• Council for educated work force
• Reward effective teaching
• World-class teacher corps
• Mobilize parents for change

The Health Care committee recommended:

• Reform health-payment system
• Measure health outcomes
• Hold patients accountable
• Reform medical malpractice
• Promote integrated care

I’m not saying that these are a super-liberal set of recommendations. Certainly if Mother Jones or Howard Dean issued a set of recommendations on these topics, they would be different, although there would definitely be some overlap. But if you take the entire set of recommendations, I would say that they match up more closely with the Democratic platform than with the Republican platform. And if you take the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, I’m not sure that they would agree with any of the CEO recommendations.

What does this all mean? That when you get outside of Washington DC, the country isn’t as polarized as the media makes it seem. A collection of the most powerful CEOs in the country comes up with recommendations that are mainstream liberal. The majority of citizens are sitting solidly in the center, and if politicians and pundits would stop acting like jerks – if they would stop, listen and think – then maybe we could actually solve the big problems that our country faces.

One more reason I love the Wall Street Journal.

The Labor Department’s report of occupational injuries and illnesses that required days away from work mimicked the shifts the recession caused in the labor market in 2008. Hard-hit sectors, such as construction and retail, reported fewer injury and illness cases. Older workers experienced more injuries as their labor force participation rose. And incidents among younger workers fell as fewer remained employed.

Today I unexpectedly discovered all of the Wall Street Journal’s Twitter lists.

Won’t setting these all up via RSS to be fed into my Google Reader and iGoogle account excite Mr. Murdoch even further?

Scanning all of the Wall Street Journal feeds (and now their listees) in one homogeneous format like an iGoogle page should make identifying the articles I would like to read much easier than trying to visually strip out all of the extraneous information that usually occupies the Wall Street Journal’s homepage.

@WSJ/news Get the latest breaking news headlines from top news organizations on Twitter.	Following: 16 Followers: 111
@WSJ/all-things-digital Twitter list with writers from All Things Digital (ATD).	Following: 3 Followers: 51
@WSJ/economics A collection of tweeters discussing the latest on the economy and its recovery.	Following: 22 Followers: 73
@WSJ/wall-street-journal Get the latest headlines and breaking news alerts from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).	Following: 60 Followers: 36
@WSJ/wsj-economy The Wall Street Journal’s economics reporting team on Twitter.	Following: 9 Followers: 30
@WSJ/wsj-politics The Wall Street Journal’s latest tweets on politics and policy.	Following: 6 Followers: 43
@WSJ/politics A collection of VIP tweeters discussing U.S. politics and policy on Twitter.	Following: 18 Followers: 19
@WSJ/entertainment	Following: 13 Followers: 20
@WSJ/world-news Get the latest headlines on world events from the Wall Street Journal and more.	Following: 11 Followers: 16
@WSJ/wsj-staff A comprehensive list of eporters, editors and columnists from the Wall Street Journal.	Following: 66 Followers: 155
@WSJ/business	Following: 11 Followers: 43
@WSJ/iran-elections Tweeters discussing Iranian elections.	Following: 7 Followers: 6
@WSJ/healthcare Tweets on healthcare, including updates from the Wall Street Journal’s health team.	Following: 7 Followers: 26
@WSJ/investing Tweets on investing. Woot!	Following: 17 Followers: 21
@WSJ/wsj-life-style-staff The Wall Street Journal’s Life & Style reporters, editors and columnists.	Following: 8 Followers: 23
@WSJ/autos	Following: 8 Followers: 5
@WSJ/sports-news The latest tweets in sports. Football. Basketball. Baseball. Hockey. NASCAR. Soccer.	Following: 16 Followers: 8
@WSJ/wsj-news The latest headlines from the Wall Street Journal.	Following: 36 Followers: 19
@WSJ/wsj-blogs The latest from the Wall Street Journal’s blog coverage.	Following: 22 Followers: 22
@WSJ/future-of-news The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray and his list of top tweeters discussing the future of news.	Following: 13 Followers: 67

The game is apparently over — at least for now –
for Center Court With C-Webb, the sports restaurant opened by the former Sacramento Kings basketball star three years ago.

A recording on the restaurant answering machine said that Chris Webber is calling a time out for his sports bar and restaurant at 3600 N. Freeway Blvd.

for more info.

I can’t keep blogging every time a major newspaper releases fear-driven social media guidelines. But once again, I can’t resist.

The Los Angeles Times is the latest major news organization to apparently tell its staff to beware the dangers of social media. I don’t have time to critique this in the same detail that I did the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post guidelines.

But I count 19 words of mild general encouragement to use social media and more than 600 words of thou-shalt-nots and warnings of the terrors lurking below the water, including subpoenas.

Without looking, I knew that these policies were written by people who don’t use social media much. But I looked. I couldn’t find Editor Russ Stanton, who released the guidelines on either Twitter (tried searching for Russ, Russell and “Rstanton”) or Facebook  (several Russ Stantons there, but none that I could find identifying themselves with the Los Angeles Times in their public profiles).

At first, I couldn’t find Assistant Managing Editor Henry Fuhrmann, who also signed the guidelines, on Twitter. So I tweeted that neither of them used Twitter. Then Chris Krewson tweeted that Andrew Nystrom might have had some input and he’s a regular Twitter user. I messaged Nystrom and he pointed out that Fuhrmann tweets as hfuhrmann (at the time he listed his name that way in his profile, but he spelled it out after I pointed that out to Nystrom). Fuhrmann’s profile identifies him as overseeing the Times copy desk. He has tweeted only 71 times (three this month, four in October), so I think it’s fair to say he’s not a very active Twitter user. Fuhrmann has 491 Facebook friends, so I’ll guess he’s more active there.

Fuhrmann has more social media experience than some editors who have developed misguided policies. But I feel safe in saying that we again have inexperienced, fearful editors telling staffs to be very afraid of social media.

Nystrom tells me in an email (responding to my mocking of the subpoena fear), “our legal folks do take the potential implications of social media very seriously.”  I should note that I misread this fear in one of my mocking tweets, after reading a story about the policy and before I had read the full policy. Still, throwing in subpoenas does add to the “reefer madness” tone of the whole policy. I have been subpoenaed frivolously, long before social media were part of journalism, so I don’t take subpoenas lightly. Journalists should always be careful and social media don’t change that.

The Times policy warns: “Your interactions could be subject to a third-party subpoena. The social media network has access to and control over everything you have disclosed to or on that site. For instance, any information might be turned over to law enforcement without your consent or even your knowledge.” Yes, and so could information you publish on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. With the exception of personal messages, social media content is public anyway. Some good judgment in use of personal messages is advisable. But so is some perspective.

Some of the issues raised are valid and some of the advice is good. But the tone of fear, the failure to give more than passing lip service to the importance of social media and the unwillingness to trust journalists’ judgment reflect the same cluelessness we saw from the Journal and the Post.

For wise policies in social media, check out NPR or the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

As I’ve said before, newsrooms need lots of conversations about the wise use of social media. And those conversations should stress the opportunities and the value of social media. But first we need more editors to learn about the opportunities and the value.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of volunteer editors on Wikipedia is dropping.

Entities such as Wikipedia or Linux have always been a bit of a mystery to economists as to why people with great knowledge donate their time to write articles or software.  Some are motivated by pure altruism, others by professional credentialing that accompanies being a leader on software like Linux.  [See Jochai Benkler on Wikipedia, Linux and the gift economy in "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm."]

In any event, the number of volunteer editors on Wikipedia fell last year by 49,000 (a jump of 10-fold over the prior year’s loss of 4,900 editors).  There is active disagreement whether this has resulted from their being less new ground on Wikipedia as more and more things have been covered or whether editors are put off by increased bureaucracy Wikipedia imposed in an effort to increase the accuracy of Wikipedia articles and decrease the mischief.  Moreover, Wikipedia has become less friendly to new contributions: “In 2008, Wikipedia’s editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to data compiled by social-computing researcher Ed Chi of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center.”

Despite this, Wikipedia’s popularity continues to grow: “Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.”

One interesting snippet from the article is that 87% of the volunteer writers on Wikipedia are men.

The article does point out that Wikipedia founder Jimmie Wales is more interested in web traffic to Wikipedia and accuracy of the articles than in the volume of volunteerism on the site.

See: Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler, “Volunteers Log Off As Wikipedia Ages“, Wall Street Journal, 11/23/09.

At what point does speech which advocates violent jihad, murder and mayhem against Americans by Islamists cease being protected under the First Amendment?

It is our opinion that jihadist speech, which includes websites and other communications, needs to be evaluated in a historical and doctrinal context.

That context is that the “call to jihad,” or the advocacy of jihad, very often leads to jihad. In other words, there is an arguable cause and effect, or at least a high positive correlation. There is an argument that the call to jihad poses an imminent threat to life.

Osama bin Laden declared holy war against America, which was followed by the attacks on September 11^th. Nidal Hasan responded to the advocacy of jihad and perpetrated the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Each of the publicized foiled terror plots in the last four months was initiated by adherents to jihadist ideology.

As Henninger notes:

“First Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as its raison d’être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American property.”

Well said. Because whether America likes it or not, at some point we are going to have to wrestle with how the First Amendment applies to jihadist speech. Choosing not to will simply mean more jihadists and more terror attacks.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

If it accomplished nothing else, the Obama administration’s announcement last Friday to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan blew the Nidal Hasan murders out of the news. The KSM fiasco deserves all the attention it gets. What Hasan represents, however, is a more immediate concern.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an old-school jihadi. They sit in far-off redoubts, assembling terror teams of foreign nationals who now must figure out how to get themselves and their plot inside the U.S. Not impossible, but harder than before 9/11.

Hasan is new school. He is what’s known as a homegrown terrorist. Virtually all the Islamic terrorist plots thwarted in the U.S. in recent years were homegrown, not designed from afar by a KSM.

Najibullah Zazi, the Colorado airport-shuttle driver arrested in New York this September and charged with conspiring to detonate bombs, came to the U.S. in 1999.

The Fort Dix Six, convicted in December of conspiring to attack U.S. military personnel, were mainly ethnic Albanians whose family came to New Jersey in the 1980s.

Zakaria Amara, the leader of the Toronto 18, who were planning to blow up skyscrapers in Canada, was born in a Toronto suburb.

How do individuals sitting in Colorado, New Jersey, Toronto or Texas suddenly transform into mass murderers for jihad? Most of the time, they become radicalized by spending vast amounts of time viewing violent Islamic Web sites run from abroad.

Two years ago, Lawrence Sanchez of the New York City Police Department’s intelligence division told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the Internet is “the most significant factor in the radicalization that is occurring in America.” Mr. Sanchez described this process as “self-imposed brainwashing.”

In New York Times reporter David Rohde’s account of his captivity by the Taliban, he wrote that “watching jihadi videos” was his guards’ favorite pastime. He describes them as “little more than grimly repetitive snuff films” of executions.

If you sit in the United States and watch this stuff ’round the clock—self-brainwashing—it is fully protected activity. It qualifies as “speech,” protected by the panoply of First Amendment law. These protections exist nowhere else in the world.

The biggest controversy surrounding Maj. Hasan is that the Army knew about his radical Islamic sympathies, from the Walter Reed lecture and the monitored emails to the English-speaking, American-born Yemeni imam Anwar Awlaki.

The argument is that the Army should have mustered him out of the service and thereby avoided the 13 murders. Really? After kicking him out of the Army, there was no probable cause for authorities to surveil a civilian Nidal Hasan. In time he as easily could have killed 13 Americans in a suburban Texas mall.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as the judge presiding over the 1995 trial of the “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman, for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had to instruct the jury that the sheik’s violent, “holy war” sermons at New York mosques were legal, protected activity (he was convicted of conspiracy). There is a mosque in Manhattan at 96th Street and Lexington Avenue, on whose sidewalk one can hear adherents spouting support for violence against the U.S. That, too, is protected.

A violent ideology is just an ideology, and that is protected speech. It requires acts to put in motion aggressive surveillance, such as wiretapping.

I think the Hasan case shows this is wrong, or at least too dangerous. First Amendment law has never dealt with a widely distributed ideology that has as its raison d’être the mass murder of Americans and destruction of American property.

For now this is the way it is: Future Hasans can get jacked up all day on kill-the-Americans Web sites, and we have to wait until they put in motion a conspiracy like Fort Dix or the Colorado jihadists. Or until they start shooting.

Politics is the only recourse.

This is what the political fight was through the Bush years—fights over the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps of conversations between U.S. citizens and foreign suspects, using the Swift financial data system to track terrorist transfers (or, with KSM, military tribunals versus civil courts). The argument against these policies was that “our values” require that judges review and approve virtually all such activity.

The problem with this view is that “our values” were already protected to an unprecedented degree. Raising the bar higher is asking too much of the people assigned to catch all these self-radicalizing jihadists.

How crazy is Joe Lieberman?  He’s so crazy, he doesn’t want to bankrupt America!

From the Wall Street Journal: Mr. Joe Lieberman is “digging in” against the public option.  And why?  Why, fiscal considerations, of course!  What a right-wing nut!:

[H]is objection is based on fiscal risk: “Once the government creates an insurance company or plan, the government or the taxpayers are liable for any deficit that government plan runs, really without limit,” he says. “With our debt heading over $21 trillion within the next 10 years…we’ve got to start saying no to some things like this.”

Mr. Lieberman wants a bill, just not one that mandates a complete government takeover of the healthcare sector, or one that will push us further down the Bush/Obama road to bankruptcy (and complete ownership by China).  What a lunatic nutjob!  What a stooge of the insurance companies!  He clearly hates all poor people, and wants people to die!  Saving money–what a loon!  Lock him up, he’s crazy!

-Mister Person

This week marks the second anniversary of the first live internal demo of the intelligence community’s A-Space project, groundbreaking for the IC in its goal of collaborative use of social media across agency lines. Somewhere in Maryland, a remarkable government employee and friend named Mike Wertheimer should pause and quietly celebrate the fruition of his early evangelism for it.

I was still a government employee then, but wrote about the effort at the time here on Shepherd’s Pi (“A-Space: Top-secret social networking“). It makes me chuckle to remember back to those days when it was still mostly unheard-of for IC employees to blog openly on the public web about current technology projects. Now you can’t shut ‘em up!

It made sense, I thought, to set down a few notes at the time for several reasons:

1. A-Space was intended by Mike’s Analytic Transformation team of the Office of the DIrector of National Intelligence (ODNI) to take advantage of social-media advances then occuring rapidly on the internet, more rapidly than behind our firewalls. I had joined Twitter for example in March 2007, but few of my IC colleagues had Twitter accounts or access from work machines. Same for Facebook and LinkedIn. I blogged about A-Space because I felt we needed to socialize externally the path we were following internally, in order to attract good ideas and assistance from Silicon Valley and technologists who had little knowledge of intelligence work.
2. The time would come when A-Space would be all grown up and accepted as a success, I hoped – and at that point “paternity” could become an issue. We had seen the same thing happen with Intellipedia, which has had several bouts of being claimed as a CIA creation rather than its more community-minded actual roots – and I thought it might be best to set the record straight early on. As Winston Churchill said about World War II, he intended history to treat him fairly “because I intend to write it.”
3. I had announced my “retirement” from government service and was ready to go back to the private sector, and was frankly intent on setting a mark with A-Space so that later leadership might be less inclined to reverse course, against the use of social and collaborative tools.

So here we are, two years on.  I am relieved that A-Space lives! At this point in their lives Twitter and Facebook were themselves  not quite into their hockey-stick growth cycle as social-media phenomena. Think back to Facebook of early 2006 (it was launched in February 2004), or Twitter of March 2008 (it launched in its first alpha baby SMS steps in March 2007.  If you’re interested, Flickr holds some interesting screenshots of the very early Twitter beta screens by their designer).

This week Joab Jackson, senior technology editor at Government Computer News has an update titled “A-Space Melds Social Media and Intelligence Gathering,” quoting Ahmad Ishaq, who manages the project at DIA for the ODNI. I like giving him praise – not just because I hired him, but because he is doing  a bang-up job in difficult circumstances. Let’s just say that he and his team have been dealing with my third bullet point above during the last couple of years.

One of Ahmad’s smart tactics has been to enlist supportive users from multiple agencies as vocal advocates. The GCN article provides an example illustrating the cross-agency collaboration that was mandated by the 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission reports, and which A-Space and its sister tools are helping to realize:

A Homeland Security Department analyst needed to identify a person whose face was found posted on several street and stop signs in a region of the United States. So he posted a scan of the poster on A-Space and received information and photos from seven other agencies. With that information, he could run an image search of the face, which ultimately provided identification.” -Government Computer News

There’s been a lot of change in A-Space since I left – in the requirements, in the emerging business practices, in the software baseline used, and – perhaps explaining some of that – in the contractor team used. That’s all fodder for another article, perhaps.

Whither Analytic Collaboration?

What I prefer to focus on is the future potential of this tool and others in enabling progress for intelligence analysis and collaboration. Ahmad gives one window in the GCN article, and it’s a topic he and I have talked about recently:

[A]llowing analysts to share all this information is only the first step of A-Space. Ishaq and his team are exploring ways of making all the information that is being generated machine-readable. Ishaq would like to incorporate elements of the Semantic Web tools, which would allow them to draw inferences from existing material.

“Right now, the communication is between person and machine,” he said. “We’re trying to take it a step further, to machine-to-machine. So the end-user logs in to the computer, and everything he could possibly want would be there, without doing searches or clicking around.” -Government Computer News

But I’m sure that Ahmad would be among the first to agree that technology is perhaps among the lesser factors which will contribute to the success or failure of analytic collaboration (and “transformation” – an overused term but a worthy goal). Much more important are the social and cultural aspects of the workforce, the workplace, and the changing nature of intelligence work itself  – in response to and support of a dramatically changing foreign policy approach, driven as much by political transition as by societal shifts.

For the moment, let’s keep the focus on the tools though. As A-Space continues taking its own baby steps, it is worthwhile to consider the experience of its older sister Intellipedia – and that sytem’s progenitor Wikipedia. 

Early this year, GCN carried another Joab Jackson article claiming: “Intellipedia Suffers Midlife Crisis.” Much chatter ensued. Some of the challenges dealt with in the article are being addressed internally by the likes of the IC’s Chris Rasmussen, with new and complementary efforts such as Intellipublia (see Federal Computer Week, “Intelligence community wrestles with Web 2.0 tools for information sharing“).

The looming question rises about the overall significance of Web 2.0 style tools.  Dr. Mark Drapeau argued early this year in a widely read piece that “Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crsis.”  Now, more concrete and noteworthy stats are emerging about the hallmark Web 2.0 tools which inspired many of the IC’s efforts.

Could Crowd-Sourcing Max Out?

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported on new research  (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“) showing that “unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.” They’re leaving Wikipedia and not being replaced by as many new volunteers, undercutting the “many-eyes” approach that crowd-sourcing relies upon. The numbers are striking: “In the first three months of 2009, Wikipedia lost more than 49,000 editors, compared to 4,900 a year earlier,” reports ZDNet based on the new research (more details here: “Is Wikipedia Maxed Out?”). An influential Econsultancy.com blog now asks in response: “Is free user-generated content dying?”

It is worth keeping an eye on the pulse of Intellipedia and A-Space, as their activity levels wax or wane. Unlike Wikipedia, they are work systems, not free web tools. So the issues there are the differential adoption and longevity of enterprise tools, as explored in Andrew McAfee’s excellent new book Enterprise 2.0.  

For the new intelligence tools, much will depend on their inclusion within agency official processes and analytic-tradecraft training programs. As Chris Rasmussen has pointed out about A-Space, it may still be true that “not a single agency recognizes A-Space content as official.” But social collaboration is more and more an accepted and critical requirement of all information technologies – we’re certainly reflecting that at Microsoft, and have been busy building such capabilities into the new Office 2010 suite (info and free beta sign-up here).

The wave is not going away (well, Google Wave might go away… see here and here and here and oh never mind…)

Who best reflects the pulse of A-Space and Intellipedia? There are many intel-watchers in my blogroll over on the margin, who chart the progress of the IC’s collaborative ways. I can also recommend Chris Dorobek’s reporting on the topic for FedNewsRadio; see his piece from July 2009 ”Intel on the government 2.0 front lines – and a new report assessing A-Space” and more recently his article “November’s Signal column: The Intelligence Community Writes the Book on Collaboration” – both have insight and supportive links as well.

There will be other ODNI and constituent agency efforts to provide cutting-edge collaborative and analytic software and techniques. A-Space will be improved upon, no doubt.

The real test of A-Space – while we have it – and its intelligence utility will come in secret moments of crisis, but also in less-flashy use of consistent collaborative processes which over time contribute to the uncovering of truth for our decision-makers and national leaders. Of necessity, most successes will be unseen by the outside world… and likely, most failures as well.  For now, a happy beta anniversary to the A-Space team and its users.

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The Wall Street Journal writes that liberals are more interested in identity politics than a color-blind society.

Jesse Jackson accused Alabama Congressman Artur Davis of selling out his race when he voted against the health-care bill.

Source:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545913962628736.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Microsoft is holding talks with News Corporation and other media-companies to convince them to remove their news content from the Google search engine while continuing to feature their material on the Microsoft search engine. One source told the Financial Times that this initiative had originated with Keith Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and that talks are in their initial stages. News Corp and Microsoft representatives refused to comment.

Climate change smackdown between believers and skeptics. (WSJ)

I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to both reduce emissions as if we were responsible for climate change and study it more to figure out if we’re actually responsible. If there’s one thing the history of science has shown us it’s that our understanding of our world, ourselves, and the interactions that affect both is constantly changing. The dangerous surety of those who insist on human causation of climate change is no more comforting that the refuseniks who stridently deny any role we may have.

I’ll tell you why that’s a good thing

Last week, President Obama’s approval rating slipped below 50 percent in the Gallup poll for the first time since he took office, making him the third-fastest president to fall below that bar since World War II.  Ford did it in his third month, Clinton in his fourth, and Reagan in his tenth.  I challenge anyone to argue that these men were unpopular presidents.

Long term perspectives were seldom considered by our reactionary media this week as pundits and commentators responded to Obama’s falling numbers.  Some fated him to a failed presidency.  Another argued that his numbers will “make re-election an uphill struggle.”  Susan Page of USA Today reported that others are still willing to give Obama some time to deliver on the promises he made from the campaign trail, but “not too much more.”

Only one article that I came across seemed to get it right; Domenico Montanaro, NBC News political reporter, had this to say:

“Three, taking George W. Bush out of the equation due to 9/11, every president who has ended up winning re-election since 1980 saw his approval rating drop below 50% in his first year. Moral of the story: If your goal is to get re-elected, it’s better to have your political struggles early (Clinton, Reagan) rather than later (Bush 41). Kind of like a college football season, right? Better to lose early than late. So be careful what you read into what Obama’s approval rating right now means for his presidency. There’s really no correlation between how quickly a president’s poll numbers drop and the overall success of his presidency.”

I would have to take issue with Montanaro on one component of his argument.  He proposes that there is no correlation between dropping poll numbers and presidential success, but I would argue that dropping poll numbers early in a presidency foretell future success.  Seems to defy logic, right?  I’ll explain.

If at first you don’t succeed, be sure to fail

Ronald Reagan addresses Congress

Clinton and Reagan are good examples to use, especially since they represent opposite political ideologies.  When Reagan assumed office, he shocked the political system by powering through his Republican agenda and overhauling the financial system all within his first year.  His popularity took a hit at first, but change, especially drastic change, is a taste acquired over time.

courtesy of blognetnews.com

Clinton provoked a similar stir when he signed the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 and adopted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy during his first year in office.  His numbers fell too, but rebounded once people realized he was getting things done.  These significant government reforms made people uneasy at first, which explains both men’s fallen poll numbers.  Both resurged, however, when the public realized these presidents were willing to act and actively address the problems facing our country.

Nobody trusts a rookie to catch the ball

Don’t confuse long-term action with inaction.  Too many critics are blasting Obama for sitting on his hands and doing nothing.  This is simply not true.  Since taking office, Obama has:

• Pushed relentlessly for the adoption of landmark health care legislation even in face of almost unanimous Republican opposition in both houses of Congress and resistance from Blue Dog Democrats as well
• Banned the use of “harsh interrogation,” and ordered the closing of the Guantánamo Bay Prison
• Repealed Bush’s environmental legislation that re-allowed industrial plants to pollute waters with previously banned toxins, among other things
• Signed the $787 billion dollar stimulus bill
• Announced American withdrawal from Iraq
• Repealed bans put in place by Bush that disallowed federal funding for stem-cell research
• Introduced the incredibly successful “Cash for Clunkers” and “First-Time Homeowners” rebates that economists are crediting as having helped facilitate our economic recovery

Take a deep breath, relax… and ignore O’Reilly

These are just a few of the more notable things Obama has done in his eight months in office, but you rarely see them mentioned in news stories.  That’s because Fox News is too busy covering the developing “bow-gate” scandal and O’Reilly is seriously contemplating whether or not Obama is Lucifer with Lou Dobbs.

Good public relations in the presidency require that you have a product to promote.  In order to have something to promote, you have to introduce social and governmental reform, and that change agitates the public.  This unease will pass, and eventually we will realize that Obama’s strategy is right on point.  Considering the fact that Bush’s approval rating fell from 91 percent in his first year to 22 percent when he left office, I think a slow start really is best.

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/is-wikipedia-dying/
While the Wild, Wild West known as Wikipedia is not becoming tamer, there are signs that it could be dying, or at least going through changes or growing pains.  A front page story on the Wall Street Journal today reports that Winkipedia, the words fifth most visited web site with roughly 325 million monthly visitors is losing volunteers who write, edit, and police the online encyclopedia at an alarming rate.  In the first three months of 2009, 49,000 volunteers were lost compared to 4,900 the same time a year before.  It is unclear if people are quitting because they think the encyclopedia is done, or if they are becoming hostile to the newbies.  Wikipedia has implemented many layers of rules to help make it more reliable, control edit wars, hijacking, and other malicious behavior which makes it less freewheeling.  But if a higher percentage of writers and editors are “kooks” then the added rules won’t matter.

I admit, I use Wikipedia; I find it very useful.  But I take it with a grain of sand and realize how unpredictable the information may be.  It has a place, and I would like to see it stay that way.  But if “errors” like the one where Senator Kennedy was listed as having died months before he actually did become more commonplace, then Wikipedia will (or should) die by lack of users, not lack of volunteers.

Since this article requires a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, I can’t provide a link to full text.  This will give an abstract of the article.  For full text, most libraries should carry the Wall Street Journal.

This story from last week’s Wall Street Journal is an interesting example of why our clients need us to think and behave as business partners not just advertising or marketing or online (or insert catch phrase du jour) experts.

I’ve been reading a lot of late on recent West African history and the control of the cocoa production, the rise and fall of its price, is the story of the region’s fortune (or lack thereof.) The industry’s reliance on child labor has made this chocolate lover a much more choosy, questioning consumer.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc. purchased the New York Board of Trade in 2007, and converted it to an all-electronic exchange.

The move to all-electronic trading meant that virtually any one could get involved in the cocoa markets, buying and selling futures contracts online. The hope was to make the cocoa markets more like other commodities, such as oil, where contracts are traded almost around the clock.

But the move had the opposite effect on commodities like cocoa: Many cocoa floor traders and brokers, who made up about 40% of the market, have quit. Dapco Brokerage, which used to handle 30% of the cocoa trading on the floor, went out of business a year ago.

Its departure scared off other electronic-commodities traders, who have stayed out of the $4.3 billion market because of high volatility and thin liquidity.

Sometimes, fewer than 100 contracts change hands each hour in the early mornings.

That has made the market for cocoa a highly volatile one. Cocoa surged 65% in the first half of 2008, to a 28-year high of $3,360 a ton on July 1, then tanked 43% in four months before recovering 77% to hit $3,392 in late October, the highest since June 1979. On Wednesday, cocoa settled at $3,199, up 3.7%.

Soaring prices of cocoa drove chocolate makers to raise prices and cut the size of candy bars since mid-2007.

In August 2008, Hershey Co. raised prices an average of 11% to offset “significant increases” in the cost of raw materials such as cocoa, sugar and peanuts, said Hershey Chief Executive David West in a statement at the time. Andrew Bonfield, Cadbury’s chief financial officer, said on a September analysts’ call that reducing bar sizes enabled the company to avoid raising prices.

During the first 10 months of 2009, cocoa’s daily trading volumes fell 14% to a level not seen since 2005.

According to e-mails hacked and re-posted on public file sharing sites in Russia, there has been a concerted, concentrated, and organized effort by scientists subscribing to theories of global warming to silence any scholarly opposition.

There are two main schools of thought with regard to climate change: the first is that the planet is heating quickly and that human activity is the biggest, and perhaps only, cause of it. The second is that there is some climate change happening, but the causes, effects, and extent of it are not fully understood. There isn’t enough historical data available to know if any change is the result of recent activity, or historical trends… and if the result of recent activity, then what activity, precisely?

The Wall Street Journal reports that scientists who subscribe to the first, ”imminent doom” theory have threatened to “shut out dissenters and their points of view,” going so far as to disallow peer review of scholarly research by dissenters. Phil Jones, an environmental scientist who believes humans are the only cause of global warming, explained to colleague Michael Mann at Penn State that he would “keep them out somehow.”

University of Alabama scientist John Christy, who has asked scientific organizations to allow dissenting opinions to be published in scholarly journals, is alarmed at the contents of the e-mails: “It’s disconcerting to realize that legislative actions this nation is preparing to take, and which will cost trillions of dollars, are based upon a view of climate that has not been completely scientifically tested.”

If the environmental lobbies and politically correct “scientific” orthodoxies continue to hold sway, it appears that such a view will never have the chance to be completely tested. The overly vocal left won’t allow it.

As much as Rush Limbaugh may shout down cogent left-leaning criticism for the sake of the party line, so too do leftist scientists treat colleagues who criticize what climate researcher Mojib Latif calls “a kind of mafia that is trying to inhibit critical papers from being published.”

Environmentalist methodology.

I usually don’t like linking to articles at the Wall Street Journal, since they are hidden behind a paywall, but the old trick of googling the article title and clicking on it enabled me to read this article.

I stopped editing Wikipedia long ago. I’ll correct a typo or a minor mistake, but I won’t publish any new articles. Not everyone has that much free time available to write encyclopedic articles for free. Still, the WSJ reports that droves of editors are fleeing Wikipedia. Should we be worried?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Not according to an article published last year by the Wall Street Journal.  The columnist cites research which indicates that people who never worship at a traditional house of worship are more likely to be superstitious.  Below is an excerpt:

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

It seems that the modern, secular myth that traditional religious folks, especially Christians, are generally more irrational and prone to believing things without evidence, is clearly false.  It turns out that everyone, and especially the non-religious, believes some things without evidence.

No group of any size has the market cornered on cold, hard, rational thinking.  In my life, I have met irrational Christians, atheists, Muslims, and Mormons, to name a few.  Each group has its share of irrational followers.

Instead of poking fun at the irrational followers of a movement, why don’t we seek out the rational and reasonable members, and speak to them?  I think it’s because those people might actually make us think, and reconsider some of our cherished beliefs.  That wouldn’t be as fun, would it?