Berkman Buzz: Week of October 12, 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.

* Harry Lewis digs the DIY book scanner.
* Future of the Internet watches it all go poof.
* David Weinberger feels the pain for Internet triumphalism is productive.
* Ethan Zuckerman says it's time for you to pick up the slack.
* Doc Searls clocks us deep.
* CMLP on the Noonan v. Staples jury verdict.
* Stuart Shieber addresses "perhaps the starkest criticism" of open access journals.
* Weekly Global Voices: "How the recession has affected motherhood"
* Micro-post of the week: Urs Gasser shares a public notice from the FCC.

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The full buzz.

"I am just back from D is for Digitize, James Grimmelmann’s conference on the Google Books Settlement at the New York Law School, where he teaches. It was an excellent meeting, about which I will report more in a followup post. But there was one clear star in the day-and-a-half of panels, each with four or five speakers. The prize goes to Daniel Reetz of DIYBookScanner.org — that is, Do It Yourself Book Scanner. Reetz, a book freak and mechanical genius, figured out how to make a book scanner out of stuff you can find in dumpsters, or buy cheaply, including off-the-shelf, cheap digital camers. He has put the instructions online so we can all build our own. It’s amazing to see — Reetz demonstrated it, and then in just a few minutes folded it up and put it into a bag small enough to take on an airplane. It works fast — and it’s really well designed. The slowest part is turning the pages, which you do by hand."
From Harry Lewis' blog post Do it Yourself Book Scanning

"There are many reasons to worry about cloud computing. Data stored in the cloud can be difficult to extract for you, yet all too easy to demand by government. Applications running the cloud can mean new gatekeepers between you and code you might want to run. (And in discussing these issues, people don’t even agree on what the cloud means). Yet among Prof. Zittrain’s concerns on cloud computing is rarely the fundamental worry that a vendor will simply lose the data — one assumes that a major vendor can get that part right."
From Elisabeth Oppenheimer's blog post for Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet blog, A cloud evaporates

"Plenty is being written already trying to parse, understand, and come to terms with Larry Lessig’s article 'Against Transparency' in the New Republic. Ethan Zuckerman does his usual outstanding job in clarifying ideas sympathetically. Transparency advocate Carl Malamud responds to Lessig. I presented my own 'walkthrough' of the article. The New Republic has run Tim Wu’s response, which agrees with Lessig in important ways. The New Republic has also run four other responses, including an excellent response from Ellen Miller and Michael Klein, founders of the Sunlight Foundation, the leading advocate for transparency. (My response is included in that set of four.) Aaron Swartz prefigured Larry’s argument in a piece he posted in April: 'Transparency is bunk.' Plenty to chew on."
From David Weinberger's blog post Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism

"I had the realization the other day that the main way in which I procrastinate from the work I should be doing is by taking on other work that’s interesting, but not always necessary. So while I should be finishing a book proposal and authoring a couple of articles before succumbing to the challenges of new parenthood, I’m picking arguments with the transparency community and putting a new roof on sections of my house. In other words, I’m an idiot, just an idiot as described by Max Weber. So rather than spending the next three days writing blog posts about topics that have fascinated me, let me offer links and a thought or two, in the hopes that perhaps you’ll write something and I can read it, and I can write the pieces I’m supposed to write."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post What I'm not writing about

"Three conditions have been profoundly increased by technology during my brief (62.2 year) lifetime: connectivity, autonomy and abundance. Those have been provided respectively by the Net, personal computing, and data processing and storage. I can now connect with anybody or anything pretty much anywhere I go, as an autonomous actor rather than a captive dependent on some company’s silo or walled garden. I can also access, accumulate and put to use many kinds of information of relevance to myself and my world."
From Doc Searls' blog post It's too early

"In a closely watched case that challenged (at least in Massachusetts) our long held understanding that truth is an absolute defense to a defamation claim, the jury has returned a verdict for the defendant, finding that it acted without actual malice when it sent an email to its employees stating -- truthfully -- that one of its salesman had been terminated because he violated the company's travel and expense policies."
From David Ardia's blog post for the CMLP, Case That Upended Truth Defense in Libel Actions Ends With Jury Verdict for Defendant

"Open-access journal publishing has been criticized on a whole range of grounds as being unsustainable, unfair, or ineffective. Perhaps the starkest criticism is that open-access journals amount to a vanity publishing industry, and will exhibit a “race to the bottom” in which journals compete to lower editorial standards to capture the revenue for publishing articles. Is open-access journal publishing prone to the problems of a vanity press?"
From Stuart Shieber's blog post Is open-access journal publishing a vanity publishing industry?

"When the economies of world plummeted late last year, that 'motherhood' would be a victim of the spiraling trend might not have been foremost in the minds of most. However, recent reports have indicated that mothers have ended up being as much a casualty of the recession as the stock markets."
From Daniel Chandranayagam's blog post for Global Voices, How the recession has affected motherhood

"RT @FCC Berkman Center for Internet & Society released their Broadband Study. Help us decide how we use their findings: http://bit.ly/2q1DJZ [PDF]" [7:39 PM Oct 14th]
Urs Gasser echoes the FCC's invitation to comment on the Berkman Center's broadband study
The study, Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world (PDF)