This was originally posted at Journalist’s Resource, a project of the Harvard Shorenstein Center where I teach. I’m desperately overdue to blog something so I’m resorting to cross-posting.

Understanding the core ideas that guide how the Internet’s space and culture are constructed is crucial to interpreting an increasing number of events, from Barack Obama’s election and Wikileaks to the Arab Spring and the ongoing upheaval of major industries.

Though such events can seem shocking in their novelty and speed, the reality is that the underlying logic embedded in the Internet long ago helped set the table. Programmers, designers and theorists — who substantially came from the open-source movement — made decisions that are now having consequences, from the local to the global.

Ultimately, it’s important to see why the construction of the Internet is not necessarily friendly to the establishment.

For the hyper-connected, these core ideas are well known; they are taken for granted and are, as it were, the air the digital community breathes. But for many others, it is a matter of catching up. Digital norms and architecture need to be, in a sense, discovered for the first time. To be without this basic knowledge is to be subject to continuing blindsides and perpetual spin.

Below are five recommended readings that can help expose the bedrock of the digital world. Each examines key ideas and connects to wider notions. I have included some brief, informal remarks to set each reading in context and have linked to Wikipedia pages to clarify basic terms.

1) Idea: OPEN SOURCE

Reading: “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond.

Relevance: This essay focuses on how the computer programming community in a networked world should operate. Raymond argues against one way of writing source code: the “cathedral” way, with a single architect or small elite planning and an army of serfs building the structure. In contrast, he advocates a “bazaar” model, whereby many people participate in a messier mutual system of trade. This system is often chaotic, but it’s also beautiful in its engaging liveliness. Software starts with “scratching your own itch” — solving problems that make your work more efficient. Raymond believes it’s good to then put this tentative software on the Internet where it may be improved by others, often perfect strangers — “release early and often,” he implores. This shared approach to work and problem-solving is embodied in the phrase, “Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.” And embedded in this idea is that there are effectively no resource constraints to scaling up ideas.

2) Idea: ALGORITHMS AND AUTHORITY

Reading: The Search, John Battelle.

Relevance: This book about the central ideas of Google gives crucial insights into the development of the company’s Internet search innovations. Google’s world-changing algorithm PageRank took on the problem of trying to figure out users’ intentions — what they are really looking for. Google needed a way of establishing authority that was very hard to game. The fundamental way that Google went about this was to adopt the academic, scholarly model of peer citation. One of the most important measures that determines any web page’s authority and importance, and hence its ranking, is the number of other in-bound links. The number of other web sites, the terms that they link to you on, the frequency with which they link — all of these are a proxy for authority. And authority itself is thereby defined in a whole new, distributed way. Of course, it’s more complex and there are many other variables. But this is Google’s core genius, and it set the template and standard for how to assess importance on the Internet — and ultimately how informational power is constructed.

3) Idea: WEB AS PLATFORM

Reading: “What is Web 2.0?” Tim O’Reilly.

Relevance: In this essay, O’Reilly coins and articulates the idea of “Web 2.0,” a buzz term that is often now thrown around so loosely that it has lost its original meaning. The core concept is the “web as platform.” Traditionally in computer science, a platform is a piece of software that controls a bunch of resources so they easily can be shared. Microsoft Windows, for example, controls your keyboard, speakers, battery, keyboard, screen, and much more. This means that Excel and Firefox and whatever other programs a computer is running don’t need to each manage a computer’s basic functions. The idea of “web as platform” exports this technical computer science notion to the interactive Web world. This concept is made manifest in, for example, the way Wikipedia harnesses user-generated content; or, the way Netflix harnesses user ratings to recommend other movies to its audience. O’Reilly discusses how the Web can be used to take advantage of the sprawling, constantly growing digital world to accomplish larger goals, in business, social organizing and beyond.

4) Idea: DIGITAL GOVERNANCE

Reading: The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih.

Relevance: This book looks at how Wikipedia has worked out a way to harness and organize the power of a vast, decentralized community. An astonishing percentage of the world uses Wikipedia on a regular basis; it may be the only media with truly global reach. The most important thing is Wikipedia’s governance structure, which provides a new model for the world. The organization has a community with norms and values that is working toward establishing an authoritative, neutral point of view on the sum total of human knowledge. But there is no easy or clean way to achieve this. Disputes need to be resolved, but often cannot be; “flame wars” break out over facts and accounts of events and people; there are a wide range of viewpoints. Wikipedia operates with the idea of asynchronous collaboration online, whereby a variety of people with differing views contribute across a wide range of time. (The digital media theorist Clay Shirky also has a lot to of relevant insight on this sort of project, organized around his idea of “cognitive surplus.” His thesis is that small amount of free time spent by individuals on interactive projects — when spread out over a larger community — can result in the creation of things of enormous value.)

5) Idea: THE PARADOX OF PERSONALIZATION

Reading: The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser.

Relevance: This is a relatively new book that contains a useful warning for all journalists, researchers or other information workers who use Google or other search products. Part of basic digital literacy now is understanding that search results are being customized and personalized to individuals’ browsing and search histories. (This also relates to how social networking applications are organizing your experience.) As Pariser notes, the amount of data now being created every 48 hours is roughly equal to all of the data in human history prior to 2003. This presents an enormous challenge. Google is trying to manage this torrent of information by serving up results that the company thinks may be better suited to what you are looking for. This new dynamic of personalization introduces a number of problems — for research, establishing authenticity, building movements, shaping public opinion. It’s an aspect of the digital world that everyone who cares about information should be watching, and this book provides a powerful lens through which to see this important trend.

A friend of mine came to me for some advice on starting a service business. I tried to figure out the most important things (from my perspective) that were required:

1 - Start by getting a tax id number and opening a bank account. Make sure your bank account is somewhere you can see the banker face to face on a regular basis and develop a relationship; you will need a relationship with a banker at some point in your business life.

2 - In your proposals included a section called “Payment Terms” and require 25% of the total project fee to be paid in advance before the project starts. When you are starting a business, you need cash. Cash is king.

3 - Spreadsheets are your friend. Don’t pick numbers out of thin air; use a spreadsheet to estimate how much time the project is going to take you, and what extra costs there might be (travel, outside consultants, etc). 

4 - Don’t forget taxes: The government takes a lot of your money, more than you generally think.

5 - Do things on time. Big clients will immediately lose faith in you if your first few deliverables are late.

I won’t lie. I’m a little annoyed at Tumblr these days. I’ve lost at least one full post on Tumblr. It looks like if I create a draft post, and then publish, it still keeps a copy as a draft. But if I delete the copy still in the drafts, it then deletes the published version as well. This is annoying; I have a lot of drafts, and now there are a lot of published posts mixed in with them.  So my brilliant post on the future of the Creative Class has been lost forever.  Into the ether. A lesson in losing things, I suppose. Reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

I highly recommend this blog post on the possibilities of mobile justice by Kate Krontiris. Great piece.  Generally speaking, it makes sense to me. One of the things I assign in my class is the book “Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. The key idea is that the groundswell is “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions”.  What Kate is describing is the way people could use technology to build their own sort of judicial system in countries without a functioning one. The challenge is not the technology — it’s the process, the values. How do you design a (mobile) judicial process that does not require centralized administration, embeds key values around due process, justice, and equality, and is culturally appropriate? The technology is all there — and pretty cheap — to make it happen. 

It was a cold January in Burlington, Vermont. I was ready for dinner, and I wanted some spicy soup to warm my insides. I was also going a little stir crazy. I was working at the Dean For America headquarters, and Howard Dean was a little more than two days away from the Iowa Caucus. We had been preparing for the Iowa Caucuses for a long time; I had been on the campaign full-time for about 9 months. And it might have been days since I had actually left the building, I’m not entirely sure. But I was jumpy, and the internet team I led had long since delivered the dollars required to be competitive in the campaign. There was a lot to do, but in some ways the only thing there was to do was wait until Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire made some decisions.

At the time Dave Winer was a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard. It’s only a few hours drive from Boston up to Burlington, and Jim Moore was making the drive all the time. I think Jim introduced me to Dave. Dave was busy bootstrapping blogging at Harvard but was interested in what was happening during the election, and Burlington was a lot closer than Iowa.

I had spoken to Dave on the phone a few years earlier in 1999 when he was running EditThisPage.com. I was working for Arianna Huffington on the Shadow Conventions, and was charged with building a website for the Shadow Conventions that would be unconventional. Arianna demanded that I talk to Dave. (In retrospect, it makes The Huffington Post seem inevitable, because she had religion on blogging as early as 1999…) Dave and I had a couple of phone conversations and although I was impressed with EditThisPage, I was a cocky young developer and dreamed of building my own web publishing tool from scratch. (I would live to regret that particular dream, but that’s another story, and it involves an early iteration of Roxen.)

When I showed up on the Dean campaign in April of 2003, I came with a background that included a hodge-podge of technical and political influences, and one of the influences was Dave. One of the first things I did was help Mat Gross and Marc Chadwick re-launch the campaign’s blog and played my small part moving political campaigns forward.

So I was pretty thrilled to have Dave there in our campaign office. I’d never met him in person before. And it was pretty exciting to have a chance to chat with Dave, and a good distraction from the pending nervous exhaustion over the outcome of the caucus (by that time, we were beginning to get some signals that winning was not inevitable). And so it was cold, and I was craving some hot soup, and Dave and I went out for Vietnamese — at the time I’m pretty sure it was the only Vietnamese restaurant in Burlington. I don’t remember what exactly we talked about, but it was a terrifically engaging conversation and I came back to work after dinner fired up, with a lot of energy to try some new things.

The next few days were a blur. Among other things, my brother flew up from New York the day of the Iowa Caucuses to tell me he was getting married. And there was the candidate and the campaign, which was rapidly unraveling around me. It was kind of an insane moment to meet Dave, but also perfect. I think it was GK Chesterton who said, “There are no coincidences, only spiritual puns.” Here we are, just days before the campaign’s collapse, and one of the pioneers who inspired my work on the campaign shows up.

I don’t find hindsight to be 20/20. I find it to be decidedly more hazy than that. Maybe it was clear, in retrospect, that we needed to fight the media’s use of the “Dean Scream” to take down Dean with the channel we’d developed so well — the grassroots internet. But I don’t remember any discussion of it at the time; it just seemed like “they” — the mainstream media — were winning. And they were making a bad call, rejecting Dean. The same kind of bad call they made when they believed the Bush White House about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

One of my colleagues on the campaign who was in Wisconsin at the end tells a story (which may be apocraphyl) about how when Dean lost Wisconsin and was finally out of the race, the traveling press corps who had been following him around for a year wore t-shirts that said, “No, WE have the power,” a repudiation of Dean’s exhortation to the grassroots that they have the power to change the country. It is an ugly and terrifying story and it sounds exactly like the kind of urban myth spurned campaign workers would circulate, but it also has the ring of truth to me. I never found the national media very honest about Howard Dean. I always felt they decided early on what he was — not even who he was — and that was it. (In fact, I just went looking for the magazine cover, either Time or Newsweek, that featured Howard and was titled “Why is this man so angry?” and I couldn’t find it. I wonder if I made that up or if they have buried it.)

A few weeks ago I debated Alex Jones on the future of news. I wasn’t that thrilled with my own performance in the debate; I wasn’t on my game. But I realized coming out of the debate that Alex had this “iron-core” faith in the professionalism of journalism - and I don’t. Maybe it’s because Alex is a different generation; journalists held power accountable back then. In my adult life, journalists have been a power that needs to be held accountable. (Although N+1 recently brought to my attention that the notion that back then journalists held power accountable may also be a myth: “Remember Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, demonstrating with twenty years of painstakingly collected press clippings that the Gray Lady was misrepresenting the plight of East Timor, Burma, Nicaragua? Remember Rick Perlstein explaining that David Halberstam’s reporting in the early 1960s pulled us into Vietnam?”)

So far I’m loving Tumblr. When I went to setup an account, I was bummed because someone had nabbed “nicco” already.  Then I figured out it was me — I must have setup a tumblr account way back when — so it turns out I’ve got Nicco.tumblr.com after all.  I vaguely recall setting up the account a few years ago, but wasn’t so impressed after poking around. I fled the scene and only returned this week… but what a return! It’s matured into an impressive product. Especially fun are the design templates. As a long time Esquire reader (and having been written up once in the magazine) I’m delighted by the design template that mimics the Esquire style. But how come the actual Esquire blogs don’t use it?

I saw my old friend Rick Klau at Google today and he was talking about Blogger.  I started thinking about how — like Tumblr — the last time I logged into Blogger was a few years ago.  I forget that these web products undergo a constant process of development.  In my class, I require people to setup a Wordpress blog. I used to give everyone a choice of whatever platform they wanted, but for tech support purposes it turns out it is much easier to require everyone to use the same platform. Now I’m wondering if I should consider using a platform other than Wordpress next semester.

And randomly - I was goggling around to find the link to the Esquire piece and discovered that I’m apparently on the Advisory Board of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham. My brother and aunt (both Fordham alums) would be proud. The trouble is I’m pretty sure nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be on the Advisory Board. I was on the Advisory Board at NYU’s Elections and Campaign Management School - and it looks like that must have moved to Fordham? Meanwhile I have actually joined the Advisory Board of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard but haven’t made it on to their website.  That’s the internet for you.

I’m returning to blogging as the new school year looms just a few days away. After all, as my friend Dave pointed out, how can I require my students to blog and teach a class about (among other things) blogging if I’m not an active participant myself?

My personal domain - http://nicco.org - celebrated a ten year anniversary this past February, and I neglected to recognize the event.  The idea of nicco.org is even older - I had my own hosting account at the local ISP as early as 1996. But whois never lies (or does it?), so behold - at the ten year mark for nicco.org, I’m starting a tumblr blog for blogging of less personal nature. Having children has a way of dominating your photos and posting regimen.

As I’m gearing up for the new school year, my reading has been focused on recent books and articles about our digital era, especially as they relate to politics, the press, and public policy.  One topic I’m having a hard time figuring out how to address in a survey course is security — both national security and computer security. It seems worthwhile — a part of digital literacy — to understand malware and its implications, but at the same time I’ve struggled to find readings that were both interesting and useful. I’m all ears if you have some ideas.

Teaching is one of my all-time favorite activities. I find it enormously engaging on an intellectual — especially considering the quality of the students — and every semester provides new challenges, new topics, new opportunities to learn new things. One of my long time interests is in the governance structure of Wikipedia — an interest I’ve never explored in any great detail until recently. Now I’ve decided to add a couple of classes and some readings on the topic to my class, in part because of the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative and its encouragement. 

I’m looking forward to blogging again, writing every day and strengthening all the interesting muscles that go with writing, like thinking and reading and remembering.