Radio Berkman

In the early days of the LLC launching a business might have been a simple task. After all, chances are your partners were close by and you probably worked within the laws of your state. It was mostly a local task.

Setting your shingle out in the 21st Century might be a bit more arduous. You’ve got partners in different time zones, and where once you might have met face to face, now you’re making decisions over conference call, IM, maybe even Twitter and Facebook. And all of the paperwork and record keeping involved with staying legal seems somehow past its expiration date.

Today’s guest says the LLC was probably one of the greatest inventions of all time, on par with the steam engine and electricity. This legal infrastructure for operating a business helped promote innovation by pinning the cost of risk to a collective entity rather than to the individual.

But the humble LLC has a lot of growing to do if it wants to keep up with the digital revolution.

Oliver Goodenough — of the Law Lab at the Berkman Center — talks with guest interviewer Zeba Khan about the evolution of business law, and a new initiative he’s been working on with the State of Vermont to let new businesses function online.

CC/Public Domain Music from:

Learning Music Monthly

Morgantj – Café Connection

What are you doing with your spare cycles? You know, the bits of time you spend on the web when you’re not really being productive? Maybe you’re waiting for a file to download. Maybe you’re playing a game. Maybe you’re even filling out a form.

All of these little moments could in fact be put to good use.

In some cases, they are. And you might not even know it.

For instance, when you type out a Captcha — those little squiggly words on a web form you transcribe to prove you’re human — you are in fact transcribing a word from a scanned book. A word that is illegible to a computer’s eye. Here, you’re simultaneously proving you are a human being (not a robot), and also doing a good deed (helping to transcribe text).

You can thank today’s guest for that little innovation. Luis von Ahn — professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and expert in the field of human computation — explores the little innovations on the web that are harnessing the power of millions to change the world. Not always for the good.

CC/Public Domain Music from:

Learning Music Monthly

State Shirt – Computer

Neurowaxx – Carioca

Take a look at the headlines of any major newspaper or news magazine. Check out the non-fiction bestsellers at Amazon. The net is on everyone’s minds.

Or more specifically, the way the net is on our minds is on our minds. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows paints a bleak picture of what the net is doing to our plastic brains, cheapening our relationships, and ruining our attention spans. Clay Shirky’s recent release Cognitive Surplus on the other hand celebrates the web’s power to enable quick, smart, crowdsourced action and creativity.

Hundreds of other authors and thinkers have responded with their own variations and theories on what the internet is doing to us, and what we are doing on the net.

With all of this thinking on the net, we thought it was time to do some thinking on the thinking on the net. And luckily we have two great thinker thinkers in house.

Our very own David Weinberger has suggested jokingly that there should be a Myers-Briggs test for net fanaticism, while memetracker and ROFLCon founder Tim Hwang has grouped net thinkers into schools. Today, they explain how different thinkers think on the net, and importantly, why the heck everyone’s so interested.

What kind of net thinker are you? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

MMORPGs may maim and pwn but words will never hurt me.

In online gaming environments you may be getting shot at, impaled, or run over by tanks. But the more serious damage may come in the form of the offensive chatter bandied about casually between players connected remotely via headsets.

Racist, homophobic, and sexist language proliferates as gamers trash talk. But often such language and name calling is used, not to offend, but to distract and gain attention.

Such “Griefing” behavior is meant to be ironic. “I am not racist/sexist/homophobic,” a griefer will think, “therefore, my use of an offensive term is just a joke. If you interpret it any other way then you just don’t get it.”

But that doesn’t mean griefing doesn’t have an impact.

Lisa Nakamura — Professor in the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of the book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet — spoke to David Weinberger about the origins of griefing, and how online communities are dealing with it.

CC Music this week:

Scott Altham: Hear Us Now

Learning Music: Ovulation

With the estimated 250 to 450 million soccer fans now descending upon South Africa for the World Cup, we can expect to see billions of dollars of spent in local communities, benefitting the entire region.

Locals and soccer fans alike are also looking out for an increase in crime that comes with such a dramatic increase in population. Vandalism and mugging come with the territory. But NGOs and public agencies are also looking out for an increase in crimes that prey on South Africa’s vulnerable young population.

In a country already facing high instances of child abuse, rape, and sexual violence towards women — children can easily stumble upon pornography and pathways to abuse by way of broadcast, internet, and mobile phones.

Nadine Naidoo of Visionaries in Africa was concerned about the potential for the World Cup to bring with it a dramatic increase in sexual violence towards children, enabled by the media. So she is running a 30 day multimedia project of her own, coinciding with the World Cup and incorporating video, podcasts, interviews, and a live concert to raise awareness about the dangers facing children.

CC Music this week:

Arslkhan: “Love Odyssey”

Greg Williams: “Teagarden, Blues, and Rain”

Let’s admit it: the advertising world we once knew is long dead. In a couple short decades, the digital revolution has fundamentally undermined all of the old arbiters of image, from Madison Avenue to Hollywood to K Street.

Companies have been quick to jump ship and join the social media bandwagon. Even without clear proof that Facebook and smartphone apps will garner them an audience. It’s almost enough to make Don Draper roll over in his scotch glass.

But it’s not just Facebook and smartphones that companies have to worry about. Be it the blockbuster movie producer trying to find ticket buyers, the multinational pizza company seeking hungry consumers, or the home-based graphic novelist looking for readers — the ways of reaching an audience are now limitless. And there is a premium for “sticky” experiences that engage consumers, over the old-fashioned billboards and banner ads which consumers are more likely to overlook. And building these experiences can be risky, and costly.

Still, companies are taking the gamble, buying up companies with no clear revenue model, and investing in experimental outreach strategies for which “success” has only a few solid metrics.

To navigate the muddy waters of digital outreach you need a guide. Sarah Szalavitz is one of the more informed and experienced folks in the social media world. Founder and CEO of 7-Robot — as well as a former Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law Graduate, and media mogul with too many credits to mention (we put some links in the Reference Section below) — Sarah swung by the Berkman Center not long ago for a conversation about what she calls “social design” and the cooperative evolution of brands, people, and social media spaces.

CC Music this week:

Podington Bear: Jackie and Floyd

General Fuzz: Acclimate

Jaspertine: Pling

Coconut Monkeyrocket: Accidental Beatnik

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and video moves at 30 frames per second, how many words could you get for 24 hours of footage?

Today’s guest started a project that may have the answer to that question.

The Global Lives Project picked ten subjects from around the world, followed each of them with a camera for 24 hours straight, and is now sharing the footage of their lives with the world, uncut, unaltered, in museum exhibits and online.

It’s fascinating enough as an art project. But for David Evan Harris – a trained sociologist and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future – the project also raises interesting questions about the role multimedia can play in the more traditional world of academic research.

If you’re near San Francisco you can experience the Global Lives Project for yourself at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until June 20, 2010.

Listen in here for a sneak preview.

CC Music this week:

Neurowaxx – Carioca & Pop Circus

Step into a world where information floats through the open air — around your house, around your town, around the world — just waiting for you to reach up and grab it. Music, movies, phone calls from loved ones, the sound of your baby crying — it all travels in the charged particle space known as Spectrum.

Your average consumer might interact with a dozen or more devices on a daily basis, designed specifically to both emit and pluck information to and from the air. But how much do we really understand spectrum? There are fights going on right now between regulators, media and telecommunications companies, and consumers about how spectrum is bought, sold, and used. Today’s guest argues that we need to go back to basics to effectively settle these battles.

Christian Sandvig is a Berkman Center Fellow and director of the Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On this week’s show David Weinberger and Sandvig elegantly deconstruct Spectrum, and give us some ideas as to how we can use this space more effectively.

CC Music this week:

Jeremiah Jacobs: Bounce Loops

Last week the FCC announced that they would seek a “third way” in regulating the broadband industry, one that they hope will respect a recent court decision prohibiting them from cracking down on telecomms, while also ensuring some level of net neutrality.

Susan Crawford co-led the FCC Agency Review team for the Obama-Biden transition team and served as President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy until December 2009. She now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. She founded OneWebDay and can be found blogging here.

Susan spoke with David Weinberger about what the FCC’s “third way” is, and what it could mean for how bits get to your house.

Creative Commons music used this week:

Scott Altham

Does the discussion of a free and open internet really have to be an ideological debate? Some would say the situation is black or white, open or closed. You are either for freedom of content, the right to post anonymously, and to opt out of having your data tracked, or you are in favor of censorship, filtering, and monitoring.

But delve deeper into the discussion and you’ll notice the nuance. In fact, if you don’t notice some caveats in the debate you’re probably not looking deeply enough.

One person who has spent a lot of time looking at those caveats is legal expert and Berkman Center fellow Donnie Dong. He says there is room for more than one perspective on how the net should work, and cautions against pursuing a common denominator along ideological lines. Culturally, linguistically, and individually we do not see a unified internet, regardless of the technological underpinnings that bring us together on the web.

Donnie says the multi-cultural web we are currently experiencing represents a kind of “cyberpluralism,” a phenomenon that would be good to acknowledge as we debate the future of the web.

Music this week:

Scott Altham – Hear Us Now

Childish Gambino – Baby Doll