Lyndon B. Johnson: Remarks Upon Signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967:

I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all the people, stake a claim based upon the combined resources of communications. I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education….

So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can rise.

Think of the lives that this would change:
–the student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university….
–the country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital;
–a scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York;
–a famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected. Eventually, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank.

And such a system could involve other nations, too–it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.

A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.

techno.blog(“Dion”): More Rails / Java Talk: an interesting roundup of recent discussions.

Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers’s Flashforward presentation is online.

Guy Watson has posted his Flashforward presentation online.

Wired News: Technorati: A New Public Utility

The number of posts on blogs tracked by Technorati increased 30 percent, from about 850,000 a day in July to 1.2 million on the day of the attacks. Nine of the 10 most popular search requests involved the unfolding tragedy in London.

If you think about it, Technorati has become a public utility on a global scale.

While Google didn’t invent the internet, it made it easier to navigate by organizing billions of web pages. Today there are about 12 million blogs, with 10 new ones created every second. Since March, the number of posts has increased 40 percent a month, from about 350,000 a day to 850,000 a day.

At its essence, Technorati may be a search engine, but its approach is vastly different. Google, for instance, views the web as the world’s largest reference library, where information is static. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System, Google employs its PageRank technology, which orders search results based on relevance. Google uses words like web page, catalogs and directory, which are more than just words: They convey an entire worldview.

In contrast, Technorati sees the internet as a stream of conversations. This makes it much more immediate. Google requires two to three weeks to input a site into its search engine. (Although it does post frequently updated content from news sites.)

…”With Technorati, you know what is being said, when it is said, and who is saying it,” Sifry said. You can track the metamorphosis of an idea, not only who commented on it last but who came up with it first.

…Sifry believes when you stop thinking of the web as pages and documents, you begin to understand it’s all about people.

“I like to think of a blog as the record of the exhaust of a person’s attention stream over time,” he said. “You actually feel like you know the person. You see their style, the words they use, their kids, whatever there is.”

…Someone has to cut through all the contemporaneous smog, however, and that would be Technorati, which includes information about every poster in each search result. That way you can gauge bloggers’ “net attention” — calculated by the number of people who link to them — so you can locate the most authoritative views. Or stick to the default mode, which lists blog entries chronologically starting with the freshest.

A thread I started at CivicSpaceLabs on upgrading Philly Future. For reference.

BBC’s Newsnig8t: A balance sheet of the blog

The BBC is having a discussion about what it should do about blogs. This takes place in the wider context of the breakup of the broadcasting model. People are reporting stories for themselves using blogs and mobile phones (with the 7/7 bomb, not the G8, being seen as a tipping point). The Guardian’s foray into blogs has been impressive but seems to me the wrong track: trying to weld a corporate identity onto the content and capture it within a corporate system on their own platforms. A blog is the free and individual writing of a single person, or group of people, untrammelled by rules or a given “mission statement”; the blogosphere is a series of communities of blogs, where what is of value comes to prominence because of self-selection and word of mouth rather than promotion: in other words, because enough people believe it helps them get to the truth. Blogs are acting like the ibis on the shoulder of the buffalo to mainstream journalism right now. I do not predict the demise of the broadcasting model but I can’t see a linear progression for it either. How it interacts with blogging, and mobile content, is not the interaction between two technologies but between two kinds of content. The challenge for broadcasters is not to produce faux blogs; ditto the challenge for journalists. It is to respond to the content need, indeed the content gap, demonstrated by the existence of blogs. The problem is: maybe it can’t respond fully. The added hitch is: it is going to be more difficult for public service broadcasters to engage in this because we are hidebound by extra rules on impartiality as well as fairness and accuracy. It seems to me that the world right now, for good or ill, is craving partiality…or at least honesty about one’s stance. The popularity of Fox News is testimony to that: Fox and blogging are part of the same phenomenon and it is not totally welcome to traditional journalists in the UK. But that is not a reason to stop experimenting with blogging.

Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher was recently at a panel with Peter Hirshberg, a marketing guy at Technorati.

SiliconValleyWatcher.com: “The selling of the Blogosphere Technorati’s big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs”:

…Technorati has done an enormous amount of work in supporting the early blogging communities, and it has been a strong evangelist for bloggers everywhere through its promotion of blogs and bloggers.

…The subject of the panel was “How the Blogosphere is changing the game in PR and marketing” organized by the PR company Horn Group and nicely moderated by Shannon Latta, a partner of the Horn Group, and the panel included Horn Group’s in-house blogger Blake Barbera, who writes an increasingly popular blog: Wet Feet PR.

…What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati’s expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals.

…Mr Hirshberg talked about the current tracking services that Technorati offers, and new products coming that will offer a deeper analysis of web blogs and will assign a value of authority, and other tags. All the better to more accurately distinguish how important a blog post is, the sphere of influence of a particular blogger, and the many number of ways to slice and dice the wealth of blog data Technorati is collecting and selling.

“It’s all about getting the right algorithm” he said at one point, arguing that Technorati’s sophisticated automated services would enable corporations to find out what is being said about them, their people, products, and to respond to bad news very quickly, by engaging bloggers in conversations.

…Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the “wrong” message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate “SWAT” team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

“You need to become involved in the conversation,” Mr Hirshberg strongly advised his audience.

…A lot of blogs are semi-private, their authors are mostly talking with their friends and family, and the discussions are not intended for broad publication.

…This produces a relaxed intimacy of conversation that marketeers prize very highly. And now they can track and eavesdrop on millions of such relaxed conversations, thanks to Technorati’s services, (not cheap either.)

Doc Searls, does a round up, and has a few comments to share.

Mike Sanders, puts it bluntly.

Jeneane Sessum has been having issues with Technorati and is wondering why other bloggers haven’t spoken up.

allied: When We Are Hypocrites

…I’m getting a little miffed.

Because when it’s someone like Dell that fails to deliver, more brick than click, the bloggerati jump up and down and demand satisfaction. They call in the legit media and launch a feeding frenzy.

But when it’s me and the folks who comment here about Technorati’s weeks of non-usability, you hear a lot of wind. Is that because we’re supposed to all be friends? Not bite the hand that ranks us? Because Dave Sifry’s busier launching Live 8 sites and sending bloggers backstage, and announcing top 100s, than he is making sure that we can search beyond the new Technorati wasted-space homepage?

Is it okay to take Dell to the matt while making sure one of our own is immune?

No it’s not.