At I’m at a meeting with NPR, along with Zadi Diaz, Jeff Jarvis, Rob Paterson, Doc Searls, and Euan Semple. Jay Rosen is on his way. We’ve been hearing about NPR’s structure and business. Fascinating. And check Jeff’s fabulous pre-post.

Just a few notes from the opening background discussion:

NPR’s structure is complex. It produces some shows, but NPR member stations run lots of stuff produced by others. So, when your local station runs “A Prairie Home Companion,” NPR doesn’t get a nickel. About ten percent of the country listens to NPR stations, but the average age is in the 50s. (The average age of PBS viewers is 60.) It has an operating budget of $140M and 750 employees, which makes it smaller than some of its stations, particularly stations with radio and tv branches.

After a while, we come to what seems to me to be the essential conflict: NPR wants to tell more stories, allow listeners to tell stories, and make those stories available to anyone at any time. But, NPR is also a creation of the member stations. If we can find and listen to those stories when and where we want, we won’t tune in to the stations. In short, podcasts peel listeners from stations.

We talked for a few hours after that about what this means for NPR going forward, and then had a group dinner. Then Doc, Jay, Jeff and I had a beer in the hotel bar, where we each declared our unending love for the Internet and threw our glasses into the fireplace.

So, I learned a lot, spent time with people I admire, and maybe get to help in some tiny way an institution I care about. Sort of a great day.

BTW, Euan has flickred a photo here. [Tags: npr media radio everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The beta of the blog for my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous (which is released on May1), is up in beta. The blog is about the ways we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits (digitally that is, not through evil Lite-Brite boards). (You can get there via www.EImisc.com, too, so don’t send me your carpal-tunnel bills!)

The site’s been up for a while in stealth beta mode. As you’ll see, some of it just doesn’t work: There are no samples yet, I’ve only started to build the bibliography (in LibraryThing.com), the forum is under-formatted, etc. And the posts are mainly cross-posts from this blog. (Thanks to BradSucks for doing the work behind the scenes to get the tech up and running.)

I’d love to have your suggestions about how I can make it better. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Much as I love Wikipedia — and I love it so much that I’m giving it candy hearts on Valentine’s Day — its policy of neutrality sometimes forces resolution when we’d rather have debate. Yes, competing sides get represented in the articles, and the discussion pages let us hear people arguing their points, but the arguments themselves are treated as stations on the way to neutral agreement.

So, there’s room for additional approaches that take the arguments themselves as their topics. That’s what Debatepedia.org does, and it looks like it’s on its way to being really useful.

Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit existing content. Unlike Wikipedia, its topics are all up for debate. Each topic presents both sides, structured into sub-questions, with a strong ethos of citation, factuality, and lack of flaming; the first of its Guiding Principles is “No personal opinion.” Rather, it attempts to present the best case and best evidence for each side.

Debatepedia limits itself to topics with yes-no alternatives and with clear pro and con cases. To start a debate, a user has to propose it and the editors (who seem to be the people who founded it…I couldn’t find info about them on the site) have to accept it. This keeps people from proposing stupid topics and boosts the likelihood that if you visit a listed debate, you’ll find content there. It also limits discussion to topics that have two and only two sides, which may turn out to be a serious limitation. But, we’ll see. And it can adapt as required.

Will Debatepedia take off? Who the hell knows. But it’s a welcome addition to the range of experiments in pulling ourselves together. [Tags: politics wikis wikipedia debatepedia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Personal Democracy Forum has launched a terrific blog — techPresident.com — on how the presidential campaigns are using technology. For example, Joshua Levy blogs about Fred Stutzman’s post about my.barackobama.com, Obama’s “private-label social network.” Here’s a bit of what Fred says:

In reality, 2008 is going to be about the enmeshing of networks. Some of the action that goes on in the networks will be centrally maintained, but some (as in the example of the Facebook group) will be produced by people external to the campaign. Should candidates put their head in the sand and act like the external work doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. The simple reality is that by embracing social media, communities are going to play a significant role in the creation of the candidate. Like it or not, some of Obama’s online identity is going to be created by the Facebook group, over which he has no control. The millions of users who embrace Obama in one way or another will get their messages from a number of different sources, so central control is effectively impossible.

The TechPresident feed is going straight into my aggregator… [Tags: personaldemocracy democracy techpresident fred_stuzman obama politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Lorcan Dempsey has a brilliant post on why Google’s moving from a SOAP API to Ajax syndication transforms it from an information landscape into an “information brandscape”™ Amazon, he points out, is happy to let other apps and sites use its product data because the data — a link to a book, a book cover — is by itself and ad. Google wants to get their actual ads into those other sites. Lorcan goes on to apply this distinction to library Web services.

(BTW, Lorcan, I slapped the trademark on to “information brandscape” so now it’s mine. Bwahaha!) [Tags: google libraries amazon lorcan_dempsey everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 api soap ajax worldcat]

Here’s a list of the interviews I did at the Fast Forward user conference, along with the little blurbs describing them. I’ve appended an occasional editorial comment. Most are around 5 minutes, although a few run considerably longer. (I’m writing this in an airport and will probably get things wrong. Darn that haste!)

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail talks about when taxonomies, text search and tagging works, and how this applies to a magazine site. And what about tagging’s own long tail? [Tagalicious!]

John Battelle, the author of the best book on Google, says that search should be a conversation with your customers. And it won’t occur only by typing into a text box.

Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit talks about her survey of 400 executives that showed that even though they’re unclear about what Web 2.0 means, they’re planning on using it to increase revenues and drive down costs. [Quite amusing survey results.]

Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, talks about the future in which search is ubiquitous but also frequently less visible.

Susan Feldman, an analyst with IDC, gives an advance peak at a study she’s going to be announcing tomorrow that upsets expectations about how people find sites…and opens a possibility for “long tail” advertising. [I think I forced a “clarification” on her that’s actually misleading. From talking with people afterwards, the two types of “queries” she’s talking about probably are ones made at search sites, and ones made using the search services of particular sites, e.g., searching for a book at Google or Amazon. I thought by the second type of query she meant people typing a URL directly into the address bar of a Web site. Sorry!]

Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group explains why we should think of search not in terms of finding so much as in terms of teaching.

Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture, says that business intelligence is the main factor high performance companies have in common. Bottom-up, “messy” data (in Tim O’Reilly’s phrase) is only a “nice to have.”

Kathleen Gilroy, who’s also doing video blogs at the conference, answers her own question, “How has search changed her life?” If you want to know, just ask her husband.

Joyce Haas, search product manager at WebMD, talks about the use of social software in her company, the resistance to it, and the transformative effect it has. [WebMD’s willingness to let its employees talk this frankly says a lot about WebMD.]

Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group, Director of Franchise Development and Partnership (a subsidiary of the Long Titles Divisional Department :) talks about how Dow Jones organizes itself in the multi-dimensional world of the Web, where the dimensions include content, brands, devices, markets, interests….

Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems says that at last we’re able to combine structured and unstructured search, so that (for example) a search for a customer will find transaction records in the database and emails the customer may have exchanged with customer support.

Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group talks about the intersection of full text search and tagging.

John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast, talks about who is a bigger competitor, Oracle or Google [a question I totally stole from blogger Joe McKendrick], and the ways in which Fast internally is a Web 2.0 company…wikis and blogs, emerging bottom-up.

Lydia Loizides, a former VP of technology and emerging media at IPC.

Andrew McAfee, creator of the Enterprise 2.0, talks about what Knowledge Management 2.0 looks like…and whether it will arrive top-down, bottom-up or both.

Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam, a social software company, explains why tags are like poetry. [And the extent to which poetry and tagging are expressions of the individual. And why rhyming adds meaning.]

Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group, and DiamondHead founder, talks about the need for businesses to allow employees time to think, and the extent to which thinking can be done in the social public of blogs.

Tim O’Reilly, creator of the Web 2.0 meme, says that organizations have been slow to understand how “network effects” can benefit their business if applied internally as well as externally. As customers add to what the company knows, should that added-value information be made accessible outside of the company? [Tim emphasizes the need for internal sharing and notes that that sharing externally may not always make business sense.]

Hadley Reynolds, VP of Fast’s Center of Search Innovation, discusses the implications of the fact that in enabling sites to provide us with highly relevant results, we may trade-off some of our privacy.

James Robertson of Step Two Designs explains why “search sucks,” and how it can be kept simple and made more effective if the implementers do more work up front. [Plus, there’s the great Prawn vs. PrOn confusion…]

MIT’s Michael Schrage explains why getting highly relevant results from a search can actually inhibit the iterative process by which we discover and learn. [Is this the first use of the term “post-relevant results”?]

Euan Semple, formerly the knowledge management guru at the BBC and now an independent consultant, says that he thinks search is overrated. He trusts more the answers given to him by his social network. [Did the leave in the part where I find out that Euan, whom I’ve counted as a friend for years, pronounces his name “You-ann,” not “Eee-an”? How embarrassing!]

Sandeep Swadia, head of Search Business Consulting for Fast, talks about the intersection of customer needs for search and the evolving media business model.

David Watson, VP of Product Design and Development for Digital Media at Disney/ABC, talks about the role of user-generated metadata in guiding people toward his company’s content. Look for looser licensing of news content before creative content. [This is a Disney guy who understands that an importnat measure of control has slipped from producers to the audience.]

Zia Zaman, SVP of Strategic Marketing at Fast, talks about search as the visible surface of deep business processes, and what this means for Fast as a partner. [Tags: ff07 fastforward web2.0 videos interviews search everything_is_miscellaneous]

Earley and Associates, an information architecture firm, has bought Wordmap, according to an article in KMWorld. WordMap makes tools for constructing, viewing and navigating taxonomies, including a pattern-matching tool for automating some of the construction process. From having poked around their site, Wordmap seems to be all about the top-down side of taxonomic life, a side that we continue to need to do well even as the bottom wells up. [Tags: taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous wordmap earley information_architecture]

This video is a beautiful piece of work. It will be a classic statement. Don’t be the very last person to see it… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Interesting stuff percolating around the question of how controlled content ought to be, where “ought” means morally, culturally, and for hard-nosed business reasons. Is the issue coming to a head?

We have Viacom sending 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube, including some videos Viacom is pulling out of the public domain without even having viewed them. Viacom’s shareholders ought to start up a suit right now. This is the stupidest marketing move in a long time. Jeff Jarvis puts it succinctly in a post that ends “Damned fools.” Terry Heaton also lays it down. And then we have Steve Jobs asking the music publishers to give up on DRM, although Job’s piece also has some special pleading that (imo) weakens it.

Could the content control bubble be about to burst?

[Tags: media viacom drm youtube everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Steve Schultze, from MIT Comparative Media Studies , is giving a Tuesday luncheon talk at the Berkman about the Beyond Broadcasting conference, which has as its theme this year “From participatory culture to participatory democracy.”

Chris Lydon in a video clip asks, “Is the Internet the new public?” Steve plays a clip of Rebecca Mackinnon talking about Chinese repression of speech that leads to political action. Nevertheless, she says, the Web is enabling new forms of social discourse. Before the Web, she says, you couldn’t be famous in China without getting past an official gatekeeper. Steve tells of a Chinese woman, Xiang Xiang , who uploaded an MP3 that’s been downloaded a billion times—a song about a pig. There may be political echoes to the song, apparently.

The hypothesis of the conference: “Skills that emerge in the course of participating in pop culture can become powerful forces when translated into tools of citizen engagement.”

The first half of the conference will be us listening to speakers. The second half will be working groups. Steven asks us what the working groups should be. (There’s a wiki here.) [Tags: media conferences beyond_broadcast everything_is_miscellaneous ]