Michael Zimmer.org

I am pleased to announce that the Center for Information Policy Research and the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are hosting an important conference on “The Ethics of Information Organization“. The full CFP is below:
The Ethics of Information Organization
May 22-23, 2009
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Information organization (IO), like other major functions of the information profession, faces many ethical challenges. In the IO literature, ethical concerns have been raised with regard to, for example, the role of national and international IO standards, providing subject access to information, deprofessionalization and …

For some odd reason, the New York Times has an article declaring that data-mining has now gone mainstream:
…a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information, ever faster and cheaper computing, and the explosion of online networks and data collection.
Sorry, Gray Lady, this isn’t some new thang. This has been going on or quite a while.
This is probably best argued in James Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. In this detailed …

I missed this when it was first released back in March: UNESCO has published a survey on ethical implications of emerging technologies, “Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies”:
The ethical, legal and societal implications of ICTs are one of the three main priorities of UNESCO’s Information for All Programme and UNESCO was recently designated as the Facilitator for the implementation of Action Line C10 “Ethical Dimensions of the Information Society” of the Geneva Action Plan adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society.
Moreover, UNESCO encourages the definition and adoption of best …

David Matheson has posted an excellent essay on the blog*on*nymity research blog suggesting a merger of Nagel and Rawls into a theory of “the original privacy position”:
Perhaps we can make use of a privacy version of the Original Position; call it the “Original Privacy Position.” Thus, as before, imagine a group of individuals behind a metaphorical veil of ignorance. Now, however, the veil only precludes them from knowing anything significant about their privacy position in society. Inhabitants of the Original Privacy Position, in other words, don’t know such things as …

There has been much attention paid to Google’s newest feature Google Q&A. Google Q&A (Google’s response to features already provided by Yahoo & Ask Jeeves) delivers factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other sites and look for the information. For example, if a user enters the query ‘Portugal population,’ Google returns the answer — 10.5 million — along with a link to the Web page where the information came from.
Of course, there are limits to …

Today’s New York Times includes a story on mind-mapping software, “To-Do List: Shop, Pay Bills, Organize Brain.” It suggests that to learn new topics, organize ideas and spur creative thinking, people should draw dynamic and unstructured “mind maps” rather than traditional lists and outlines:
Ever since high school, I have relied on classic I, II, III-style outlines to organize ideas. (The best computerized outliner, in my view, is still NoteMap, $149 from CaseSoft.com.) With MindManager, you create an outline not by writing out a list but by entering one main idea …

There’s a discussion at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine about what term should be used to describe “blogs” (the assumption being, apparently, that “blogs” is too techie, or has a negative connotation, or something like that). Jeff has frequently used the term “citizens’ media,” but Bill Keller suggested perhaps “peoples’ media” is a better fit. Jeff’s current offering is Volksmedia: “I like that. It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude.” An almost certain response was the connotation between “volks” and Hitler. So, toss that out.
I …

Susan Crawford comments on a recent talk by Benjamin Reeve about the impoverished nature of our understanding of information:
The thesis…is that Shannon’s understanding of information is not helpful — that information is really differences that “make a difference” by causing a system to change its state. Informational things have different qualities than physical things (you can’t run an algorithm against a hill). Most fundamentally, information is not conserved. Information, instead, amplifies. But amplification, just for its own sake, isn’t an unmixed good. Instead, what we …