Making online forums work

Excellent insights from Cory Doctorow on the skills and techniques needed to ensure reasonably civil and effective discourse in online environments. You would also do well to take a look at Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s advice on moderation in online forums.

Which troll-fighting techniques work

Cory Doctorow: In my latest InfoWeek column, I look at what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to fighting trolls:

In the wake of the Kathy Sierra mess, Tim O’Reilly proposed a Blogger’s Code of Conduct as a way of preventing a recurrence of the vile, misogynist attacks that Sierra suffered. The idea was that bloggers could choose to follow the Code and post a little badge to their sites affirming their adherence to it, putting message-board posters on notice of the house rules. Although it sounds like a reasonable idea on the face of it, bloggers were incredibly skeptical of the proposal, if not actively hostile. The objections seemed to boil down to this: “We’re not uncivil, and neither are those message-board posters we regularly see on the boards. It’s the trolls that we have trouble with, and they’re pathological psychos, already ignoring our implicit code of conduct. They’re going to ignore your explicit code of conduct, too.” (There was more, of course — like the fact that a set of articulated rules only invite people to hold you to them when they violate the spirit but not the letter of the law).

O’Reilly built his empire by doing something incredibly smart: Watching what geeks did that worked and writing it down so that other people could do it too. He is a distiller of Internet wisdom, and it’s that approach that is called for here.

If you want to fight trolling, don’t make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won’t discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

Link

A lazy web request about Apache rewrite rules

I’ve finally gotten around to porting my old Radio archives over to WordPress. One unintended consequence is that the urls for the individual daily archive entries change. In Radio the archive entry for today would be http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2007/05/14.html; In WordPress the url becomes http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2007/05/14 .

Google searches that point to an old Radio url end up with a 404 not found error. This seems to be a case where Apache’s rewrite rules should help, but I don’t know how to write the right rule off the top of my head. I could do my usual combination of searching for clues and trial and error. Perhaps someone out there could point me in a productive direction in the comments.

Charles Stross on some possible futures

I’ve been a fan of Charlie Stross’s science fiction since I discovered it. Here’s a transcript of a talk he gave recently in Munich trying to tease out the potential implications in some pretty straightforward predictions about near-term technology change. As Larry Niven once observed, “Good science fiction writers predict cars: Great science fiction writers predict traffic jams.” Stross has some very provocative things to say about some possible traffic jams.

It’s a longish talk, well worth your time. Here are two tidbits to give you a sense of what you will find there:

Suppose you could capture a real-time video feed of all of your activity, something that researchers at Microsoft Labs are already actively experimenting with (Mylifebits project). Stross calls this “life-logging” and suggests that

The political hazards of lifelogging are, or should be, semi-obvious. In the short term, we’re going to have to learn to do without a lot of bad laws. If it’s an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a ‘bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there’s no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I’m asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? And everything they see is recorded and retained forever, and can be searched retroactively for wrong-doing. [Charles Stross: Shaping the future]

Or consider the fallout that might occur when we do end up with cars capable of driving themselves?

Once all on-road cars are driverless, the current restrictions on driving age and status of intoxication will cease to make sense. Why require a human driver to take an eight year old to school, when the eight year old can travel by themselves? Why not let drunks go home, if they’re not controlling the vehicle? So the rules over who can direct a car will change. And shortly thereafter, the whole point of owning your own car — that you can drive it yourself, wherever you want — is going to be subtly undermined by the redefinition of car from an expression of independence to a glorified taxi. If I was malicious, I’d suggest that the move to autonomous vehicles will kill the personal automobile market; but instead I’ll assume that people will still want to own their own four-wheeled living room, even though their relationship with it will change fundamentally. [Charles Stross: Shaping the future]

Food for thought.

On the limits of intellectual property – Spider Robinson’s ‘Melancholy Elephants’

Melancholy Elephants provides powerful insight into the relation between an intellectual commons, the creation of news works of art, and the potential unintended consequences of perpetual copyright. It turns out that I ve pointed to this story in the early days of this blog. It s well worth reading again.

Spider Robinson’s Hugo-winning “Melancholy Elephants” online

Cory Doctorow: Spider Robinson has posted his Hugo-winning 1983 story “Melancholy Elephants” to his website; it’s a prescient look at the impact of perpetual copyright, penned “two years before the first Macintosh went on sale.”

She needed no time to choose her words. “Do you know how old art is, Senator?”

“As old as man, I suppose. In fact, it may be part of the definition.”

“Good answer,” she said. ” Remember that. But for all present-day intents and purposes, you might as well say that art is a little over 15,600 years old. That’s the age of the oldest surviving artwork, the cave paintings at Lascaux. Doubtless the cave-painters sang, and danced, and even told stories–but these arts left no record more durable than the memory of a man. Perhaps it was the story tellers who next learned how to preserve their art. Countless more generations would pass before a workable method of musical notation was devised and standardized. Dancers only learned in the last few centuries how to leave even the most rudimentary record of their art.

Link (Thanks, Colin!)

Web Design Tool: Denim Site Sketching

This looks like an interesting design tool to check out. I’m particularly intrigued with tools that emphasize the iterative and provisional nature of design. I think that too many of today’s automated design tools convey a false sense of completeness by creating outputs that look too polished. I will be downloading this and experimenting with it shortly.

Web Design Tool: Denim Site Sketching

When you are making websites, inevitably some form of sketching will be done to rough out it’s design and interactivity.

Whether you’re the web designer or someone trying to communicate your ideas to a web designer, this little piece of software, called Denim, will come in handy.

What Denim does is allow you to create a mock website, with linking pages, just from your rough sketches. Obviously, this will work particularly well with a tablet interface.

Web Design Tool: Denim Site Sketching

Supports Windows, Mac and Unix.

Denim by the University Of Washington

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE goes virtual!

I won’t be traveling to NYC for the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE after all. They’ve decided to go virtual instead.

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE goes virtual!
Date May 8, 2007

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE, which was originally planned as a physical event to take place in NYC has gone virtual and will now consist of a series of web based roundtable discussions.

The primary reasons for the switch were a low number of attendee pre-registrations and a high number of people who wanted to participate but could not travel for various reasons. We hope that the level of interest in the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE is in no way a reflection of the state of the market but rather the result of an unusual set of unintended consequences. That being said, we would very much appreciate your feedback on the state of the market by completing our Enterprise 2.0 market readiness survey.

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE web site has been updated to reflect all the changes. For any questions, please email info [AT] enterprise2rave [DOT] com. We hope to see you online on May 21-22.

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE goes virtual! | enterprise2rave.com.

Market survey effort on Enterprise 2.0 readiness

Francois has put together an online survey to generate some data on what organizations are currently doing about Enterprise 2.0.

What is the state of the market for Enterprise 2.0 Tools?

Are you in the process of deploying Enterprise 2.0 Tools or thinking of doing it? Who in your organization is involved? What do you anticipate the biggest barriers to adoption to be? How will you measure success? Which process will you start with?

If you are interested in participating in a project in which we collectively come to an answer for these and other questions, then take a few minutes to fill out the Enterprise 2.0 Market Readiness Survey. We will share all the results with everyone who’s interested.

And of course feel free to post it on your blog for your audiences to fill in and participate (just point them to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=937203810006).

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Developing an eye and ear for Web 2.0 phenomena

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead
Benjamin Franklin

I’ve been following the controversy and conversation around Digg, HD-DVD keys, and the AACS-LA response. I’ve found the following to be among the more thoughtful and useful posts on the topic for my interests:

My views on copy protection and DRM (digital restrictions management/digital rights management) have generally been more pragmatic than ideological or policy oriented. I think the evidence suggests that copy protection and DRM schemes generally don’t accomplish what they ostensibly claim to. They don’t stop anyone who wishes to circumvent them, and they increase costs and interfere with the rights of those who do play by the rules.

In this most recent incident, we’re discovering that the latest generation of technology tools and services with explicitly social components are even farther ahead of law and policy than usual. “Cease and desist” letters begin to lose their effectiveness when the number of “offenders” starts to expand exponentially. “Deep pockets” lose their effectiveness when the conflict becomes asymmetrical.

The decision makers here are not stupid people, despite what their responses might suggest. On the other hand, they do appear to be “net deaf” or “net blind.” Their judgment is formed and informed by long experience in linear environments. Whether they can compensate for that experience in a changing world is problematic. Ed Yourdon in another post that just hit my feed reader offers some thoughts on why it may remain difficult.

The problems of hierarchy are largely invisible from the top. The power of new networks is hard to appreciate if you don’t immerse yourself in it. It’s a bit like trying to coach a sport that you’ve never played. There’s only so much you can learn by watching from the sidelines. If you want to make sound decisions, you need to invest in acquiring the requisite experience.

 

Blogrolls matter – do you want one here?

Like Rick, I haven’t published a blogroll here for quite some time. Since I do 95% of my own blog reading inside FeedDemon, I don’t pay much attention to them myself. I’m curious as to who might want to see a blogroll here. It would have to be a subset of the 300+ feeds I am currently monitoring. Let me know in the comments.

Blogrolls matter

I haven’t had a blogroll on my site in years. Turns out that’s a mistake. I’ll be working on remedying that in the next few days…