So I was unaware until I got a twitter from Jim that the UMW faculty academy was on UStream.tv.

They are off air right now, but they should be starting up around 11:15. I've embedded the Ustream below.

Live Videos provided by Ustream.TV

The Janet Murray presentation was wonderful, and the the faculty participation was absolutely stunning. Whatever they are putting in the water down there, I want some of it.

I'm a big fan of Ning, and lately I've been gearing up to launch an Alumni site in it. The first email invites will go out tomorrow.

Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.

See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.

There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.

Then suddenly -- not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.

There's a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred -- at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).

I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you're left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.

Still, I can't help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):



Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It's definitely something we'll be looking at as we launch the alumni site. There's nothing more unattractive than a dead shark.

There was yet another Andrew Keen inspired article last week bemoaning the age of "wikiality" — an age of supposed gullibility of us internet sorts. It begins with shocking news -- people are getting quotes wrong, and Web 2.0 is at fault:

Truth: Can You Handle It?
Better Yet: Do You Know It When You See It?
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page M01
...

How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln *

[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

Though not technically “true,” the quote makes a nice start to this article about truth, being topical and brief, so if we want to go with truth-by-consensus (very popular now), we can go ahead and just say that he said it.]

Hesse then explains the crisis:

Andrew Keen describes it as “the cult of the amateur” in his same-named book. Stephen Colbert called it “wikiality” — meaning, “a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it must be true.

Information specialists call it the death of information literacy.

What’s really amusing about the Hesse article is that her initial example – the Lincoln quote – is an example where the web was more correct — and the web could have shown her that. The web has well known conventions for dealing with authority and making truth more verifiable, and when these conventions are embraced rather than rejected, one gets better results.

Follow along while we compare what it takes to verify truth on the web, and what it takes the "old world"...

Score one for wiki-world


Hesse seems to be claiming that the web (and it's tendency to magnify casual opinion over scholarship) was responsible for this quote being wrong. But was the quote actually wrong? That seemed an important point -- and nothing in the article seemed to prove the "Brainy Quote" version false -- nothing, that is, beyond her simple assertion.

I decided to use the web to find older, more authoritative references to the "false" quote. It was easy once I realized that I should include the phrase “said Lincoln” to filter out simple non-contextualized quotes, such as one finds in quote lists. In fact, once I figured that out, an extremely early instance was on the first page of results [Note: my posting this article appears to have altered that result set]. It appears in a work called Lincoln’s Own Stories published in 1912:

Once when a deputation visited him and urged emancipation before he was ready, he argued that he could not enforce it, and, to illustrate, asked them: "How many legs will a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?” They answered, "Five." "You are mistaken," said Lincoln, "for calling a tail a leg don’t make it so"; and that exhibited the fallacy of their position more than twenty syllogisms.

It took less than fifteen minutes to prove the Hesse article wrong: far from being an false product of the wild web, the quote has an extremely good provenance. There’s a small matter of it being a sheep mentioned, but it matches the “wiki” quotes far better than the "long-winded anecdote" about a cow that Hesse favors.

Incidentally, the web can even show you how the "sheep" may have become a "dog": Christopher Morely uses the modified Lincoln quote in Parnassus on Wheels in 1917 citing a dog, Wikipedia shows us he was an editor of several editions of Bartlett's Quotations, which probably explains why the quote appears in his editions of Bartlett's in the dog variation (no full text online, but see cites here).

That doesn't seem to me a problem of authority. And it certainly has nothing to do with Web 2.0.

Score zero for the world of “authority”

Then, I decided to try it the other way round — could I prove the Hesse version of the Lincoln quote was from an even more trustworthy source?

Here’s where it gets ridiculous — the article that is bemoaning that people simply believe what they read provides no source for their version of the quote. So whereas you, the reader of this blog, can click the link “Lincoln’s Own Stories” to verify my assertion, to verify something in traditional media requires launching a federal investigation.

To try to find the source for her quote, I took the fact that it involved a cow, and probably contained the core phrase “calling a tail a leg”. Google Web search turned up nothing of use. Google Scholar turned nothing up, neither did Google Book Search. Figuring the author probably read this in a book (or saw it in a documentary) I tried Amazon’s full text search. Bingo.

The keywords I had chosen occurred in the biography “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald. But the book was not providing a useful context snippet to Amazon. So I went down to the library, and got the book out. I looked up “emancipation” in the index — far too many pages listed. Looked up cow, and of course found nothing. Ugh.

My lunch break was slipping away. In a moment of insight, I went to the terminal in the library and pulled up Amazon.com. I did “search inside the book” again. While the snippet didn’t appear, it gave me the page number: page 396. I turned to the page — Aha! There was the source of the Hesse version. It talked of a long-winded anecdote about a Western case involving a cow.

Which raises the question: why do the defenders of "truth" want to make it so hard to verify their sources?

(The answer, in case you haven't guessed yet, is they aren't defenders of truth. They are defenders of authority. And from Ancient Egypt on, authority was maintained by having exclusive access to information... )

I won’t belabor this much longer. The source of the quote in the Lincoln biography is an obscure quarterly from 1950, the nearest available copy of which is in Worcester, about an hour and a half away. I thought of getting the article through Interlibrary Loan, but realized from the title “A Conference with Abraham Lincoln: From the Diary of Nathan Brown” that even if I got the journal, the article relied on a diary that would not be accessible to me.

So the Hesse version appears based on a single, non-primary source which references a journal article the author didn’t read, and the journal article references a diary that neither the author of the WaPo article or the author of the biography has ever seen.

It’s a big circle of trust, none of it linkable. And yet the web people, who are insisting on verifiable, linked sources are somehow the intellectually sloppy ones.

A final check

Still, given my source was from 1912, and the unverifiable source was likely contemporary, I could only prove that the quote being bemoaned as a prodct of “wikiality” had a good history, and was more verifiable. I couldn’t prove that it was more likely. So I called in a favor. I used to be a programmer for the amazing Readex “Early American Newspapers” project, the project to create a searchable full text database of this nation’s periodicals from pre-revolutionary times until 1876. So I emailed a person I know that still programs there. I asked them if they could punch in “Lincoln” and “calling a tail a leg” into the product and send me back the first results.

Sixty seconds later I had my answer — Web: 1, Books: 0.

What Lincoln said to the party visiting him — well, it was reported in the Chicago Tribune at the time.

And it's not a "long-winded anecdote about a cow", but rather, it's much closer to that quote that appears in all those crazy wikis.

Headline: Lincoln’s Own Construction of His Proclamation;
Article Type:News/Opinion
Paper: Macon Telegraph, published as Macon Daily Telegraph;
Date: 10-23-1862; Issue: 841; Page: [3];

LINCOLN’S OWN CONSTRUCTION OF HIS PROCLAMATION — A little while anterior to Lincoln’s interview with the clerical committee (says the Chicago Tribune) a couple of other abolition fanatics found their way to the President and pressed upon him the emancipation scheme, and this was his reply: “You remember the slave who asked his master — if I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have? ’Five’ ’No, only four, for my calling a tail a leg would not make it so.”

(Incidentally, the Readex Collection of Early American Newspapers is the most exciting thing going on in historical databases today — if your institution doesn’t have a license to it, you’re not serious about American History. Go check it out…)

I realize this is a Macon paper (hardly an uninterested party) quoting the Chicago Tribune (as was the custom in early papers). But there are plenty of other hits from other papers in the list as well — I’m staying on the clear side of fair use here, but they are there to be discovered by any user of Readex.

Suffice it to say, however, that the quote, and Hesse’s problem with it, are far more telling than she anticipated.

The subtitle of her article asks if you'll know truth "when you see it".

It's a good question, but Hesse has the battery wired backwards.

The answer, from any web literate scholar, is if you make it easy for me to check it, maybe I will know it when I see it. The web does that in spades, which allows us, ironically, to repair the errors that the Washington Post generates.

[Cross-posted in part at the Online Communications Blog]

Good article today forwarded to me by Jenny Darrow asking whether sites like keene.edu are becoming increasingly irrelevant as marketing tools.

The answer is obvious to anyone that's ever looked at their Google Analytics: yes, absolutely. You can see this clearly in the statistics -- students come in and do a couple things in very fast succession:

1. Check tuition cost


2. Check financial assistance information


3. Maybe, though hardly ever, check to see if we offer a specific degree. (They almost never look for information about the degree -- the question is simply whether we have that degree).

Then it's to a decision point -- send me the application, apply online, or, in the case of Keene State -- schedule a campus tour (the option we really push, since it seems to be the most beneficial to the student and to us).

Why this surprises people I have no idea. But it continues to surprise people, who wonder why we don't put reams of material about program X or Y in between that student hitting the home page and the link to the campus tour.

The answer is that the student applying here has already made their decision before they hit the home page -- or at least made enough of a decision to schedule a campus tour. Marketing information has to be done well on a site like keene.edu -- but it's in broad strokes -- they've come in sold on taking that tour, assuming you handle that last five yards well.

[This isn't always the case with parents, who are often perusing the materials looking for the general "tone" of the college, but that's a post for another day].

So what is that decision based on? This decision to give you a chance that's made before they even type "Keene State College" into Google?

It's reputation. Word of mouth, the comments on Facebook or MySpace, Livejournal articles, what they saw on YouTube, what their high-school friends that came here last year told them. And maybe even importantly for this generation, it's what their parents may have heard on NHPR, or seen in the Concord Monitor, Newsweek, or USA Today.

And eventually, if we let it, it's through perusing the artifacts of the truly Visible University -- YouTubes of recitals, videos of football games, discussion boards of classrooms, student projects posted online.

So in a world we we cannot control what prospective students (and donors) see about us, what's left for us to do?

I believe the key is to engage those channels in an honest and helpful way, through embracing transparency and creating a culture of engagement. In a post .edu world, that's where our message has to go.

More on how to do that later. But give the article a gander, it's five paragraphs, and a good starting point.

The amount of stuff Ning gets right is impressive, but they're still blinded by tradition -- and few things demonstrate this more than their forum/blog division.

Want to know the question my members on my local Ning site ask me most often?

"Should I do this as a forum or a blog?"

And all I'm able to do is throw up my hands in frustration. By maintaining weird divisions between blogs (which are posted text + discussion) and forums (which are posted text + discussion) the creators of Ning have created a dilemma where there should be none.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just duplication. But the hidden ways in which these are different require just too much understanding of how Ning works:

1. Forums give you 15 minutes to edit your comment before it is locked (a fact which initially led me to use them for everything), blog comments are locked against changes immediately.


2. Blogs ping services like Technorati, forums don't. This is particularly annoying in running a public information site -- it means the time sensitive comment in the educational funding forum is unlikely to get indexed when it matters, where as the blog post about one's new cat goes out immediately.


3. Groups can only do forums, so if you want your thing categorized under a group name, a blog post is out.


4. Comments on blogs are called comments, on forums they are called "replies".


5. Forum comments can be nested, blog comments can't.


6. On the front page, forums show who the last reply was by to the forum -- a great tool to get you to realize there's more to respond to than the original post. Blogs just tell you the number of comments.


7. Blogs on the front page say the exact time they were posted -- forums just tell you the day.


8. Clicking on a member name on the forum blurb on the front page lists all posts and comments a person has made. Clicking on a member name on the blog post blurb takes you to their profile page.

This is barely scratching the surface. As a person with quite a background in blogging and forums it's confusing to me -- so no wonder people with less background are tearing their hair out about it.

I understand the idea that Ning must be working with -- that blogs are somehow about authors, and forums are about commenters.

But IMHO, that's a 2006 understanding of blogging. The point is, most of the time at the point you post in a community you don't know whether the value will end up being about the post or the comments.

That "in a community" bit is crucial. Look at the stuff that has grown up around Daily Kos, AutoblogGreen, and other community sites. Sometimes it's a conversation, and sometimes it's people dutifully responding to the meat of a post. But you really don't know which it is until it all shakes out.

So why not unify these two things, instead of maintaining this false and confusing seperation? Make it all blogging, and incorporate some of these differences into admin settings?

Feel free to respond to the post in the comments, or just discuss it among yourselves. Whichever.

So it's weird moving from managing a high-profile political community to managing a local information site. One minute you're spinning your way into the front page of the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, and the next you're talking about salamander crossings.

But there is a point here, trust me.

Salamander migrations occur here in New Hampshire every year, and a local organization helps get them across the road on the big nights they move. There are known migration paths, and hundreds of volunteers sign up to assist gathering them up and taking them across the road.

When you start digging into this locally, you find almost everybody has heard of this.

Here's the point -- there's varying degrees of success, mostly depending on the weather. The right rainy weather forces a big migration that can be managed-- less than that, a trickle. How it works out is news.

One of the crossing coordinators posted a beautiful comment on Citizen Keene last night, right after the attempt to help, and I think it's a great example of what local information can be: legitimate up-to-the-minute news, but passionate and personal at the same time.

I'm really curious to hear how the salamander crossing went tonight at all of our sites....at my site on Route 63 in Spofford, the rain mysteriously ceased from 8 until almost midnight -- prime crossing time -- so we had a frustratingly slow night. A big disappointment, since the weather forecast fooled me into thinking we'd have a Big Night on our hands. Still, the seven of us crossed 19 spotties, 20 peepers, 8 wood frogs, and 2 red efts. On the way home, I decided to take it real slow, stopping to cross every living amphibian that wandered across my path down Route 63 and over on 119, on my way back to my farmhouse apartment in Ashuelot. What would have been a twenty-minute drive turned into nearly two hours; I moved 10 more spotties, 6 additional wood frogs, 7 peepers, and one wayward toad, several only moments before a vehicle would likely have struck them. Several folks stopped to see if I needed help after seeing my hazards flashing, which was awfully nice: when I explained what I was doing to a Hinsdale police officer on 63, he told me that his wife crosses spotted salamanders too (!)

The carnage, of course, was sobering; nothing will make you HATE automobiles like hearing the "pop" of a wood frog being crushed under a tire, or seeing a spotted salamander with its crushed back cemented to the pavement.

I killed a woodfrog on my drive home, too. It leaped in front of my tire before I could swerve to avoid it; when I got out of the car to see if it had survived the encounter, I almost burst into tears. Then I heard the quacking of chorusing woodfrogs nearby, and discovered a vernal pool almost immediately adjacent to the road. I wandered down to the pool's edge with my flashlight, and witnessed the merriment in full force: wood frogs EVERYWHERE, a riot of quacking and swimming, a few couples already in amplexus, and a spottie (the odd one out!) swimming around too. SO MUCH LIFE! SO riotously beautiful....and a small comfort, I suppose, that the wood frog I had hit was heading away from the party, eggs already laid perhaps?

There's a lot different between running Blue Hampshire and Citizen Keene, but one thing remains the same: the key is to get people to participate -- and to discuss things that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. In the weeks to come I'll probably be droning on about why Ning is better than Soapblox, WPMU, phpBB and Zope for running a local information site -- but the key here is always participation and quality of discourse -- and if you're dithering on your own local information site because you can't decide on platform -- well, don't. Just get going with it. Life's just too short for us to miss these stories.

After a very confusing vote on a local school bond, I've stepped down from my old project Blue Hampshire, to start a local information site, called Citizen Keene.

There were an number of other reasons for stepping down -- as a newly promoted Director at a public college, I wanted to move away from being a prominent figure in partisan politics. Additionally, the workload of running Blue Hampshire was significant, and did not fit into my new job.

But those are more reasons for stepping down from Blue Hampshire.

The reason I started Citizen Keene is I felt the flow of local information was broken. Talking to people after the school bond failure, I found time and time again that the people who hadn't voted, or had voted in a way that they later regretted once they learned the facts -- these people were often good friends with people who had the facts.

But for whatever reason this information just was not transmitted.

And it was significant information. Almost no one understood what the rejection of the bond meant. The rejection of the bond didn't save money -- because a stay against enforcing certain code violations at the current middle school was predicated on the new school being built.

The upshot? The town will now spend $7 million dollars on band-aid fixes in the next two years, the school auditorium and industrial arts wing will close for at least three years, and current 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will likely spend their middle school years in portable trailer.

The turnout was 16%. The bond failed by 24 votes. Now that the vote is over, there's no end of people that didn't vote or voted it down who believe they weren't provided the information they needed to make the decision. No one would have voted this way had they had the facts.

It's easy to look at that and say, well, you should have just done your homework.

But I've never seen that response solve anything. On the whole the amount of time that people are willing to put toward these things is constant. If you can get that information to them more efficiently you can change things. But you're not going to shame them into spending more time to become informed. It just doesn't work that way.

So Citizen Keene isn't about technology, or Facebook coolness, or IPOs. It's about the fact my 3rd grade daughter is likely to spend her middle school years in a trailer while they fix fire code issues in a school the town had been trying to move out of since 1968. And that's going to happen because information flow is broken, and I want to fix that.

In coming days, I hope to explain why I chose the technoogy I did to build the site, and what the relation of this experiment is to academic technology and online communications. So please stay tuned, even is this doesn't seem like it ties into the traditional subjects of this blog. It all ties in I promise, and will be useful to everybody from professors to college web editors.

But it does start with my daughter's future, and it has a deep meaning to me. That's step one.