This article examines the Hollywood Stock Exchange and gives basic information about its usage and what happens with the collected data.  In the case of HSX, the value lies not in the prediction of the future, but rather the accumulation of the preferences (tied to the demograpic information) of the average users.  That data is then sold to production companies who can adjust their upcoming films, and determine more intelligent money allocation based on their consumers.  This model works two ways, predicting the value of actors, producers and movies and also informing the film industry about what the average consumer desires. 

    While the Hollywood Stock Exchange does not release their demographic information on their website, they operate an entire research end that enables studios to selectively purchase certain types of data collected.  In this case it is important for the average person to join in on the trading, not only to get data on the target audience but also to give reason to attract experts, who see opportunity to do well.  These experts' opinions are important and might not be harnessed in other more traditional methods.

    Collective Intelligence is described here as a tool to be harnessed, since crowds can also have negative or difficult characteristics in most other contexts and are generally not preferred to deal with "directly".  The formed collective can almost be thought of as a almost a distinct individual or expert according to Watkins.  Prediction markets here are examined as "sophistocated aggregation tools" bringing together communities of self-selected individuals who already perhaps have an emotional investment in the issues.  Watkins is also concerned with issues of trust and how to cultivate public trust in collective intelligence as a reliable source of information.

    Watkins touches on the characteristics of particular communities and the individuals who are drawn to prediction markets, an area that I plan on focusing on more intesively through the study of forums and demographic data on each of the particular sites.  In additon, the notion of trusting this collective prediction over that of the experts interacts interestingly with Surowiecki's theory that they experts often partake in the predicting.

Bledsoe, Elliott. "Lessig's Use of Flickr Photos: is Creative Commons Really a Community?" Creative Commons Through the Looking Glass.

          Bledsoe's blog was inspired by a comment Lessig made on his own blog about how, after using a photograph from Flickr in a post, the photographer actually came up to him in Hong Kong. According to Lessig, it was "the most amazing fact of the day". This led Bledsoe to question how, or even if, Creative Commons functions as a community since it relies not only on legal permission but on the idea of sharing and the relationships that sharing facilitates. What makes CC different is that things are not directly shared like they would be in the real world. He compares CC to borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor, which involves a direction need and interaction. Using a CC license, however, preempts sharing. Even though someone may not need or want to use the work, permission has been granted anyway without any direction interaction between parties. CC also lacks direct membership which even other online communities have. The point here is that with no central hub and no obvious boundaries in the community, it's actually likely that "members" (those using CC licenses) will feel very isolated. CC then becomes a community only in the fact that it facilitates smaller subcommunities which have come to use it.

        This article emphasizes this idea that Creative Commons facilitates communities and, in turn, the commons. Some of the examples of subcommunities that Bledsoe mentions are Flickr and DeviantArt, places that my project hopes to emphasize as models of the value of the commons online and how Creative Commons plays a role in it. Both of them are made possible, at least in part, but the larger CC community. However, the article points out an important distinction. CC itself is not (at least not yet) a community in the same way that Flickr and DeviantArt are. No one has to sign up or login to use CC licenses. No one discriminates against who can and cannot use these licenses and therefore little is shared among users except for their willingness to share. But smaller communities that embrace CC licenses offer the boundaries and distinctions necessary for a community to really flourish.      

Creative Commons. "DeviantArt." CC Wiki.

          This case study is about the "world's largest, most vibrant, and relevant online community focused specifically on ART" (DeviantArt, or simply DA), which was founded in 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Angelo Sotira, and Matthew Stephens. The site hosts around 55 million works by 4.5 million users, spanning all categories of art from skins to photomanipulations, animations, stocks, paintings, literature, and more. There are free memberships as well as subscription based memberships. Those with subscriptions enjoy more benefits, such as earning fifty percent of any revenue from prints versus the ten percent non-subscriptions members would earn. DA offers an advertising service (adCast), which gives discounted rates to "non-profit and community-related products".

          DA began using CC licenses in November, 2006. The default on the site is still regular copyright, but users have the option of placing their work under a CC license. DA administrators operate under the same system of take-down notices that many places do when works infringe on copyright. If someone complains that their work has been used against their wishes, the administration deletes it. The owner of the deleted work still has the opportunity to argue that it was not copyright infringement though. CC is seen as preferable to watermarking images and though DA doesn't believe it will solve all the problems, it is excited about its ability to help alleviate them.

       DeviantArt is a truly wonderful example of how CC, copyright, and online community norms come together. Many users license works under CC, mainly for the purpose of becoming part of a photomanipulation later on. The beauty of this is photomanipulation for many people would be impossible without the stock provided by other artists. This is just one of the things that DA and CC facilitates. However, as an online community, DA also has a standard of norms. The case study briefly mentions the messaging network that helps connect DA users to one another, just one of the services on the site that allows for this community to grow. More importantly, the community knows that many artists do not use CC licenses, preferring to list their own rules in journals or comments on their images when CC does not offer enough. Most artists request a link to the finished work. In this way, the artist can see how their work is being used and the creator of the new work is also able to share their work with others. DA is really a flourishing example of how online communities add to the commons, be it through CC or their own standard practices.

Citation: Etzioni, Amitai.  “On Protecting Children from Speech.” Chicago-Kent Law Review. 2004: 3-53. Google Scholar. 5 April 2009. http://lawreview.kentlaw.edu/articles/79-1/Etzioni.pdf

 

            This article discusses and analyses the issues concerning children’s rights to free speech.  According to the author, past court cases care more about how restricting access for children would inadvertently affect adults than they do about how there is a compelling state interest to protect children from harmful speech.  To remedy this, Etzoini thinks Internet access for children and adults should become separate.  Where it is not possible to make a separation, government regulation is needed, because voluntary measures, such as parents choosing to purchase filtering softwares, are generally ineffective.  A review of research studies concludes children can be harmed by viewing objectionable media content, although this has been more definitely proven for violent content than for pornography.  Etzoini also says that as children get older, they should have greater free speech rights, and should have their content restricted less.

 

            The article provides a counterargument to some of the other documents published concerning how children can be protected from harmful content on the Internet. The Supreme Court cases concerning section 223 of the CDA and COPA were struck down in part because it was believed that there was truly no way for to restrict content for children without also inadvertently restricting it for adults.  Etzioni, however, believes there may be ways to separate Internet access based on age. Additionally, this article differs from the arguments made by Thierer, because it  favors governmental regulation of content over self-regulation. Etizoni’s reason for the ineffectiveness of voluntary regulation does however relate to a concept Thierer discusses – that of self efficacy.  If people’s motivation to filter the Internet content of minors, self-regulation could potentially work. The problem right now is that efficacy is too low for people to want to take an initiative and regulate content.

Citation: "Children's Internet Protection Act." 2000. Internet Free Expression Alliance. 4 April 2009. <http://ifea.net/cipa.pdf>.

 

The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is a law passed by Congress that encourages filtering the Internet to protect minors by giving schools and libraries financial incentives to do so.  Throughout the text, the legislation defines terminology used in the remainder of the document.  It states that schools and libraries cannot use federal funds to buy computers or aid Internet access unless they have policies and softwares in place designed to filter visuals on the Internet that contain obscenity, child pornography and material harmful to minors.  There is also discussion of how the government plans to implement the law in schools and libraries and how groups can waive this requirement.  An exception to the filtering rule is also provided; schools can disable filtering softwares for research purposes.  The law concludes by discussing how schools and libraries need to document and enforce the policies outlined in CIPA, and what the legal ramifications for the schools and libraries are if they do not enforce the policies.

 

            CIPA is relevant to my paper because it demonstrates how the government can constitutionally play a role in protecting children online and it shows governmental support for self-regulation. CIPA, unlike parts of the CDA and COPA, has been ruled to be Constitutional and not in violation of the first amendment, because Congress is providing incentives for schools and libraries to regulate content on their own computers, rather than requiring regulation. Congress seemed to take the Supreme Court’s ruling concerning the CDA into consideration when drafting CIPA, because the law allows filtering of obscene and pornographic material but not indecent material.  Encouraging communities to enact regulations protecting children themselves is also a better strategy than governmental regulation because it allows communities to better apply their own standards regarding what is obscene and harmful to minors.  The government’s established definitions of obscenity and harm to minors involve applying community standards, so this law does a good job of following past legislative precedents, giving the law even greater validity.

ABSTRACT

Abstract
In this paper we explore a method of decomposition of compound tags found in social tagging systems
and outline several results, including improvement of search indexes, extraction of semantic information,
and benefits to usability. Analysis of tagging habits demonstrates that social tagging systems such as
del.icio.us and flickr include both formal metadata, such as geotags, and informally created metadata,
such as annotations and descriptions. The majority of tags represent informal metadata; that is, they are
not structured according to a formal model, nor do they correspond to a formal ontology.
Statistical exploration of the main tag corpus demonstrates that such searches use only a subset of the
available tags; for example, many tags are composed as ad hoc compounds of terms. In order to improve
accuracy of searching across the data contained within these tags, a method must be employed to
decompose compounds in such a way that there is a high degree of confidence in the result. An approach
to decomposition of English-language compounds, designed for use within a small initial sample tagset, is
described. Possible decompositions are identified from a generous wordlist, subject to selective lexicon
snipping. In order to identify the most likely, a Bayesian classifier is used across term elements. To
compensate for the limited sample set, a word classifier is employed and the results classified using a
similar method, resulting in a successful classification rate of 88%, and a false negative rate of only 1%.

There are numerous difficulties with collaborative tagging systems (e.g. low precision, lack of collocation, etc.) that originate from the absence of properties that characterise controlled vocabularies. However, such systems can not be dismissed. Librarians and information professionals have lessons to learn from the interactive and social aspects exemplified by collaborative tagging systems, as well as their success in engaging users with information management. The future co-existence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging is predicted, with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal and informal.
Research limitations/implications – Librarians and information professional researchers should be playing a leading role in research aimed at assessing the efficacy of collaborative tagging in relation to information storage, organisation, and retrieval, and to influence the future development of collaborative tagging systems.
Practical implications – The paper indicates clear areas where digital libraries and repositories could innovate in order to better engage users with information.

ABSTRACT

Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of becoming technological infrastructure to support knowledge management activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges, however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology generation, user and document recommendation. Design prototypes, evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.

Philadelphia City Planning Commission site with current plans for Philadelphia neighborhoods.