For example, we know that “social media” — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other examples — are becoming ever more popular, and also ever more important as an “influence” in society. As of January 2010, for example, Twitter had 75 million users (see “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse“, in the Jan 26, 2010 issue of Computerworld); and while Computerworld felt it was important to emphasize that “a lot of current Twitterers are inactive,” it’s also true that those who do Twitter have a disproportionate influence. It’s not just Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, with their multi-million Twitter armies, but the fact that that protesters and dissidents and ordinary citizens are using Twitter to communicate news more quickly and more effectively than the traditional media.

Cynics might well argue that 75 million is actually a very small fraction — just over 1% — of the global population. But Facebook has a user base that is estimated to be approaching 500 million. True, that’s still less than 10% of the global population; but as of April 2009, it was the fifth largest “country” in the world with a mere 200 million users (see “200 Million Strong,” in an April 8, 2009 posting on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog)… which means that, by now, it’s the third largest country in the world, with only China and India ahead of it.

Of course, Facebook (and MySpace, and the various others like it) is only a “virtual” country; it doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t have a Parliament, and it doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations. But maybe it should … and maybe it will. Probably not in the next 5-10 years, but it does suggest that we should start paing more attention to the blurring of “real life” and “virtual life.” Thus far, most of our attention has focused on the “virtual life” of individuals (see, for example, the excellent book, Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle), or relatively small “virtual communities” of individuals, in places like SecondLife.

We’ll know that things have changed irrevocably when Facebook (or MySpace or Twitter, or whatever) achieves some significant political accomplishment, such as getting a major politican elected or thrown out of office. Note that that’s completely different than the “top-down” efforts by politicians (e.g., Barack Obama) to use social media to help promote their own campaigns.

The social/political impact of future IT will, of course, become all the more important as computing becomes more ubiquitous. You’ll recall that I discussed this in part 5 of this thread of blogs (you’ve memorized all this stuff, right?), and suggested that in another 5-10 years, we might well find that a majority of the human race will have non-trivial computing devices, even if it takes the form of a mobile phone. So, if Facebook (and/or its cousins) grows from 500 million users to 5 billion users, there are bound to be some significant social/cultural consequences — the details of which I’m incapable of predicting with any specificity.

One thing is fairly obvious, though: if we’ve got 5 billion people using computers, the majority of them will be located in what we casually refer to as “third world” countries … or, more politely, “developing countries.” That means the applications that dominate the worldwide computing environment probably won’t be the ones that currently dominate the marketplace in advanced/developed countries. They might be “simple” applications that we have relegated to a back corner, like e-mail or texting; or they might be games that we’ve never seen before. Or they might be something else entirely … in any case, what creates this dominance will be culture, not technology.

One last observation, which I’ll just summarize — even though it probably deserves several blog postings on its own: the relationship between government and members of society will change, and the boundary between government and citizens will blur. I can make some educated guesses about the general nature of this change, but the details of how and when … I simply don’t know.

As for the “relationship”: recall that in part 12 of this thread, we discussed the phenomenon of resistance to change. Specifically, to the extent that new technology threatens to disrupt established political (power) structures, and/or social and religious cultures, it will almost certainly threaten to disrupt established laws, regulations, and other forms of codified behavior.

Of course, most societies have organized methods for changing their existing laws and regulations, but (a) it takes a long time, and (b) it tends to operate from the top down. Yeah, yeah, the people at the grass roots can elect new representatives, Presidents, and Prime Ministers; but unless you live in a society that operates with a “direct” town-hall-style consensus, the reality is that the day-to-day establishment of laws and codes and regulations comes from the folks at the top. And (a) they’re likely to be the same ones who were at the top five years ago, and (b) they’re likely to be 50 or 60 years old, if not older, and (c) they still haven’t figured out e-mail.

But all of that could change if you get a “Facebook army” that’s determined to make some changes. We got a minor taste of this when Twitter got used by the protesters in Iran after their controversial election last year … and I think that was just the beginning.

The other aspect of government is this: in the best of all worlds (without getting into the usual debates between liberals and conservatives), we expect government to do the things that we (individuals) cannot do for ourselves. I don’t expect a “Facebook army” to acquire guns or tanks or planes, and thus replace the government’s army and air force; and I don’t expect the “Facebook army” to start building the next generation of roads and bridges and tunnels.

But they might take on some of the responsibilities for repairing the roads and bridges and tunnels. Well, maybe even that is too much, since they’re unlikely to have the heavy equipment. But to the extent that any of this (even national defense) depends upon effective communication and collaboration — that much can be done by a Facebook army. What it means is that a lot of governmental organizations — bureaucratic committees and agencies and authorities — might find that their services were no longer needed.

Is this likely to happen in the next 5-10 years? Obviously, not completely … and maybe not at all. But it could happen little by little, without make a lot of noise, and thus without creating a lot of resistance. Want an example? Take a look at Clever Commute, and subscribe to the Clever Commute blog — I think it’s an exemplar of things to come.

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions and changes I’ve made to this version:

1. I made a number of minor cosmetic changes to clean up various items on the 32-page mind-map, in order to make it easier to read and understand.
2. On the “Cultural Issues” page of the mind-map, there’s a branch labeled “People Power,” with a sub-branch titled “Citizens,” and a sub-sub-branch titled “Products get used in unexpected ways.” To that sub-sub-branch, I added a link to a New York Times article explaining how Craigslist is now being used by prostitutes in various parts of the U.S.
3. On the “Miscellaneous books” branch of the “References-Books” page, I added an thumbnail icon, and a link to the appropriate Amazon page, for David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous.
4. Also on the “References-Books” page, I added a new branch titled “Books I haven’t read yet,” which lists 10 relatively new Web 2.0-related books … which I’m hoping to read, but probably not in the next month or two. I haven’t provided Amazon links, but if any of them look interesting, you should be able to find them easily.
5. On the main “References” page, I added a number of new items to the “conferences” branch — with links to an AJAX World conference, the Web 2.0 expo in Berlin, the Web 2.0 expo in Tokyo, a London-based conference called “Future of Web Applications,” a Paris-based conference called “Le Web 3,” an “Asia Web 2.0 Conference” in Singapore, a link to next year’s Wikimania 2008 conference (for which the host city has not yet been chosen), and a link to the upcoming Boston-based Enterprise 2.0 conference. This is in addition to several existing Web 2.0 conferences, all of which suggests that the topic has now become fairly “mainstream” in Europe, North America, and Asia.
6. On the main “Technology” page, there’s a branch labeled “Design Guidelines, best practices,” with a sub-branch titled “Agile.” To that sub-branch, I’ve added a new sub-sub-branch with a link to a blog posting by Scott Rosenberg (author of Dreaming in Code, which I discussed in several blog postings earlier this year, starting with this January 15, 2007 entry), in which Rosenberg argues that most of the Web 2.0 products and services actually have a 5-year development cycle.
7. On the “Google” branch of the “Big Vendors” page of the mind-map, I’ve added a link to an article in the Economist titled “Who’s Afraid of Google?“
8. On the “Wikipedia” sub-branch of the “Wiki” page, I’ve added a new sub-sub-branch with a link to an article noting that the 2 millionth article was added to the English-language version of Wikipedia on September 12, 2007. By contrast, Encyclopedia Britannica has approximately 100,000 articles.
9. Also on the Wikipedia sub-branch, I’ve added a new sub-sub-branch with a link to an August 19, 2007 New York Times article about “Wikiscaner” entitled “Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits.”
10. On the “Business Issues” page, there’s a branch titled “Government,” to which I added a new sub-branch, with a link to a September 2, 2007 New York Times article entitled “Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence” about the creation of something called “A-Space,” which is roughly analogous to MySpace for the various intelligence agencies of the U.S. government.
11. Also on the “Government” branch, I’ve added a new sub-branch with a link to a poll currently being conducted by Federal Computing Weekly, entitled “Is the government ready for Web 2.0?“
12. Also on the “Government” branch, I’ve added a new sub-branch to an article entitled “IBM on governmental blogging.”
13. On the “Introduction-Overhyping” page, I’ve added a new branch, with a link to the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator — which helps you come up with catchy phrases, like “integrate user-centred blogospheres” for your new Web 2.0-based product or service. And it’s free! Think of the millions you would otherwise be spending for creative marketing geniuses to come up with the same phrases!
14. Along the same lines, I’ve added a link to the Web 2.0 Company Name Generator to the “Small startups, small vendors” branch of the “Products-Vendors” page. Now you’re really ready to launch your own Web 2.0 company, create a lot of attention, and then sell out to Google for gazillions of dollars. Heck, maybe I’ll do that — and stop spending my time updating this damn mind-map!
15. On the “Political Commentary” branch of the “Intro-Society” page, I’ve added a link to a new article entitled “2008: the Web 2.0 election?“
16. Also on the “Intro-Society” page, I’ve added a link to a May 7, 2007 C|Net News.com article entitled “American public: wired, but not Web 2.0? That’s normal, study says” — which notes that roughly 73% of American citizens have Internet access, but only 8% make active use of Web 2.0 products and services.
17. On the “Cultural Issues” page, there’s a branch titled “Generational Issues,” where I’ve added a new sub-branch that provides a link to an August 23, 2007 Wired article entitled “Rise of the Silver Surfers: The Over-50 Social Media Opportunity.”
18. On the “Trends-Social/Cultural” page, I’ve added a new branch, with a link to an August 18, 2007 blog posting on the O’Reilly Radar site titled “Revenge by Gadget.” I think I’ll get me one of those gadgets.
19. On the “IBM” branch of the “Big Vendors” page, I’ve added a new sub-branch with a link to an August 23, 2007 article describing IBM’s acquisition of Web conferencing service provider WebDialogs.
20. On the “Reactions and trends in large companies” page, I’ve added a new branch with a link to a blog posting called “Knowledge Worker 2.0.”
21. On the “Yahoo” branch of the “Big Vendors” page, I’ve added a new sub-branch with a link to a September 17, 2007 Infoworld article describing Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Zimbra.

I could probably have added another hundred links, branches, sub-branches, and assorted details in addition to all of this, but I’ve run out of time. Hopefully this will keep you occupied for a while, and I’ll create yet another update in the coming weeks. I’ll be giving a two-day seminar on Web 2.0 technologies in Rome on October 29-30 (for more details, click here), so it’s almost certain that I’ll have at least a couple of additional updates between now and then.

Happy mind-mapping!

During and after my presentation, I was peppered with a number of interesting questions — questions that reflect, at least to some extent, the kind of reaction that professional software developers have about Web 2.0. I’m one of those guys who has a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time (which explains why I stopped chewing gum a long time ago), so it’s no surprise that I had trouble responding to the questions, and writing them down for subsequent review. Indeed, it was a couple hours later that I wrote down a dozen of the questions that I remembered; there may have been several others that I’ve completely forgotten. For what it’s worth, here are the questions and comments that I remember:

1. What about security? My immediate response to this question was, “I haven’t thought about it very much.” Having now had an hour or two to ponder the question, my reaction is: Web 2.0 is more about “reputation” and “trust” than firewalls, passwords, identity theft, and the various other aspects of “conventional” computer security. We can still insist that the people who create Web 2.0 content have user-id’s and passwords; we can still insist that they not access or tamper with confidential data; etc. But it’s a little more difficult to authenticate the source of information when we allow virtually anyone to publish material on the Web; after all, how do you know who really wrote this blog posting (assuming that you care?). And how do you know whether you should trust the information contained within this blog posting?
2. Why are agile development processes important for Web 2.0 projects? Ummm … well, does it really make sense to imagine a waterfall development process for a Web 2.0 project? Or, for that matter, does it make much sense to imagine a waterfall development process for any project these days? One of the common themes of Web 2.0 products and services is that they are in “permanent beta,” which obviously implies constant iteration, refinement, and improvement. Whether you accomplish that with extreme programming (XP), Scrum, or any of the other variants of agile development, the point remains that you need to have an iterative approach.
3. What’s the next wave of collaboration tools that we should expect for Web 2.0, and are any of them likely to be open-source initiatives, so we can acquire them without spending a fortune? The person who raised this question commented that wikis are a fairly rudimentary tool, and that they don’t really facilitate a “rich” form of collaboration for innovation and invention. I don’t specialize in the area of collaboration tools per se, so I didn’t have a good answer for this question. I’ll ponder it some more and see if I can think of something intelligent to say.
4. If we make it easier for an ever-larger community of non-technical people to create “content” on the Web, won’t that create a need for an ever-larger community of specialists to fix problems, provide support, and answer questions? The person who raised this question used spreadsheets as an analogy: the introduction of Visicalc 25 years ago made it possible for non-technical people to accomplish an enormous amount of “number-crunching” that previously would have required a professional programmer to code something in FORTRAN or COBOL; but while this was a good thing, it also created the need for a new cadre of support people who could explain the nuances of Visicalc (and then Lotus 1-2-3, and then Excel) to these non-programming problem-solvers, as well as tracking down bugs and problems, etc. My response was that — at least in my opinion — the spreadsheet-specialists did not require the same degree of technical expertise as the professional programmers who hand-coded programs to add rows and columns of numbers. Arguably, you needed a degree in Computer Science to be a really good COBOL or FORTRAN programmer; but you didn’t need anywhere near that much training or expertise to be able to help an accountant with his problems using Visicalc or Excel. I think the same is true for Web 2.0; we don’t even have to teach HTML to end-users any more.
5. Are there any interesting Web 2.0 companies in New York? Ummm … yes, there are. I got a list of interesting, local Web 2.0 companies from Joel Spolsky, which I’ll blog about at some later time. And someone in tonight’s audience mentioned a local technical association – the name of which I’ve forgotten, but know how to track down – where these folks meet. More information about this in the coming days… It’s called NY Tech meetup, and it meets on the first Tuesday of each month; the next meeting is October 3rd.
6. Did you know that YouTube now gets 138 million downloads a day? Isn’t it likely that YouTube (and, by extension, other popular Web 2.0 sites like MySpace) will implode because of bandwidth overload, or other technical problems? Wow! Last time I looked, YouTube was bragging about a mere 100 million downloads a day; if it continues growing at this rate, it will consume 100% of all Internet bandwidth by July 13, 2007. Just kidding — I don’t know if it will continue growing at this rate, and I don’t know who’s paying for all that bandwidth, and I don’t know if YouTube is making a profit. I suppose it’s a valid concern; but on the other hand, if they changed their business model to a subscription-based approach, where registered users had to pay a few dollars to watch their favorite video clips, the demand would drop fairly dramatically.
7. Have you seen the hilarious YouTube mashup of Al Gore’s Penguin Army, as a spoof on his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary? Ummm … no, I haven’t. But I’ll track it down.
8. You mentioned that you sometimes work as an expert witness, on lawsuits associated with failed software development projects. Have you seen any lawsuits associated with failed Web 2.0 projects? Nope, not yet. I haven’t even heard or, or read about, any significant Web 2.0 failures yet; and given the ponderous pace of the U.S. legal system, it will be 2-3 years after such failures before any of this ends up in court.
9. What about lawsuits involving failures of the semantic web, because the inference engines used to identify patterns, or make decisions about potential terrorists or credit risks turned out to be flawed? Wow. No, I haven’t heard of such things — but as someone in the audience remarked, the same kind of thing could be said about flawed data mining, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Web 2.0.
10. Does Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace indicate that he’s an “early adopter” of Web 2.0 technologies? This question was aimed at some comments I had made about the “technology adoption cycle” described in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm; I suggested that, in general, Web 2.0 technologies and practices are well past the initial “innovator” (lunatic fringe) stage, and are about to move past the second, “early adopter” stage, into the third “early mainstream” stage. So, yes, from that perspective, Rupert Murdoch — and his News Corp. — does appear to be an “early adopter” of Web 2.0 technologies. But there are a number of far more important examples for those of us in the computer field: Google, Yahoo, eBay, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and the other major vendors.

If you attended the SPIN meeting this evening, and recall any additional questions being asked, please post them as a comment, or send me an email. I’ll add them to the list, along with whatever answer I provided at the time, and/or whatever answer has occurred to me in the meantime.

Yochai Benkler has achieved a great deal of well-deserved attention in recent months, with the publication of his book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms. I first heard about the book a few months ago, when Harvard Business School professor Stephen Bradley lauded it during a keynote presentation at the Cutter Summit conference (see my blog posting on Bradley’s presentation). And during his keynote presentation at this conference, Lawrence Lessig said the book was certainly the most important publication of the year, if not of the past decade.

And with that background, Benkler began his talk by saying that he wanted to present a condensed version of his book — which, by the way, you can download free in PDF format, by visiting the appropriate Wikipedia page here. It’s churlish of me to mention this, but I couldn’t help but feel some disappointment that the PDF version has no hyperlinks to anything else. It was, of course, tremendously generous of Benkler to provide his book, gratis, to the public; but on the other hand, one of the enormous technological benefits of PDF versus dead-tree publication is the ability to embed and preserve hyperlinks — a simple act that would, among other things, greatly increase the likelihood that the book will remain vibrantly alive for many more years into the future.

In any case, Benkler says that his book, and his Wikimania talk, make two claims: first, that Wikipedia (the poster child, of course, for the entire Wikimania conference) is a salient example of a broader phenomenon: the economic transformation that comes from networked computers as a core information-added component to our economy. His second claim is that when a “production system” like Wikipedia is injected into democratic societies, you can see improvements in democracy, social justice, and other social values.

To illustrate this, Benkler provided some statistics from history: in New York City during the period of 1830-1850, he said, the cost of starting a newspaper increased from $10,000 to $2.5 million (I’m pretty sure this was expressed in terms of today’s dollars, but I’m not absolutely certain). People of moderate means might be able to come up with a $10,000 investment, but for $2.5 million, you needed a business model. And, says Benkler, that need for a formal business model was an early indicator of a central change that took place over the next century as subsequent technologies were introduced (e.g., the telegraph, the telephone, railroads, automobiles, air travel). It created a stark bifurcation between producers and consumers; that is, ordinary consumers could not realistically imagine themselves to be producers as well, in contrast to the way things had operated in previous centuries. As a result, most technology-based businesses became “market-based” (by which I assume he means that they were financed and controlled by the vagaries of the stock market), or government-owned (as in the case of nationalized railroads, telecommunication systems, etc.). And this characterized the basic structure of “information production” for a period of 150 years, from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, and among other things, it created a passive audience of consumers.

Benkler then segued to a snapshot of today’s environment, using SETI@home as his example: in mid-2004, SETI@home doubled the number of teraflops of computing power available for a computational project, based on the collective grid computing power of some 4.5 million users. This, he says, provided twice the computational power of expensive supercomputers that previously could only be afforded by massive companies or government, e.g., IBM’s Blue Gene computer, the NEC Earth Simulator, etc. So this is the networked information economy — a radically decentralized capitalization of computation, storage, and communications capacity. And it has created a world in which approximately one billion people can connect to one another, and take advantage of this massive computer resource.

Aside from the immediate, direct economic consequences of such a transformation, Benkler says that it has created a new, somewhat more subtle situation: the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies are now widely distributed in the population (as opposed to being centralized within big companies or government agencies); they’re non-fungible (click on the link for a definition of “fungible“), individual, and unique. And for the first time, behaviors that were once on the periphery of production — like social motivations, cooperation, friendship, and decency — have moved to the very core of economic life in the most technically and economically advanced societies.

This has led to what Benkler calls commons-based production — which he defines as production without exclusion, from inputs, from outputs, idividual or collective, commecial or noncommercial. A subset of commons-based production is “peer production” — which he defines as large-scale cooperation among human contributors without price signals or managerial commands. This involves the sharing of material resources, e.g., distributed computing (SETI@home), wireless mesh networks, distributed storage, and mixtures (like Skype).

As an example of peer production, Benkler showed a chart of open source software, specifically mission-critical Web servers. The Apache server product has grown from 0 to 70% market share since 1995, while Microsoft’s proprietary server product has dropped to 20%. But, he says, software is a special case of distributed knowledge production, of which Wikipedia is the central icon. And Wikipedia is not the only form of peer production. Another example is slashdot, flickr, MySpace, AMV’s web site, and deli.cio.us .

Commons-based peer production is based on a radically decentralized authority and the practical capability to act, on an individual basis. It uses an individual’s self-selection to tap diverse motivations, particularly intrinsic and social-relational motivations, and it allows diverse insights, capability, and availability. And commons-based peer production involves diverse cooperation platforms, which consists of task construction, self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline, and fairness. Benkler argues that this commons-based social production is a real thing, not just a fad; and because of that, social production is a threat to, and is threatened by, incumbent business models.

Turning from business, Benkler proceeded to talk about politics. Our experience with democracy, he says, is purely with mass-mediated materials; by “democracy,” I think he was referring to the modern, Western form of democracy that began to emerge in the late 18th century, and by “mass-mediated materials,” I think he was referring to newspapers, pamphlets and other materials made possible by the printing press. In any case, our autonomy as citizens is increasing today, because we are moving from (passive) consumers of information to users (and creators) of information.

Benkler gave a then-versus-now example by comparing the manner in which the “Pentagon Papers” expose was orchestrated primarily by the New York Times and the Washington Post, versus the dispute over the alleged problems with voting machines made by Diebold during the 2000 and 2004 elections. The Diebold dispute involved a complex battle, summarized in this Wikipedia article, between individuals, universities, students, and Diebold lawyers who were trying to shut it down. Ultimately, some California State Commission decertified the voting machines. Benkler illustrated all of this with a series of cascading Powerpoint slides (also shown on pages 233 and 234 of his book) that illustrated a much deeper, richer web of grass-roots interactions than the classic Pentagon Papers showdown between the Supreme Court, the U.S. government, and (arguably) the two most powerful newspapers in the country.

Another, far broader, example of this kind of grass-roots participative political action is Congresspedia, which describes itself as “the ‘citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress’ that anyone—including you—can edit.”. And while Benkler argues that “not everyone is a pamphleteer,” he does believe that we are witnessing the re-emergence of a new form of folk culture, based more on active participation than passive consumption. And he believes that in today’s networked world, there’s also more transparency, with critical evaluation moving to community resources like Wikipedia. He illustrated this showing the different versions of the “Barbie” (as in “Barbie doll“) entry in Britannica, versus Wikipedia and a few other sources that I didn’t have time to write down.

Wrapping up, Benkler says that today’s technological threshold conditions enable greater individual human agency, and that we are beginning to practice new ways of being free and equal human beings. But all of this is subject to a growing battle between entrenched forces and new paradigm, a battle that h e believes will continue for another 30-50 years.

As noted earlier, Benkler says that his talk was intended to be a condensed version of the themes and arguments in his book — which, I should point out, consists of 515 pages of dense text, and only a few diagrams and illustrations. I’m still wading through the book, but it does appear that his talk was a pretty cogent summary of what he’s written. And I’ve done my best to summarize his summary, but if you really want to understand the details of Benkler’s important message about this new networked world, you should definitely read The Wealth of Networks.

Fortunately, all is not lost, for there’s an audio (MP3) and video (QuickTime) version of his presentation; this is, after all, the Wikimania conference that strives to provide all forms of human knowledge to society in as free and unfettered a fashion as possible. But the downside is that I’m not able to provide the “value-added” that I would normally want to provide on a blog like this — i.e., summarizing, abstracting, and synthesizing his presentation so you could be freed from the time-consuming burden of having to listen to the presentation yourself. I will try to distill a few salient points and pearls of wisdom for you to browse through before you click onto some other part of the Internet. But if you really want to understand the details of Lessig’s thesis on the “ethics of the free culture movement” — the title of his presentation — you’ll have to listen to it, or watch it, for yourself. Sorry about that, but c’est la vie.

If it’s any consolation, you’ll find that Lessig is an excellent speaker; in the past, I’ve spared a number of blog/website readers the onerous task of listening to mind-numbingly boring presentations by people who actually had something important to say, but who simply didn’t know how to present their message without putting their audience sound asleep. You don’t have to worry about that with Lessig: he’s a delight to listen to, fun to watch (it’s not vaudeville or a French can-can dance, but hey, this is computer stuff; whaddya want, after all?). He started off his presentation by wryly observing that Wikimania 2006 was similar to Woodstock (which took place, I might point out, when he was 8 years old); it was raining outside, as it was for at least part of Woodstock, and Lessig theorized that several babies had already been made during the conference. (If so, I certainly didn’t see any evidence of it!)

Well, okay, so what was the talk all about? If I had to boil it down to one thing, it was Lessig’s argument that the 19th and 20th century — i.e., the height of the Industrial Age, and the first 50 years of the Information Age — were an aberration, and that the 21st century has begun shifting things back to the way they were before the Industrial Age (toward the end of his talk, he noted that author and former TV news anchorman Tom Brokaw had written an homage to the our parents’ World War II generation, referring to them as The Greatest Generation, but that we shouldn’t forget that they did their heroic deeds during what will eventually be remembered as the weirdest century). The Industrial Age was not an aberration in terms of incomes, or prosperity, obviously, but in terms of something that Lessig considers much more imporant: a “read-only” (RO) society, versus a “read-write” (RW) society. But his warning to the audience was that the Wiki-style promise of a RW society is threatened, and under attack by the big-media, big-corporate copyright-oriented interests of the old RO culture. His concern is that, unless we recognize the nature of the battle and mount a vigorous defense, we may lose this battle, and find ourselves to the whims of the corporate publishers and media companies for many years to come.

I haven’t thought about this very much, and I haven’t tried to independently confirm what Lessig said in his talk today, but it makes sense: before the Industrial Revolution, much of what we consider “knowledge” could only be captured and preserved, transmitted and passed on to future generations by a collaborative, verbal mechanism: as such, it was a read-write (RW) mechanism, in the sense that generation N+1 could replicate (with some inevitable loss of information content) what they heard from their generation-N elders, but also improvise, enhance, and improve that information for the benefit of their generation N+2 children. But in such a culture, the notion of “copyrights” and “intellectual property” basically didn’t exist.

All of this changed, Lessig argued, with the 19th-20th century technologies that allowed and emphasized the importance of intellectual creations (e.g., the design of a textile factory), the recording and documentation of such intellectual creations, and the legal protections associated with such creations — e.g., patents and copyrights. But what I found interesting about Lessig’s presentation was his argument that it wasn’t just an evolution in the business community, but also an evolution in politics: in the U.S., for example, he argues that the early versions of the Republican Party championed a RW “Free Labor” movement, but that it was replaced by a technology-based “RO” movement that favored the people in charge of factories. There’s a lot more to this, but I’m not sure my notes are accurate, and you’re better off listening to, and/or watching, the actual words of Lessig’s audio-visual presentation.

Well, all of that is a prelude to our current situation. Lessig argues that there are two very different cultures created by the Internet: a very efficient RO mechanism that facilitates the buying and selling of culture anytime and anywhere, if it was created elsewhere. The poster child for this kind of mechanism, he argues, is Apple’s iTunes, which provides convenient, inexpensive access to millions of songs, and now thousands of videos and movies — but only on an iPod, and only within the restrictions of Apple’s copy-protection constraints.

But at the same time, a rich, vibrant, and rapidly growing RW culture is being created with examples like Flickr, MySpace, and a whole genre of “anime music videos” (AMV), which I had never heard of before Lessig’s presentation; of course, there’s a Wikipedia article on the subject, so you can find out what all the fuss is about. There’s an AMV web site devoted to this form of culture, and there are also (as of the date/time when I’m writing this), some 14,785 AMV video clips on YouTube.

Lessig’s point is that universally available audio/video/graphic/Internet tools are democratizing creativity, and that today’s creativity is no longer predominately expressed in written form; “writing words is the Latin of our time,” Lessig says. The “vulgar (popular) language” of today is video and remixes. Some of it, I have to admit, is pretty hilarious; if you’re not easily offended by religious satire, take a look at “Jesus Christ: the Musical.” And Lessig noted that these creations are not limited to music, cartoons, or things created in the U.S.; here’s a political satire titled “Bush and Blair Love Song,” from a Swedish website.

All too often, this wildly popular RW culture involves copying — copying music, copying video and movie clips, copying code, copying photographs — and as a result, the RW culture is engaged in a war against the RO culture, whose business model is threatened by copying, and which threatens to shut it down. Lessig says that his first instinct, given his training and background as a lawyer, was to “litigate” against the RO culture; but he changed his views after serving as lead counsel for the plaintiff in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case before the Supreme Court, and losing by a vote of 7-2. That case challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyrights to either 95 years, or the life of the author, plus 70 years — the practical result of which was that works published on or after 1923, which would have entered the public domain in 1998, retained their copyright.

After losing this case, Lessig says he shifted his battle to “private means,” which he continues today. He argues that there are two critical “private steps” we need, in order to preserve publicly-available materials and thus enable the RW culture. The first is for individuals — and especially those who create artistic works of any kind — to practice a free culture — e.g., by using the Creative Commons (CC) licensing mechanism rather than traditional copyrights. And second, we need to enable free culture: we need to make it possible in schools, universities, and public places everywhere. This, he says, is what Wikipedia is all about; and it’s what open-source products like Linux are all about.

Lessig spent the remainder of his talk explaining the mechanisms of the CC, and arguing that interoperability and useable platforms (e.g., hardware, Web browsers, operating systems, API’s, etc.) are crucial for enabling a a vibrant RW culture of freely distributable intellectual content.

My notes don’t reflect how he made the segue to his final comments, but he quoted one of the important Internet pioneers, David D. Clark, who said, ” We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful and thought-provoking presentation. I urge you to share the enjoyment by watching the QuickTime video clip; you’ll find it well worth your while.

I expected a fairly calm, low-key discussion among amiable academics about the details of organizing and creating, uploading, and maintaining wikis of one kind or another; but I found instead that I was surrounded by roughly 400 passionate, intense provocateurs who see wikis not so much as a technological creation, but rather an intense effort to create, build, maintain, and protect what Larry Lessig (and others) have referred to as a “free culture.” Given the somewhat revolutionary atmosphere of the conference, I was slightly amused to see that traditional companies like IBM and Coca-Cola were among the sponsors, along with traditional Internet vendors like Amazon. One of the main sponsors was a company called answers.com, which bills itself as the world’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia.

There are academics here, to be sure, and there are also graduate students from several different disciplines. But there also seem to be some hackers, some corporate representatives, some social/political activists trying to create wiki repositories to help people in developing nations around the world, and also a smattering of “old-timers” like me who are delighted to see the techy-geeky stuff we’ve worked on for 40 years actually being put to some good use. The energy level in all of the presentations, panel sessions, coffee breaks, and breakout sessions was both informal and intense: several of the speakers had a technique of rapid-fire, run-on sentences that made it difficult to take notes, or parse the meaning of their long, complex thoughts.

In addition to the traditional forms of presentation — e.g., keynote presentations, one-person lectures, and panel sessions — Wikimania also had a series of “lightning talks” during the final hour of the afternoon; these were opportunities for anyone attending the conference to give an impromptu 5-minute talk on any subject he or she wanted to share; no slides or formal handouts, just stand up and talk. This seems to be an increasingly popular approach in recent conferences I’ve attended, along with “unconferences” and “group breakouts” where a handful of 20-30 conference attendees will grab some corner of the conference meeting space, and sit down on the floor to have an extemporaneous discussion about some topic of interest

It was in one of these afternoon lightning talks that I heard (from someone whose name I didn’t catch; will try to find out tomorrow) about what was described as the “Chinese firewall” that has been invoked twice to block Wikipedia in China. I must admit I had never heard of the event, though a moment’s thought makes it obvious why such a thing might happen: the notion of freely-created, freely-edited intellectual content about anything must be an anathema to societies like China, not to mention Iran (where foreign words have recently been banned), North Korea, etc.

But as this afternoon’s lightning speaker observed, the Chinese government isn’t really concerned about Wikipedia itself; if they were, he said, they would be arresting people. What they’re more concerned about is suppressing the rise and viral spread of social networks that could potentially become politically active, like the “orange revolution” that took place in the Ukraine in 2004-2005. One Chinese person who happens to read a provocative or subversive item on the Internet and then decides to protest isn’t of much concern; after all, how much can any one person do in any country (as many individual Americans opposed to the war in Iraq are probably muttering to themselves each day)? But one person who joins together with another, and another, and ultimately 250,000 others via the Internet — that could be a problem, even in a country of 1.3 billion people, like China.

So, according to this afternoon’s speaker, the Chinese government wants to make sure that its citizens know that their surfing activities are being monitored, and that the content they see is indeed being censored; after all, people’s behavior tends to change when they know they’re being watched. Blocking Wikipedia — which happened once in June 2004, a second time in September 2004, and a third time in October 2005 — gets that point across. Significantly, the third block has not been lifted as of August 4, 2006.

In addition to this lightning talk on the status of Wikipedia in China, I also heard another blitzkrieg presentation about Esperanto Wiki, which turns out to be the 15th largest Wikipedia, with some 55,000 entries. Who knew? Well, if I ever get motivated to learn Esperanto, I now know there’s a good source of information in that language — along with 100 other languages. I also listened to a Venezuelan university student describe his group’s effort to create a wiki in a remote village within the country, in order to capture and organize their communal knowledge. Among the things entered into the wiki was a recipe for concocting a local alcoholic drink, and the villagers were apparently stunned by the empowering realization that once having entered the details into their wiki, it was immediately visible to everyone on the planet. Another lightning speaker described the similar concept of a “wikivillage,” which attempts to capture and organize sustainable resources for tribes, villages, and small communities throughout developing nations in South America, Africa, and Central Asia.

One of the things that has intrigued me about this conference is the number of bloggers who are doing their best to compose real-time summaries and abstracts of various presentations, which get posted within seconds after a talk has ended. I’ve seen three or four “instant blog” postings of Jimmy Wales’ opening keynote, and Associated Press published its own summary in the “top news” section of its website within an hour after Wales had concluded. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AP link disappears within a day or two, but the other blog postings will presumably survive. Meanwhile, I typed two or three pages of cryptic notes and gibberish to myself, which I’ll try to unscramble later this evening in order to compose a coherent summary of the keynote presentations of both Jimmy Wales and Larry Lessig.

As you can tell from the title, this is a conference that brings together people who are interested in the intersection of the law, and all manner of computer-related technologies. The speakers and attendees are, for the most part, lawyers; but they’re highly computer-literate, so much so that it’s sometimes scary. In my work as an expert witness in the past few years, I’ve had a number of occasions to work with (or against) men and women who have Master’s degrees in computer science from such universities as Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, and Stanford, plus a law degree from equally prestigious institutions. Whatever your opinion of lawyers might be, you’d better erase the part about their using quill pens and foolscap for writing their briefs.

The “tracks” of this conference will give you a pretty good idea of what the techno-savvy lawyers are focusing on these days:

• Open Source Software: the newest opportunities and issues
• Internet Security 2006
• Outsourcing: Doing it Right Every Time
• Hot Copyri8ght Issues in the Digital World
• Changing Face of Telecommunication
• Privacy and Practical Tips for the International Business
• Mergers and Acquisitions in the IT WOrld
• Current Issues in Online Marketing
• Combatting Computer Crime
• Contentious Issues in World Regulation of the Internet
• Software Litigation

There are also a couple of keynote presentations: this morning’s topic is “The Future of Internet Securities IPOs: A Business and Legal Disruption on Wall Street,” by William Hambrect, the CEO of VC firm W.R. Hambrecht & Co.

I’ll blog more about the individual sessions over the next couple days. In the meantime, check out the ITechlaw association itself. If your company is involved in, or affected by, high-tech patents, intellectual property issues, computer crime, litigation resulting from failures of large, complex IT projects, someone from your organization should be here.