I'm here at the Berkman Thursday meeting listening to Urs Gasser speak about what he calls "information quality". He started out talking about a few cases where the implicit meaning of quality with respect to information meant accuracy. While this made sense for some fairly straightforward issues (e.g. fake herbal medicines or lies in the news), I found it a pretty simple and obvious definition.

Then he talked about information as being relational between communicating entities. That makes more sense, because different individuals will have different goals for a piece of information. And now he's pulling in transnational legal issues that arise when stuff published on the internet gets delivered in a place that has different libel or hate speech laws.

At this point, the definition of information quality seems so broad that we couldn't possibly conclude anything about it in general. And Urs pauses for questions; I ask this (bluntly). First answer: yes, there are many aspects. Second answer: there are some internet-specific issues in information quality, like Wikipedia edit wars (I don't quite believe this). Thirdly, these issues are not just theoretical but also relevant in practice.

I am still not convinced, but I am listening.

Urs thinks there are three approaches worth considering:

1. Laissez-faire. We don't want to even think about internet info quality regulation; no one has the power to regulate quality. The problem with this argument, in my opinion, is that information quality is fundamentally dependent on social exchanges and there is a power balance in those which will always serve to regulate it in the context of that social structure. Good and bad fight it out over time and the good lives (J.S. Mill).
   I asked about why this is even possible. Mal asks a similar question: info quality is transactional, so just producing more information without adding more informed transactions implies a vacuous definition of information. As if you want produce information by adding speakers. Bah.
2. Information order model. An authority, like China but also possible a democratic society, making choices about information quality regulation. Also consider the BBC and internet forums with a moderator.
3. A decentralized model. Starts with the assumption "information quality is imporant" but admits it's hard to define and there are fundamental reasons we cannot produce a valuable shared normative definition of information quality.

Now we go off on a tangent and talk about markets for a while. Google seems like a sort of information market in the sense that it values each website. There are different approaches (reputation systems, etc.) and they have different advantages and disadvantages. I think this is what Urs' paper is about, so I'm hoping that means this will get more specific.

I want to ask: what problems are you trying to solve?

I don't really think there is such a thing as information quality. There are such things as trust, lies, information availability, listening, speaking, publishing, believing, regulation, communication, relationships, and censorship. But is there some meaningful common ground?

On blogs, Urs notes, that we don't have laws to establish social contracts for information-related transactions. Some bloggers explicitly state poilicies. On top of this, I think that all bloggers take part in implicit social contracts, unwritten assumptions that underlie communities and cultures and help people communicate.

Urs has to leave… which I think is kinda lame, but quite forgivable. I'm still not sure he's talked about anything specific enough to be meaningful.

Tonight the Berkman Blog Group is going on a field trip. We'll visit Boston's Institute for Contemporary Arts, and each blog about their exhibit Getting Emotional. The exhibit is about works that depict emotion.

Take a look at the ICA's page on the exhibit. Take a look right now, then come back and read the rest.

The two photographs on the ICA's page were extremely jarring for me. The photo on the left, of a woman on hands and knees apparently screaming, was very moving for me. Maybe my avoidance of television is re-sensitizing me. But that's not all.

The photo on the right, of a basketball player either cheering or freaking out, isn't on its own as moving as the screaming woman. It does strike a chord, though.

Alarmingly, what's really freaky is the emotional dissonance evoked by the presentation of these two pictures together. Part of that is their appearance on my tiny little screen, catching me unaware because I was expecting, like, jumbles of paint representing "confusion", not actual photos of real live people actually freaking out.

The effect of this was so strong that I couldn't look at that page. I switched away from it very quickly. And I had the oddest feeling, not sadness or fear or pride in connection with the individual photographs, but a mental (not emotional; my mind hurt!) pain at the simultaneous evocation of such dischordant emotions. I think it actually gave me a bit of a headache, and I am prone neither to strong emotional reactions to pictures nor to headaches.

I wonder whether I will experience the same pain at the exhibit tonight. I am worried about that. But also intrigued.

Tonight at the Berkman Thursday Blog Meeting I'll be facilitating a discussion about tagging. Tagging is the hot phenomenon of user-supplied labels, used on popular sites like del.icio.us and flickr, and on my own frassle. Why is tagging so popular? What makes it interesting? And is it an innovation or just a short-lived fad that will soon be destroyed by confusion and spam?

Berkman Thursday blog meetings are free, public weekly meetings for people interested in weblogs. We discuss technology along with its social effects and influences, and it's also a chance to complement your online community with some face-to-face meetings, learn the latest tricks, and ask questions—there is no expertise requirement. The meetings, Thursdays at 7pm at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, are also streamed online and have an IRC (chat) channel for participants who can't come to Cambridge, MA. More information is available on our weblog.

Here's the plan for tonight's tagging discussion:

God help me, but I might have to set up a shoutcast/icecast stream from a macintosh this evening. Bookmarks:

• Audion 3, for OS 9 and OS X
• Mac Amp Lite X (defunct)
• Apple QuickTime Broadcaster (does it do shoutcast?)

• Status of rura.org streams
• The stream itself

Update: Ben sent a link to this howto, which seems useful if you're a unix geek stuck in mac-land.

How to set up streaming audio for a meeting using no-cost software

• What you'll need

• mic (omnidirectional) & laptop (windows XP)
• streaming audio server (fedora core 2 gnu/linux box in CA)
• test mp3 client (desktop machine with net connection & MP3 player)

Server setup

• prerequisites (libtheora)
• get & install RPM
• emacs /etc/shoutcast.xml
• ensure iptables are open
• start the server: icecast -c /etc/icecast.xml

Audio source setup

• get & install SHOUTcast DSP plugin for Winamp 5
• start Winamp
• configure SHOUTcast plugin
• connect to server

Listener setup

• http://myserver:8000/stream

Screencast of the above coming soon…

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Steve produced a nice 10-minute version of our Thursday meeting. It's a lot easier to watch than the meeting, which I found a little annoying.

The only logical conclusion that a crew from ABC Nightline can draw from yesterday's Berkman Blog Meeting is that bloggers are a bunch of screaming monkeys jockeying among themselves to produce a statement so quotable it will be on television.

That is the spectacle we experienced last night, when a record number of people converged on the Baker House conference room to discuss issue of blogging and on/off the record. It was an interesting topic, but seeing this many people demonstrate their overarching desire to get their mug on television was just… depressing.

I honestly didn't have all that much to say on this topic, but there was one question the Nightline correspondent asked that I would have liked to answer. (Mostly the crew just filmed, but at the end Mr. Donovan (?) asked a couple of questions.) He asked simply, why do we come here?

That's an interesting question because the motivations behind the Berkman Thursday meetings are so different from the motivations behind the meetings many of us corporate worker bees are used to. At work, a meeting that sucks is one with no agenda, where you spend most of the time getting to know the other people in the room, reach no actionable decisions, and come out with 15 different understandings. But this is pretty much what we do every week at Berkman.

Why? Because we're not corporate worker bees. We're a bunch of friends who learn a lot from each other. Normally, a Berkman meeting makes me smarter. Not because I convinced some newbies that wrangling Movable Type is so easy only a moron could screw it up, but because I asked one newbie to explain her struggle getting some piece of software to work. I develop software, and I want that software to be usable by humans who not only are not me but are people I may have not even met. It's hard enough to design software my own coworkers can use, so I need all the help I can get.

I come to Berkman Thursday meetings to listen, so I can be a better software developer.

Yesterday's meeting sucked because there wasn't much to listen to, just a bunch of people competing for best sounding paraphrase of something witty someone else said. That's why the dinner afterwards was such a relief; there were no cameras, and the screaming egotists were not at my end of the table. I sat next to a traveller named Andy, a Nightline producer named Alissa (Elissa? Alyssa?), Rebecca MacKinnon, Ingo Muschenetz, Ann House (blog?), and Jennifer Stoner. And I learned some stuff, like if the cops in China catch you taping something you shouldn't, a high speed chase is a viable option because they often get lazy. And that if you're setting up Movable Type and you're almost there but you have to give up and pay for TypePad instead, it's frustrating.

And then the Nightline correspondent decided to buy us all dinner. That was nice.

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On 3 Feb 2005, a few Berkmanites including myself joined Greg Narain for some Beercasting — a podcast recording of people telling stories at a pub. It was fun. I think I'm on the topics titled Love At First Sight, Or Almost and Traveller's Tales: Stories From Near and Far.

Update: Steve Garfield has a cool video post about this.

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Betsy Devine has an inside view of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, in her own unusually endearing style. Perhaps one of the happiest weeks for one of the happiest people I know!

[via Jim Moore]

Josh starts off the discussion with a question about what blogging tools and applications might interest information professionals. Randy mentions Air America radio, which has huge comment threads. Lisa mentions office knowledge sharing systems: the ideal, back in her analyst days, would have been a system like del.icio.us with the ability to selectively share things with clients.

New people! Meghan of Megastyles, Erica (new to the Berkman Center), and Adam Gaffin. Regulars include Vernica, Sun, Randy, Josh, Michael, Wendy, Gregor, Lisa, and j.

New topic: Marc Canter, who is interested in "Digital Lifestyle Aggregators," which gather all sorts of microcontent and media. He's currently on a tour promoting these standards and trying to get social network sites to standardize on FOAF. This will give us a chance to invite a speaker to speak for us, nail down a date (Nov 18), set up our audio streaming, etc.

Adam tells us a little bit about how blog comments are weak and incapable of sustaining community. I agree (of course). Meghan talks about how she got a job from blogging(!) and Boston is nice because you can walk around in your pajamas.