Berkman Buzz: Week of October 5, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Dan Gillmor shares his first impressions of the FTC's blogger disclosure guidelines.
* StopBadware comments on the "Informed P2P User Act."
* Wendy Seltzer toasts some recent warming effects.
* ProjectVRM invites you to get personal about data on Tuesday morning.
* Andrew McAfee <3s email?
* CMLP unwinds the difference between analog and digital mix "tapes."
* David Weinberger live-blogs the Law Lab luncheon.
* Ethan Zuckerman live-blogs Don Tapscott's talk at BIF-5.
* Weekly Global Voices: "ICTs and the spread of indigenous knowledge"
* NEW! A year ago in the Buzz: "Insights on Cyberbullying: an interview with a digital native"

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The full buzz.

"The Federal Trade Commission noticed a while back that marketers of brands, products and ideas have used new media in some incredibly dishonest ways. These include paying people or giving them freebies in return for positive mentions and not requiring (or even encouraging) them to disclose that they’re being compensated. So with laudable goals, the commission issued a document aimed at better disclosure — with penalties of up to $11,000 in fines for violations. Basically, the FTC is saying that if you have a 'material connection' to a product or service you’re praising, you are an endorser who must disclose that connection. Sounds good, doesn’t it. But when you read the FTC’s ruling, published today, you get the sense of a government-gone-wild travesty. Why?"
From Dan Gillmor's blog post A Dangerous Federal Intervention in Social Media

"As reported by Ars Technica and others, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-WA) and the rest of the House Energy & Commerce Committee are pushing a bill that requires peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications to provide informed consent before installation and before making files available for sharing. The bill labels a failure to provide the required consent as an unfair trade practice, which means the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can use its authority to punish the offending software distributor. The motivation for the bill seems to be a combination of two concerns: first, that important confidential files may be inadvertently shared by government or corporate employees; and second, that individuals accused of illegal file sharing may use 'I didn’t know I was sharing those files' as a defense."
From Maxim Weinstein's blog post for StopBadware, Proposed bill pushes informed consent for P2P sharing

"For several years, the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has cataloging the effects of legal threats on online expression and helping people to understand their rights. Amid all the chilling we continue to see, it’s welcome to see rays of sunshine when bloggers stand up to threats, helping to stop the cycle of threat-and-takedown. The BoingBoing team did this the other day when they got a legal threat from Ralph Lauren’s lawyers over an advertisement they mocked on the BoingBoing blog for featuring a stick-thin model. The lawyers claimed copyright infringement, saying 'PRL owns all right, title, and interest in the original images that appear in the Advertisements.' Other hosts pull content 'expeditiously' when they receive these notices (as Google did when notified of the post on Photoshop Disasters), and most bloggers and posters don’t counter-notify, even though Chilling Effects offers a handy counter-notification form."
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post Chilling Effects and Warming Effects

"CRM — Customer Relationship Management — is a huge business. According to this article, Forrester expected the CRM software market to hit $74 billion in 2007. This more modest Gartner report says the worldwide CRM market totalled $9.15 billion in 2008, growing at a 12.5% rate over 2007. CRM is pure B2B: business to business. You’re not involved, except as a customer of CRM’s customers. It’s your relationship with a company that’s being managed—by the company. Not by you. Last month Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com reached out from the CRM world to interview me on the subject of VRM. The result is Doc Searls: Customers will use ID data to force CRM change. The angle was data. If VRM gives customers more control over their data and how it is used, how does that help CRM? Wouldn’t customers want to share less of their data rather than more? In fact data will be front and center as a topic at — VRooM Boston 2009 on Monday and Tuesday of next week at Harvard (please come, it’s free). While most of the workshop will be organized on the open space model (participants choose the topics and break off into groups to move those topics forward), we decided to have one panel, titled Getting Personal With Data: How Users Get Control and What They Do With It. I invite local CRM folks (and everybody interested) to come and participate."
From Doc Searls' blog post for ProjectVRM, How VRM Helps CRM

"The IT manager estimated that she and her team had rolled out at least ten different DMRs [digital meeting rooms] in recent years. And she was clear that all of them had failed. None were widely or deeply used, and none had made any serious dent in the company’s steady torrent of email. I don’t think her experience is atypical, and I don’t think it should be ignored. In fact, I think it’s time for Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts to give up their frontal assault on email – their war on words (it’s your father’s technology, it’s a dinosaur, it’s where knowledge goes to die) and their attempts to build and/or deploy replacement technologies."
From Andrew McAfee's blog post, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Email

"Digital technologies have allowed people to share music in unprecedented ways, and earlier this week recording artists, music industry leaders, and policymakers gathered at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for the Future of Music Policy Summit sponsored by the Future of Music Coalition to talk about their impact on the music community. Also on the agenda were panels on how recording artists can use digital technology and social media to share and promote their work. Unfortunately, some of our intuitions of what kinds of sharing are okay don't always square with the law of copyright. The result has been confusion about the boundaries for legal conduct. For instance, we recently received this inquiry from a reader: 'Can I post a mix tape on my blog to highlight a new recording artist? Can I allow visitors to download my mix tape?'"
From Helen Fu's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, Think Twice Before You Dust Off Those Mix Tapes

"Urs Gasser introduces them by giving some background on the Law Lab. It arose out of a 2008 workshop on innovation. How could we think in innovative ways about the law? How does law work in a digitally networked environment? How does governance play? The Law Lab is a rich environment, open for collaboration, that does research, explores ideas. John [Clippinger] says that the mission is about multidisciplinary and collaborative research: evolutionary, neurological, and computational sciences, not to mention psych, sociology, law and economics. It aims at doing experimental research in the wild. It will create open technology 'for governance and mechanism design — private production of norms, rules, common law and statutes.'"
From David Weinberger's blog post, [berkman] The Law Lab

"Don Tapscott tells us that the children of the baby boom are the first to be bathed in bits. Their time online hasn’t taken away from doing their homework or learning the piano – it’s taken time away from television. 'There is no more powerful force to change society than a generation of digital natives.' Digital Natives just elected their first president – this isn’t Don’s point of view – Obama says this is true as well. He tells us that he watched his kids in the early 1990s and marvelled at their effortlessness with new technology. He initially thought that his kids were prodigies, and then discovered that all their friends were equally fluent. They were effortless because they’d grown up digital."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, Don Tapscott and learning from our kids

"At first glance, the relationship between indigenous knowledge and the Internet seems fraught. Indigenous knowledge provides a distinct set of beliefs, practices and representations avidly tied to place; the internet lauds itself for erasing boundaries and borders. On one hand, the traditions encapsulated in indigenous knowledge are culturally unique, using local understanding to solve local problems. This makes it an important component in the fields of ecology, education, agriculture and health security. On the other hand, the internet is lauded for spreading information to help people, but it is also a bazaar, tilted towards large corporations and the economies of scale: Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, PayPal. Indigenous knowledge has certain spiritual and ceremonial components; the internet is largely agnostic, and makes a good deal of money peddling pornography. For all their perceived differences, the indigenous knowledge and global knowledge systems have become much closer in the past decade. Indigenous knowledge practitioners have begun leveraging different media to exchange ideas and publicize traditional learning to the larger world."
From John Liebhardt's blog post for Global Voices, ICTs and the spread of indigenous knowledge

"In this week’s audio podcast, our Reporters-in-the-Field asked 19 year old UMASS student and New Jersey native, Lisa Epstein, to share her thoughts on the world of cyberbullying. In this interview, Epstein provides insight on how the anonymity of cyberbullies makes one question who her real friends are, and how the Internet acts as a 'big shield' in such situations."
From the Digital Natives' blog post Insights on Cyberbullying: an interview with a digital native [originally included in the Berkman Buzz in October 2008]