Become a blogger and you’ll never have to have coffee alone again.

I’m in London for three days packed chock-filled with meetings for Open Society Institute. But when Sokari Ekine mentioned she was also in town, I realized that meeting one of my favorite African bloggers was far more important than catching up on those hours of sleep I failed to get in a coach seat on British Airways. So I finished the stack of reading I’m plowing through for the OSI meetings, took the tube from Hammersmith to Victoria, and spent two hours talking about blogs, the universe and everything with Sokari and her partner, who are visiting their former hometown for a few weeks in the midst of moving from a village in rural Spain to a new urban life in Granada.

Sokari’s blog, Black Looks, was one of the first blogs I found when I started searching for blogs by Africans and Afrophiles. A few comments on each other’s blogs and an email exchange, and I discovered that her nom du blog, “Owukori”, was a psuedonym, chosen to honor her grandfather. A few more emails and we arranged an interview via instant messenger. Then a chat over Skype, which we recorded and podcast… until I ran out of SkypeOut credit and abruptly ended the call! And then Sokari agreed to join Global Voices as our Africa editor - she’ll pick up the mantle in a few weeks, once she’s settled in her new home.

All of which means that, when we sat down in Victoria Station, it was more like sitting down with an old friend than meeting someone for the first time. This is one of the miracles of blogs - they can give you context and a history with people you’ve never met face to face.

I’ve got photos, but wasn’t bright enough to bring the cable that lets me load photos onto my Mac, so you’ll have to wait…

Jimmy Wales, international man of mystery, father of Wikipedia and non-resident Berkman fellow joined his fellow Berkmaniacs in Cambridge yesterday, and filled us in on his new intellectual project, “10 Things that Will be Free”.

Jimmy’s list is inspried by David Hilbert’s address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, 1900, where he proposed 23 critical unsolved problems in mathematics. This list was enormously influential in shaping mathematical research over the 20th century, and most of the problems have been resolved. (Hilbert’s 23 Problems should not be confused with Jay-Z’s 99 Problems which, though also influential, have had less of an influence on academic research.)

Jimmy’s list is, like Hilbert’s, an outline of what we don’t know how to do yet in the world of free culture, and a call to action. It’s also, to a certain extent, a prediction of the future - Jimmy makes the point that it’s 10 things that will be free in the next ten to twenty five years, not should be free.

The list Jimmy presented yesterday was slightly different from the list blogged by Ross Mayfield (compiled from Jimmy’s posts on Larry Lessig’s blog), and from his Wikimania keynote presentation - this indicates that the list is changing and expanding over time, eventually approaching a Hilbert/Jay-Z limit, perhaps. Yesterday’s list:

1) Free the Encyclopedia - Wikipedia is probably how this will be accomplished, though the Wikipedia goal involves a freely licensed, high quality encyclopedia in every language - while we’re more or less there for people who speak English or German and have broadband net access, it’s a long way away for speakers of Arabic, Hindi or Bengali…

2) Free the Dictionary - While Wiktionary is working on this problem, it’s proved harder to accomplish than Wikipedia. One reason - dictionary data is highly structured - every entry has certain things (an authoritative spelling, a derivation, a pronunciation…) while encyclopedia articles are less structured. A new version of MediaWiki software that better supports structured data is in development, and Jimmy thinks this will move the project forward.

3) Free the Curiculum - Free textbooks and curicula, from kindergarten through the university level. Jimmy’s done some work on this with the WikiBooks project, though the project is, again, not taking off with the same rapidity as Wikipedia.

I made the argument that it’s harder to get someone to commit to writing a book - or even outlining a book for someone else to contribute to - than it is to get them to write a Wikipedia entry, suggesting that Wikibooks is a project where the wiki model might not scale. Jimmy conceded that this may be an issue, and that Wikibooks has moved to a “book module” model, encouraging people to write sections of books rather than the whole thing. Jimmy believes that public school textbooks in some US states would be easily built under the module model, since the modules are clearly specified by state standards - this would allow teachers to contribute small sections of curiculum and rapidly create free books.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm for “free the curiculum” around Berkman, especially given the H2O project’s new Playlists feature.

4) Free the Music. Most of the great works of classical music are in the public domain. But most recordings of them aren’t. And many scores and arrangements aren’t. The Free the Music project would encourage community orchestras to create freely licensed recordings of great works.

5) Free the Art. Again, many of the great sculptures and paintings that represent our collective cultural heritage are no longer copyrighted. But many photos of these works ARE copyrighted. Jimmy tells a story about receiving complaints from museums that Wikipedia contains “unlicensed reproductions” of works that they hold in their collections. These complaints aren’t quite cease and desist letters, because the images on Wikipedia might be photos taken by Wikipedia users and released under a free license. But they are threats, designed to deter users from reproducing works of art that are in the public domain. Jimmy’s response to these letters is to write back letters encouraging museum directors to feel a sense of shame in locking away cultural works from the public… he’s not gotten any responses to these letters.

(I personally love the idea of empowering an army of wikimuseumfolken to take digital cameras into the world’s museums and begin creating a comprehensive collection of artwork. There are museums and artists that I’d be prepared to sign up for and begin photographing when Jimmy gives the word.)

6. Free the File Formats - Jimmy argues that proprietary file formats are worse than proprietary software. If your data is in a proprietary format, you’re trapped if you want to stop using a particular piece of software. Wikipedia uses Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3 due to patent concerns and fears of being locked into a proprietary format.

7. Free the Maps - As Google Map hackers are proving, there’s tremendous interest in building GIS-enabled services. Open source hackers are concerned about building services on Google Maps because Google owns the underlying data - Jimmy believes that hackers will build their own maps database and start creating GIS and GPS enabled services on top of this data.

I’m skeptical, if only because Google Maps is a) free, as in free beer, b) good and c) has a good API. My sense is that open information projects succeed when what they’re replacing is frustratingly bad - Wikipedia is a success in part because Encyclopedia Britannica’s web presence was so poor. Jimmy offers Apache as an example - people loved to hack on Apache because Microsoft’s competing product was expensive and bad. Will ideological purity be sufficient to get people to build an open alternative to Google Maps?

8. Free Product Identifiers - If you link to a book on Amazon.com, you have two choices in constructing your URL - an ISBN number (non-proprietary) or an ASIN number (proprietary). Jimmy recommends you link using an ISBN, so if you decide not to continue selling books as an Amazon affiliate, you can migrate to another bookseller, rather than being locked in by proprietary product identifiers. He’d like to see a world where there’s a full set of free product identifiers where people could more easily participate in the world of “long tail” sales by getting an LTIN: a “long-tail identification number”. There was more than a little skepticism from the group on this one - yes, it’s worrisome that Amazon numbers are non-transferrable, but will open product ID numbers really help people sell to a global market?

9. Free the search engine - Jimmy believes we’ll see an open, transparent, ad supported search engine in the future. Unlike Google et.al., its ranking algorithms will be published and won’t rely on security via obscurity. Jonathan Zittrain wonders if this engine will rely on the long-promised “semantic web” - Jimmy explains that this is more a prediction/call for a non-proprietary search engine ala Google.

Having worked on search engines a little in my distant technical past, I wonder about the feasibility of this one. Someone, somewhere needs to build the index for a search engine, a process that requires huge amounts of disk space and processor time. Will folks really volunteer this many machines and disks? Jimmy points out that this is a problem that may be solved by doubling processor speed a few more times - just as video over the Internet seemed pretty absurd in 1994, building a search engine capable of indexing the web on a PC might not seem unreasonable in 2010.

10. Free the Communities - The terms of service agreements at many online community sites (like my former venture, Tripod) include text giving the community host either ownership of or a perpetual license to any content you create. Jimmy believes that projects like WikiCities will start creating new community spaces where users own their content and can decide whether or not hosts can use it.

Two bonus “will be frees”:

- TV listings. If you want to build your own digital video recorder, like MythTV, you need a good source of data for what programs are on when. It’s not hard to believe that a group of end users could discover and enter this data on a free basis.

- Academic publishing. Jimmy’s slowly but surely coming around to the Open Access model for academic publishing advocated by Peter Suber and others.

One interesting proposition not included in Jimmy’s list: Free the News. While he supports the WikiNews project, he says he’s not convinced that a wikipedia-like community can produce a meaningful competitor to AP or Reuters, despite some huge successes the WikiNews community has had thus far. Very interesting. I’m pretty firmly convinced that professional journalists - with travel budgets and legal departments - will be able to do reporting that wikireporters won’t be able to replicate for a long time to come.

I wonder whether there aren’t some organizing principles that could help unite Jimmy’s 10 or 12 propositions. Based on a rolicking conversation that ran well over the time alloted for Jimmy’s presentation, I offer the following half-baked possible assertions (how’s that for a set of disclaimers!):

- When users have a strong personal incentive to collect information, they’re more likely to do so. I create metadata about webpages in del.icio.us because it makes it easier for me to find these pages in the future - the fact that you might benefit from this metadata is a happy coincidence, but it’s the benefit to me that makes me do it, not a utilitarian impulse. This suggests to me that projects like Television Information will succeed, as they’re analogous to projects like CDDB, or its open alternative, MusicBrainz.

- Projects where users can work on bite-sized chunks are likely to succeed, while projects that require massive organizational effort from one or more individuals are less likely to succeed. This, I believe, is why Wikipedia has had so much traction, while Wikibooks is having less luck. It’s one thing to commit to writing a 500-word encyclopedia essay - it’s another thing entirely to commit to writing a book and giving it away, or even to outlining a book and asking others to commit to fleshing it out.

This second assertion got me into a good debate with Luis Villa, Berkman’s new senior geek in residence. Luis points out that open source projects require massive amounts of time from people with highly specialized skills - kernel hackers, for instance - and that the success of these projects suggests that Wikibooks might succeed. I argued that many open source hackers build the tools they need to get their jobs done, and that most scholars don’t “need” a basic history textbook, and might not develop one without economic incentives.

But hey, I’ve been wrong about almost everything else concerning Wikipedia, so there’s a good chance I’ve got this one wrong as well.

My life lately is filled with moments that make me aware that the Internet has really made my life very, very different from what it was a decade ago. Sometimes this involves attending the weddings of people I know better online than in person. Sometimes it involves spending the morning in a chat session with people from a dozen diffferent countries, talking about a project I’ve participated in at the request of a man in France that I’ve met only online and over the phone…

We had pretty good turnout for the IRC “press conference” we held on Global Voices for the launch of the RSF Guide for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents, with roughly three dozen people showing up. The folks who showed up may well be an object lesson in the challenges of using IRC as a format for discussion - no “offline” journalists joined us, though one tried very hard and failed… And we didn’t get the questions from users in repressive nations we’d hoped for. Again, choosing a technology for conversation that’s extremely geek friendly and newbie unfriendly is probably a bad call for maximizing participation…

The transcript of the talk is here.

The folks who did show up for the talk raised a couple of interesting, thorny and challenging issues about the guide, its distribution and its future. Haitham Sabbah, our Middle East editor at Global Voices, called into question one of the basic premises of the guide, wondering whether or not we should be encouraging anonymous blogging. There was a lively debate about the title of the guide - a number of participants weren’t comfortable being labelled “cyber-dissidents” and didn’t want to carry a guide with that title… while Julien Pain of RSF explained that most of the people he was concerned about reaching with the guide weren’t bloggers, but dissidents who happened to publish materials online.

A major theme of the discussion was a desire to “remix” the guide, to make it more easily distributable, more accessible to people in nations where RSF’s servers are blocked, and - in one case - to make the guide “less glossy”. (I actually think it looks beautiful just the way it is…) I’ve started a wiki discussion on the Global Voices wiki for people interested in talking about how we might remix or mirror the guide - if you’d like to participate, you’re going to need an account on that wiki. Email me at ethanz AT gmail and I’ll get you set up.

While it’s too bad that our press conference didn’t involve journalists, it was a great example of how people around the world can get excited about an idea and how something like the publication of this guide can serve as a seed crystal for efforts of activists around the world. And if you’re missing interaction with journalists, Thomas Crampton from the International Herald Tribune has posted in a comments thread two questions I succesfully ducked in my interview with him a few days ago:

1- couldn’t al qaeda rename your book as a guide to terrorist communication?

2- aren’t you alerting the authorities to the ways people are keeping things private on the net?

Could be the seeds of a good conversation.

Reminder - there’s a chat on IRC (irc.freenode.net, #globalvoices) in a few minutes about the RSF Guide for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents. Please join us if you have questions about the guide, about anonymous blogging or blogging in the developing world. I’ll post a transcript of the chat here after it’s done…

Last night was a good night for baseball. Toronto ended the Yankee’s winning streak with a 7-4 victory. And in a long battle, Boston held off Baltimore 4-3, sealing the victory as Wendy and Joey took to the floor for their first dance as a married couple. In other words, it was a good night both for Boston and for Toronto.

(For those not following the blogger wedding of the century, Wendy’s a lifelong Bostonian and Joey is formerly one of Toronto’s most eligible bachelors.)

My plan to broadcast the wedding live via IRC was thwarted by problems with cellphone signal, but, as one would expect at a blogger wedding, it’s been extensively documented. Jessica, of J’s Scratchpad (who, to my pleasant surprise, is a marvelous dancer…) offers a warm and humorous account. AKMA dissapointed the blogger contingent by not reading from his laptop, but did remain true to his roots, opening his homily with a reworking of homily in the Princess Bride: “The Internet is what brings us together, tonight.” (No, he didn’t do the accent, but that’s how it sounded in my head.) It’s the first homily I’ve ever heard that included both the Berkman Center and an oblique Brittney Spears reference.

And my lovely wife, the Velveteen Rabbi, officiant for the evening, offers her thoughts on the nature of “bespoke weddings”, the crafting of which she’s rapidly becoming expert at.

In the company of writers like this, I have few words to add. But I’ve got a few blurry snapshots that help remind me that this was one of the most joyful weddings I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending. Congratulations, Wendy and Joey!

Forgive the (comparative) silence, friends - it’s been a busy week. I’m now in Boston at the blogger wedding of the century, the nuptials of Joey “Accordian Guy” DeVilla, and Wendy “Red” Koslow, officiated by the Reverend AKMA, and my beloved Velveteen Rabbi. While we’ve been forbidden from live-blogging the ceremony, I may cheat and post details to #joiito on irc.freenode.net from my cellphone as the ceremony takes place.

In lieu of any useful content here, let me point you to two things I’ve posted on WorldChanging recently, a review of the excellent “Brand New Justice” by Simon Anholt (more on this later this week on this blog) and a post that’s getting very silly comments regarding coconut-oil fueled cars…

At Global Voices, we’ve heard from some friends in China that they’re having difficulty accessing the Reporters Sans Frontiéres “Guide for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents” from the rsf.org website - it’s apparently being blocked by some or all Chinese ISPs. While the guide has not been completely translated into Chinese, two articles are available in translation, Nart Villeneuve’s article on circumventing firewalls using proxy servers and my article on blogging anonymously - I’m mirroring both on my server and you can download them here: Circumvention; Anonymous Blogging.

Global Voices is hosting an IRC chat about the Guide on Tuesday, September 27th at 15:00 GMT (11:00 EDT) - I’ll be in channel along with editor Julien Pain, and we’re trying to round up a few other article authors to participate. Please join us in #globalvoices on irc.freenode.net - the announcement on Global Voices has more information, including instructions if you’re not a regular IRC user.

Update: Thomas Crampton, in the International Herald Tribune, has an article on the RSF guide, including comments from yours truly. Thanks, Tom.

Three African stories that caught my eye this morning:

BBC is watching a situation in the Niger delta where a militia group, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, associated with the Ijaw people of the delta, has seized control of an oil installation. The group’s leader, Mujahid Dokubu-Asari, was previously arrested and charged with “treason and illegal assembly” - when his lawyer arrived from Port Harcourt to bail him out, he was promptly jailed as well. Representatives from the militia claimed they were moving on an additional seven installations and would destroy all of them if Asari was not released.

Nigeria is the largest oil exporter on the African continent. With global energy markets in a froth over increased demand in India and China, and supply reductions from hurricanes on the Gulf Coast of the US, major disruptions in Nigerian oil supply would likely have a major effect on world energy prices…

Natasha Burley, writing in the International Herald Tribune, observes that food aid given in response to shortages in Niger might have a detrimental effect on local farmers. The food aid has taken a long time to arrive and now appears destined to reach communities just as farmers are bringing a bumper crop of millet to market. Most farmers borrowed money to purchase millet seedlings, and with a glut of millet on the market, they’ll need to sell more of their crop to pay their debts… leaving them with less food in reserve, vulnerable to future food shortages. There’s now a debate over whether relief agencies should stop providing emergency food in order to avoid destabilizing markets.

I can’t help but think back to Kenyan economist James Shikwati’s arguments that food aid can damage regional economies. Burley’s article is a good reminder that providing aid is a difficult business - it’s easy to do harm to one group while helping another, despite the best of intentions.

Update: Jonathan of HeadHeeb does a better job on this story than I do, as he so frequently does. Read his commentary if you’re interested in the issue of donor-driven market failure.

Steve Song, a Canadian expert on ICT4D, has an interesting article on IDRC’s website about Internet connectivity to African universities. Steve contends that the average African university has the connectivity the average home Internet user in the United States has via a DSL line or cable modem, and that an African university pays 50 times what its North American counterparts do for this connnectivity. I’m assuming that Steve means that African universities pay 50x what a Canadian university would pay for the equivalent of a DSL line, not that African universities have connectivity budgets 50x of what a Canadian university would have. Instead, most African universities provide extremely limited bandwidth to their students and students who want to spend time online do so from cybercafes.

Not news, but worth a second look:

Like most African blogreaders, I’ve reached the point in Sokari Ekine’s vacation where I’m actively missing her sharp wit and insightful posts. Looking to see if she was back yet and had weighed in on the Niger delta events, I ran into the most recent of her posts, on the “Africa Standing Tall Against Poverty” concert. The post includes wonderful photos of the concert and of a parade to alert people to the concert. The parade evidently passed through Osu, a neighborhood in Accra that I lived in during 1993-4 and had an office in from 2000-2004 - the photos make me a little homesick, but mostly blissfully happy to see Ghana’s alternative to the Live 8 concerts.

Technology Review Magazine has just announced this year’s crop of 35 high tech innovators under the age of 35. TR goes through an amazing process to select the figures they feature here, and the research they’re doing is often a good preview of the most interesting emerging topics in computing, engineering and medicine.

(TR was good enough to honor me with an award in 2002, back when they were being slightly less selective and honoring 100 innovators a year. I helped judge the 2003 contest, so have a good sense for just how careful and painstaking the process is and just how extraordinary the folks honored with this award are.)

Depending on what field you work in, you’ll understand somewhere between some and none of the research topics these innovators are studying. Don’t feel bad - when TR holds the annual meeting for the award winners, there are endless conversations where one very smart person says to another, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds very cool.” Special congratulations to two friends, whose work I actually do understand, kinda sorta:

- Andy Carvin, fellow traveller in the digital divide world and, bizarrely, my long-lost cousin. Andy’s one of the founders of the Digital Divide Network and is an endless font of ideas for ways to use new technology to give voices to people who currently don’t have access to the Internet.

- David Pennock, senior research scientist for Yahoo! David’s one of the smartest guys out there about prediction markets - including BuzzGame, which he helped create - and the economics of search engine keyword auctions, a personal research interest of mine.

Congrats to everyone named by TR, whether or not I have a clue about what you did to be honored!

Julien Pain, point man on Internet issues at Reporters Sans Frontières, has spearheaded creation of an amazing new resource, the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents. It’s a beautifully produced print and online resource, useful for anyone who’s less interested in blogging to make money or get a book deal and more interested in doing original, independent online journalism in countries where press freedoms are restricted. Julien has allowed us to put a preview copy on Global Voices - you’re welcome to download and peruse it - it will be offically launched on RSF’s site tomorrow morning. My colleage, Rebecca Mackinnon, has an excellent review of the book featured on Global Voices today.

With the help of lots of online friends, I wrote a guide to anonymous blogging which is available on the Global Voices wiki and which is reproduced in the RSF guide. It’s a work in progress, and I hope that at some point soon, the world will stop spinning long enough that I can update it with screenshots and some new thoughts on avoiding “timing attacks” which might let government-controlled ISPs identify a user by tracking the timestamps of her postings. Still, I’m thrilled that the chapter I’ve written, imperfect though it is, has been translated into five languages and will be widely distributed to people who need it.

Talking with a number of bloggers around the globe who’ve articulated a need for strong anonymity, I’m developing a bit more affection for the “cypherpunks” I’ve encountered through the years. I generally have very little sympathy for folks living in mostly free nations like the USA who are convinced that the government/big corporations/multilateral organizations are reading their email/tapping their phones/watching their every move. While this level of paranoia is probably inappropriate for folks living in the USA, it’s often appropriate for people living in states with a persistent interest in muzzling a free press, and the tools and theories developed by the cyberparanoid are very useful when considering how to blog safely from Zimbabwe or Sudan.

I was talking to a reporter friend about press freedoms, anonymity and blogging the other day and he asked the (predictable, but absolutely valid) question, “So can’t all these anonymizing techniques be used by terrorist?” This is a question I’m getting with increasing frequency, especially as media organizations realize that there’s an insatiable appetite for “Terrorists are using the Internet” stories.

The simple answer is “Yes, terrorists can and will find ways use online anonymity techniques to claim responsibility for attacks and disseminate information.” I don’t believe, however, that the appropriate reaction to this is to hide information on anonymous blogging from the world. Security through obscurity is a pretty feeble form of security. The techniques I and others are writing about in the RSF guide are well documented and widely known within the Internet security community. Smart terrorists can find these techniques by searching the web, academic papers and textbooks. Obscuring these techniques in the hopes that the dumber terrorists don’t find them means that they’re difficult to find for the people who need them: independent journalists, human rights activists and dissidents in nations that restrict speech.

I predict that more than a few readers of RSF’s guide will disagree and I’m preparing for articles and blogposts that question whether RSF made the right move in publishing this guide. They did, and I’m proud to be a part of it.