Welcome Doc Searls, new Berkman Fellow

The Berkman Center announces the appointment of Doc Searls as Berkman Fellow. Doc is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, where he has covered the Internet, free software and open source movements for more than a decade. He is also (with fellow Berkman Fellow David Weinberger and others) a co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," and is one of the world's most widely-read bloggers.

J.D. Lasica, founder of OurMedia and author of Darknet, calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers of the blog movement." Tom Friedman, the author and New York Times columnist, calls Doc Searls "one of the most respected technology writers in America."
 
"Doc Searls has distinguished himself in many ways -- as a writer, editor, and leader of the citzen-generated media movement," says John Palfrey, the Berkman Center’s Executive Director.  "But what we particularly look forward to working with him on is his serious inquiry into the nature of attention in an increasingly fragmented media space and in the emerging digital identity metasystem.  Doc has done much of the most intriguing thinking and writing in this area.  We are eager to see how he builds upon this early body of work through his fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School."
 
As part of his fellowship Searls will visit the Berkman Center regularly, holding meetings and engaging students in his research efforts.
 
As a way of introducing Doc Searls to the Berkman community, we have a Q&A with him below, featuring questions about his work and his views of the Internet.

Question: Before writing "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and becoming Senior Editor for Linux Journal, you had careers in radio and advertising -- Hodskins Simone & Searls was a very successful agency in Silicon Valley. What inspired you to make the jump and proselytize the Internet?

Doc Searls: It wasn't really a jump. I've always been something of a technologist, and HS&S specialized in high technology -- which is why we moved the agency from North Carolina to Silicon Valley in the mid eighties.

My radio career probably began when I took up ham radio in junior high school. While I did work on the air in radio -- my nickname "Doc" is a fossil remnant of humorous persona called "Doctor Dave" -- I also loved working with transmitters, towers and antennas. For awhile I even made a living by doing transmitter site studies. My brain is still filled with a large volume of antique and increasingly useless knowledge about ground conductivities, skywave propagation, wave refraction, interference contours, f50-50 curves, directional arrays... In my mind I can visualize the directional patterns and coverage areas of a thousand different radio stations -- all obsoleted by the ubiquity of the Net...

At HS&S we not only handled a variety of communications-related clients, but were heavy users of comms technology as well. I remember when we had one workstation hooked up to one 1200bps modem, when that was fastest speed you could get. We all took turns with it. Our first client in California was Racal-Vadic, creator of the first full-duplex non-Bell modem.

As time went on we became heavy users of online services and BBSes as well. I had subscriptions to Compuserve, AOL, Delphi, Prodigy, The Well... And I saw from the beginning how absurdly disconnected they all were. As soon as I became aware of what the Net was, I knew it would be more than just another medium. I saw it becoming a whole new environment for business, one with rules that would be far more generous and fair and open than anything we could ever experience from a closed system. I knew the Net would become a whole new infrastructure for civilization. And that's exactly what's happening.

My interest in the Net was one reason I switched from advertising to PR at HS&S, and then operated The Searls Group as primarily a marketing organization. I believed markets themselves were changing -- from targets for messages to habitats for business. I saw the Net was a vast new ocean that lifted all boats -- not just the battleships and aircraft carriers.

Significantly, the Net vastly increased the powers available to the demand side as well as the supply side. Moreover, it allowed the demand side to *become* the supply side. Consumers could produce, and in far greater abundance and variety than traditional producers. These new producers could also invent, and adapt, and collaborate, and perform at levels and varieties that were utterly without precedent.

Meanwhile I watched all the venture money going to startups that copied the lame customer traps we'd had for generations in the off-line world. Nobody saw how the Net empowered customers at least as well as it empowered vendors.

Almost nobody, that is. Chris Locke and David Weinberger were two other marketing mavens who felt the same way. Cluetrain was born out of kvetching sessions among the three of us. Once we decided to put our complaints up on a website, we looked for a sympathetic hacker to collaborate with us. Rick Levine filled the bill, and Cluetrain was born.

Around that same time, Phil Hughes invited me to return to full-time journalism as an editor at Linux Journal, and I jumped at the opportunity. I had known Phil since 1990, and always enjoyed following his involvement with free software and Linux. I had actually started as a contributing editor in 1996, and that too contributed a number of insights that wound up in Cluetrain and later in my blog.

Looking back, I just realized that writing Cluetrain, going full-time with Linux Journal and starting my blog all happened in 1999. Together those turned out to be a perfect storm of interests and activities. Lucky for me, that storm has only gotten bigger in the years since.

By the way, Dave Winer was the one who got me to start blogging -- just as he did later for everybody at Berkman when he was a Fellow here. He considered it a regrettable error that we didn't include blogging among the subjects covered in The Cluetrain Manifesto. And he was right.

Another historical note. My weblog began as the Cluetrain Weblog, or Cluelog. David Weinberger and Chris Locke both decided that it was too weird to all be writing one blog. So that one became mine alone. David and Chris both started theirs soon afterward.


Question: A lot of people see you as a philosopher of the Internet. Why is that?

Doc Searls: I think it's because I'm much more interested in ideas and insights than in just stating facts and telling stories -- which are the pro forma contents of most mainstream news writing. Much of my writing is thinking out loud. And much of that thinking is provisional. It's not final. This makes it much different from the homiletic, pontifical (and, frankly arrogant) voices with which journalists tend to speak in columns and op-ed pieces. Even in SuitWatch, my monthly column in Linux Journal, I avoid writing in finalities.

As a writer I'm not motivated by the scoop or the score, but by sharing ideas that might prove constructive. More often than not those are ideas by others that I like to move along.

To me the best ideas grow like snowballs. Everybody adds something, and nobody gets all the credit.

It turns out that the Internet is an ideal place to roll snowballs. Or, for that matter, to push rocks up hills; because you can get more people to help.


Question: You write quite frequently about the difference between the live and static web. How do you define them, and what are the qualitative differences between them?

Doc Searls: I've long been a student of cognitive linguistics. George Lakoff is an intellectual hero of mine, as well as a mentor and a friend. I learned from George how we understand everything metaphorically. That is we use the concept, and the vocabulary, of one subject to understand and talk about another. For example, with think and talk about life in terms of travel. Birth is arrival. Choices are crossroads. Careers are paths. Death is departure. We think and talk about time in terms of money. That's what we're doing when we say we save, waste or spend time.

We understand and talk about the Web in terms of several different metaphorical concepts -- or what George now calls frames. When we talk about sites with locations and addresses, that we design or architect or build, we are borrowing the vocabulary of real estate and construction. And we are building relatively static things. When Google sends out its bots to index umpty billion sites, it assumes those sites are static enough not to change in the hours, days or weeks that pass between visits from the bots. Google also treats each site as static in time as well. With Google there is no time other than now -- or the moment when a site was last cached. On the other hand, when we talk about pages that we author and post and edit and publish and syndicate, we are borrowing the language of writing and publishing. We are also talking about activities by living human beings; not just static and finished constructions. Blogs also have a time dimension. They are organized chronologically.  IceRocket, Technorati and Google Blogsearch all index the Live Web, rather than the static one. That is, they wait for a notice, called a "ping", from an RSS "feed", and then go index the source. They note how long ago each post went up. In the case of Technorati, they also note how many others have linked to them over a period of time. In other words, they see this part of the Web as a living thing, authored (not "built") by living human beings.

It is interesting to me that Google chose to make Blogsearch separate from Google's regular static Web search engine. And to give readers two buttons to choose from: "Search the Web" and "Search Blogs". Why make that distinction if there is not a difference in kind between the two? I think there *is* a difference, and it will only get larger. Yet I don't think the two will split completely. The Live Web is a branch off the Static Web. Two branches, one tree.


Question: What are the questions and issues you will be working on here at the Berkman Center?

Doc Searls: I have always been interested in the power of individuals, and how much our industrial system has ignored and demeaned that power. What I like best about the Net is how well it supports the independence and originality of individuals, and the full range of unique contributions individuals can bring to relationships. The problem is, our institutions still lack the technologies, the protocols and the support frameworks required to engage individuals operating at full power. Instead organizations -- companies, government agencies, educational institions -- work very hard to limit what they know about individuals, and what they allow individuals to do inside a relationship. What we call "Customer Relationship Management," or CRM, is oxymoronic in all three of its nouns. It isn't about relating to customers. If it were, it wouldn't try to "manage" them. At least not the way CRM system have been doing since the beginning.

I realized recently that the problem isn't organizations being "bad" or "lame" (though many surely are); it's that we put the full burden on just one side of the relationship. Before the Net, companies were forced to relate to customers through "call centers", and to hold down the costs of those by automating as many relationship processes as possible.

We don't need to do that anymore. But we still haven't built the means for supporting real relationships between organizations and individuals in the networked world.

For the past several years I've been working hard at finding and supporting those means. I do that by covering the subject in Linux Journal, by speaking at Digital ID World, and by advising companies through my consulting practice.

In late 2004 I pushed together a variety of developers who were already moving in converging directions around what we called "user-centric" identity. I urged Kim Cameron, the chief Identity Architect at Microsoft, to start blogging. He did that, and also published his Seven Laws of Identity, which guided development for everybody in the new marketplace. On the last day of the year I convened nine guests for a Gillmor Gang podcast. The conversation went so well that we quickly began to call ourselves the Identity Gang. One of our first informal meetings was held at PC Forum in Scottsdale. Here Senior Berkman Fellow John Clippinger introduced himself to us, and volunteered Berkman as a clubhouse, starting in the form of a wiki and later as a mailing list as well. Since then the Identity Gang has grown to include hundreds of participants. Over the course of time I have become more involved with Berkman while Berkman has become more involved in the identity conversation.

Now, as a Berkman Fellow, I can continue to work on pushing the identity conversation forward, while also studying the subject of individual empowerment from several academic perspectives, including law, economics and sociology. I can also work with Berkman on organizing events, and get help from students and faculty as well as others at the Center.

I will also be working on collaborations between Berkman and the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at UCSB, where I am a Visiting Scholar. CITS studies transitions where culture and technology meet. My work so far there has been focused on the Live Web. I can see lots of ways I can help advance the missions of both organizations. I'm also still pretty new to both, so I'm approaching those opportunities with care as well as enthusiasm.


Question: What are last year's 'web highlights', the greatest successes of the web in the past year?

Doc Searls: First, although I have mixed feelings about Net Neutrality -- which I think suffered for being more of a political than a technical issue, and by becoming polarized along partisan lines (and with pro-Neutrality advocates on the minority side) -- I was highly encouraged by the geek activism involved. I remember vividly Larry Lessig's Free Culture speech at OSCON in 2002, when he took the audience to task for its lack of interest in political issues that were critical to the survival of their liberties. Net Neutrality changed that. Today Larry might make many of the same points to his geek constituency -- we still need to hear them -- but many more of us are involved in citizen-(fill in the blank). The number (and quality) of websites devoted to accountability by lawmakers seems to grow every day. I think this will change government, and governance, radically.

Second, I saw a sea change happen in the open source movement. In the past, open source development communities were often just as fiercely competitive as anything we see in commercial product marketplaces. BSD famously broke into at least three factions a long time ago, and we've seen the same thing happen more recently with Linux desktops and distributions. But I saw something new happening this past year, especially among user-centric identity developers. They all cooperated. They went out of their way to make sure their converging development paths stayed open toward each other. Another remarkable thing: major leadership came from Microsoft. I watched in amazement as Kim Cameron and his team at Microsoft worked tirelessly both inside the company and outside with different open source development teams, to make sure that a whole identity marketplace got built -- one where no one vendor would hold customers in silos or muscle other players to adopt that vendor's technologies. I saw the same kind of thing happening in other categories as well. I think one reason was that we reached a sufficiently abundant set of choices among open source building materials. Another was a growing realization that everybody was working at growing whole markets that were good for everybody, and not just building arenas where competing vendors and development communities tried to kill each like gladiators.

Third, I saw the center of gravity in technology spread outside North America, and help flatten the whole world. For years I've followed work by Berkman folks like Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, and it's nice to see it paying off.

Fourth, I saw the Web start to go mobile. Many more individuals are using the Web in a live way over cell phones and other mobile devices. While people have been able to keep up with news on mobile devices for some time, I think Dave Winer's River of News concept is going to break open a whole new collection of mobile uses for the Web. I'm also seeing, for the first time, developments on the Web that will break open the silos built by the cell phone carriers and equipment makers. I could be more specific, but I think I've already blabbed too much.


Question: If you didn't study the Internet, what would you spend your time doing?

Doc Searls: Enjoying more time with my family. Going to more cultural events. Making music. Playing basketball. Of course, I'm going to try to do more of that anyway.