Phil Windley has some comments on academic paywalls, or the practice whereby academic papers are hidden within subscription-only journals and aren't getting read by people who do their searching on the web:

The net has changed how information is exchanged and the power of linking cannot be ignored. Ideas that flow freely are more competitive than those that are restricted in some way. Ironically, academics has always prided itself on the free flow of information, but the net has turned that on its head to the point that now academic researchers are the ones who find themselves in the most restricted space of any innovators in the IT space.

Google has a new service, Google Scholar, which tracks down citations.

David Weinberger asks why some things feel on the web like 'ours' while other things feel like 'theirs':

Put aside for the moment question of what's legally ours on the Net. Instead, consider what's ours in a less explicit and less rigorous sense. Google feels like ours (even though it legally belongs to its shareholders) while Microsoft's new search site feels like theirs. Weblogs feel like their ours while online columns do not.

Ed Felten gives a Princeton University President's Lecture Series lecture on Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politices, and the Fight to Control Digital Media

From Muniwireless.com:

The Pennsylvania Senate passed House Bill 30 which prohibits municipalities from delivering telecommunications services for compensation if it competes with private enterprise. The bill is now awaiting signature by Governor Rendell but he has grave reservations about the proposed law and won't sign it unless significant revisions are made, notably to the prohibition on municipalities offering telecoms services.

In the comments to this post comes an excellent follow-on from Philadelphia, a city that's proposing to spend $10 million on wireless for everyone:

The City of Philadelphia intends to aggressively pursue a veto of the Bill. The bill as it stands is not good for Philadelphia or the State of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia is ranked as the 33 most wired or wireless City in the U.S. With the implementation of Wireless Philadelphia, the City would have moved into the top 3 cities in the country. With just the announcement to create a business plan and funding model to implement Wireless Philadelphia, we have generated world-wide interest and support.

Today less than 60 percent of the city's neighborhoods even have the option to subscribe to high-speed broadband (DSL or cable modem). The City believes adamantly that any citizen or business should have the opportunity to compete in this global, knowledge economy regardless of a neigborhood's economic status or area household density. Affordable, universal access benefits everyone.

At Many to Many, Ross Mayfield writes about Middlespace, where top-down control meets bottom up energy in the world of social networks.

Faceted navigation is a way to browse information along multiple dimensions.

Here's a KM world article on what it is and what it's likely to be used for:

So how do facets work their powers? First, we need to state what I’ll call Busch’s golden law of facets, named for Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies, a past president of the American Society for Information Science:

Four facets of 10 nodes each have the same discriminatory power as one taxonomy of 10,000 nodes.

That’s stunning. That means that with facets, I can describe a collection with 40 nodes (aka subject categories) that would take a taxonomy 10,000 nodes to describe. That’s for an idealized case, of course, but the gist of it holds true in the real world. The bottom line is that with facets, we can make do with orders of magnitude fewer categories than we needed in a taxonomy.

That’s because taxonomies are a type of pre-coordinate indexing, meaning that its builder anticipates the compound subjects people can browse along later, like “18th Century French History.” In contrast, faceted navigation is based on post-coordinate indexing, meaning that end-users string together their own compound subjects at search time. They do this by combining simple elements from multiple facets, in this example, (Time: 18th Century) + (Country: France) + (Topical Subject: History).

...via elearningpost

Dave Morgan talks about content tails, the talk about the content that takes place on web pages and blogs, at ClickZ:

For every election news story or analysis carried by traditional media, there were probably hundreds more in the blogosphere, and hundreds of millions of page views and RSS (define) feed downloads. Lots of online media was created; much of it directly related to content produced by other media entities.

This phenomenon, called the "content tail" by some, is developing as a force to be reckoned in the media business -- just ask Dan Rather!

You've been exposed to the content tail if you read John Battelle's Searchblog, Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine, or Wired Magazine's October issue; heard Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital speak recently about the future of online media; or downloaded the Jon Stewart/"Crossfire" clip via BitTorrent.

...via elearningpost

David Weinberger further ponders on the Third Age of Order:

First Order: You arrange physical objects: You shelve books, you file papers, you put away your silverware.

Second Order: You arrange separate, smaller objects that contain metadata about the first order objects: You create a card catalog. You make entries in a ledger. You index a book. You now have a second organizational scheme (e.g., the books are shelved by subject but the cards are arranged alphabetically), and it's physically easier to navigate

Third Order: You create electronic metadata so you can organize it in ways that simply weren't feasible before.

And, within the Third Age, on the nature of data and metadata:

So, in the Third Age of Order, all data is metadata. Contents are labels. Data is all surface and no insides. It's all handles and no suitcase. It's a folder whose content is just another label. It's all sticker and no bumper.

Why does this matter? It changes the primary job of information architects. It makes stores of information more useful to users. It enables research that otherwise would be difficult, thus making our culture smarter overall. But, most interestingly (at least to me), this does the ol' Einsteinian reverse flip to Aristotle. Aristotle assumed that of the 10 categories by which one could understand a thing, one must be primary: Where that thing fits into the tree of knowledge. So, you could say that Alcibiades is made of flesh or lived in Greece, but if you really want to understand him, you have to say that he is an animal of a particular kind. But, now that everything is metadata, no particular way of understanding something is any more inherently valuable than any other; it all depends on what you're trying to do. The old framework of knowledge — and authority — are getting a pretty good shake.

We've been talking lately here about tacit knowledge (about which, more later) and small talk and the limitations of online meetings and collaborations for casual conversation (which is sometimes where the most real progress gets made. Related to that, David Weinberger speaks 'In defense of small talk':

Likewise, in small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don't, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground. Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations.

Peter Merholz at Adaptive Path continues the conversation about 'folksonomy or, 'metadata for the masses':

The primary benefit of free tagging is that we know the classification makes sense to users. It can also reveal terms that “experts” might have overlooked. “Cameraphone” and “moblog” are newborn words that are already among Flickr’s most popular; such adoption speed is unheard of in typical classifications. For a content creator who is uploading information into such a system, being able to freely list subjects, instead of choosing from a pre-approved “pick list,” makes tagging content much easier. This, in turn, makes it more likely that users will take time to classify their contributions.

Of course, it's not a perfect solution:

Clearly, such tagging systems are not a panacea; they present many potential drawbacks. With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.”

You may also encounter the inverse problem — users employing the same term for disparate concepts. Flow, for instance, can either mean optimal creative experience, or the movement of a fluid.

But it doesn't really have to be. There are ways around the problems above and, as is clear from looking at Flickr and del.icio.us, they are powerful tools that can be more flexible and could certainly add more usability to traditional metadata systems that sort of work but never quite the way we want them to.

An article on Information Hunters, which discusses how information foraging on the Internet resembles the activities of hunter-gatherers.

A presentation at PARC on drawing information from groups.

At Learning Circuits, Clark Aldrich talks about six criteria for an educational simulation.