On the podcast this week, Don Tapscott, writer, consultant, and speaker on business strategy and organizational transformation, and co-author of the bestseller Wikinomics, discusses his new book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. In the book, Tapscott and his co-author, Anthony Williams, document how businesses, governments, nonprofits, and individuals are using mass collaboration to change how we work, live, learn, create, and govern. On the podcast, he discusses an Iraq veteran whose start-up car company is “staffed” by over 45,000 competing designers and supplied by microfactories around the country. He also talks about how companies are using competitions for R&D, and how mass collaboration can improve government regulation and universities.
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On the podcast this week, Joanne McNeil, a science and technology writer living in Brooklyn, New York, and curator of Tomorrow Museum, a collection of images and speculative essays exploring how technology, science, and economics are affecting the fine arts, discusses online introversion and curation. McNeil discusses realspace introverts turned online extroverts, explains the lack of social media presence of many extroverts and celebrities, and parses the distinction between shyness and introversion. She also talks about Hanoi Wi-Fi and other technology encountered on her recent trip to Southeast Asia and addresses online curation, link blogs, and Tumblr.
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If you follow the Tech Liberation Front, you’ll no doubt have run across the weekly podcast I post here on Mondays. It’s called Surprisingly Free and it features in-depth discussions with an eclectic mix of authors, academics, and entrepreneurs at the intersection of technology, policy, and economics–including some of the TLF gang.
We’ve now released over three dozen episodes and we couldn’t have done it without our listeners. For that, I want to thank you. We now want to redouble our efforts to improve the show so that we can grow our audience from hundreds to thousands. To do that, we need your help.
If you don’t subscribe to the show on iTunes, how about giving it a shot here. If you do already listen to it, I’d like to ask you to please take this two-minute survey. To make the show better, we need to know what you think. Do you like the topics? Do you like the guests? What do you think of the length? What would you change? Keep the same? Your feedback would mean the world to us. And again, the survey only takes two minutes (a bit more if you want to give us written comments, which we would appreciate).
So, thank you so much for listening to the Surprisingly Free podcast, and thanks for helping us spread the word and make it a better show.
On the podcast this week, Nick Bilton, Lead Technology Writer for The New York Times Bits blog and a reporter for the paper, discusses his new book, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works
. In the book, Bilton examines how technology is creatively disrupting society, business, and our brains. On the podcast, he talks about neuroplasticity and reading, a debate with George Packer about Twitter, innovators’ dilemmas in the porn industry, why many CEOs and movie producers bristle at how the future works, and “ricochet working.” He also discusses effects of combining human curation with computer algorithms, hyperpersonalization, informational veggies, and serendipity. He concludes with his theory about today’s news (and the reason he doesn’t worry about missing tweets): “If it’s important, it will find me.”
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To keep the conversation around this episode in one place, we’d like to ask you to comment at the web page for this episode on Surprisingly Free. Also, why not subscribe to the podcast on iTunes?
On the podcast this week, Kimberley Isbell, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society working as a staff attorney with the Citizen Media Law Project, discusses legal implications of news aggregators. The rise of aggregators amid the transformation of news and journalism spurred Rupert Murdoch to label news aggregation “theft.” In her recent paper, Isbell classifies various types of news aggregators and examines their roles in light of copyright, fair use, and hot news misappropriation doctrines. She notes that courts have yet to decide key aspects of the issue, but legal rules that promote flexibility and free access to information are needed to ensure a productive and innovative future for news.
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Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
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Caren Myers Morrison, assistant professor at Georgia State University College of Law, discusses how internet tools are affecting our jury system, which she details in her new paper, Jury 2.0
. She cites examples of jurors using the internet to seek information about cases, Facebook-friending witnesses and defendants, and even blogging about trials on which they are deliberating. She also expounds upon jury tradition in America, the evolution of impartiality’s definition, jury secrecy and integrity, ramifications of jurors’ internet activities, and the future of the jury — Jury 2.0
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After our podcast last week, Tim Lee wrote a blog post expanding on our conversation about spectrum policy. I thought I’d take a little space here to respond.
Although we will probably continue to disagree on empirical questions, I think philosophically there is no light between Tim and me. He succinctly expresses our shared view when he writes,
The question advocates of free markets (“extreme” or otherwise) need to ask is not: which property rights should we create? Rather, we need to ask: which set of regulations prevents congestion at the lowest cost in liberty? You want the set of rules that maximizes individual freedom; rules that are clear and predictable and give government officials as little opportunity as possible to make mischief.
Tim and I simply come to different conclusions in our cost-benefit calculation when we look at the competing sets of rules for spectrum.
As Tim points out, radio spectrum is not like sunlight. We can’t use as much of it as we want without congestion. This precludes an open access regime. The question then is, do we create a regime were private actors own the spectrum and make decisions about how to best utilize it? (Government’s only function in this scenario would be to enforce contracts and property rights.) Or do we allow the government to in essence own the spectrum and determine which specific uses will be permitted? (Government in this scenario decides the rules that govern a commons, which is not a trivial matter since it will allow some uses and preclude others.)
So, which regime presents “a lower cost in liberty?” Which one is more “clear and predictable?” Which one presents “government officials as little opportunity as possible to make mischief?” I tend to think the former fits the bill much better than the latter. Tim thinks we can have a little bit of both; that both can be equally efficient. He seems to see little difference between government-as-court and government-as-regulator. I’m less sanguine about government’s ability to set rules for spectrum that get you to the same or better outcome than a property rights regime.
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On the podcast this week, Timothy B. Lee, PhD candidate in computer science at Princeton University and fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, discusses a variety of issues. Lee parses new net neutrality nuances, addressing recent debate over prioritization of internet services. He also discusses wireless spectrum policy, comparing and contrasting a strict property rights model to a commons one. Lee concludes by weighing in on potential software patent reform, referencing Paul Allen’s wide-ranging patent-infringement lawsuits and the Oracle-Google tiff over Java patents.
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Do check out <a href=the”>http://surprisinglyfree.com/2010/09/06/tim-lee-on-net-neutrality-spectrum-policy-and-software-patents/”>the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
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On the podcast this week, Danny Sullivan, an expert on the internet search industry and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, discusses search neutrality. He explains the concept of search neutrality and discusses a recent New York Times editorial suggesting Google’s search algorithm should be subject to government oversight or regulation. Sullivan points out flaws inherent to the notion of search neutrality and discusses competition in the search engine industry. He also imagines what it might take to topple Google from its perch atop internet search.
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Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
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In the podcast this week, Kevin King, a recent law school graduate now clerking for a federal court of appeals, discusses his recent paper, Geolocation and Federalism on the Internet: Cutting Internet Gambling’s Gordian Knot. In his paper King uses the online gambling industry to examine conflict between federalism and the internet — the borderless nature of the internet eschews traditional models of state jurisdiction. He discusses previous attempts to regulate online gambling, conflict between internet gambling providers and the Kentucky horse betting sector, Congress’ current online gambling bill, and a solution that utilizes geolocation technology.
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Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.