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Robert Darnton, a historian and head of Harvard’s library system, has an important article in the New York Review of Books, called Google and the Future of Books. It lays the utopian Enlightenment vision of a “Republic of Letters” side by side with the development of the Internet. Darnton explains beautifully how the Enlightenment ideal failed to come about (through professionalization and commercialization of knowledge), and warns that we are about to miss another opportunity because of the settlement hammered out between the publishing industry and Google about copyright issues with the Google Books project. The most poignant passage is the following:

Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job [of digitizing the world’s books and making them available over the Internet] at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first.¬†‚Ķ¬†We could have created a National Digital Library‚Äîthe twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy‚Äîthe control of access to information‚Äîto be determined by private lawsuit.

A friend passed along this brief article from IEEE Spectrum. Among its interesting claims:

For today’s premium cars, “the cost of software and electronics can reach 35 to 40 percent of the cost of a car,” states [German professor Manfred] Broy, with software development contributing about 13 to 15 percent of that cost. He says that if it costs US $10 a line for developed software—a cost he says is low—for a premium car, its software alone represents about a billion dollars’ worth of investment.

Of all the staff hours in the entire program to build the [GMC Yukon] Two-Mode Hybrid transmission…some 70 percent…were devoted to developing the control software.

Myspace is described as having purged 90,000 registered sex offenders from its site. (Apparently there are 700,000 registered sex offenders nationally.) This has stirred up the controversy surrounding the recent report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which documented that sexual predation, while a real problem, does not generally fit the pattern of an adult stranger pedophile vs. an innocent child. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut AG, who dismissed the ISTTF report when it was issued, blasted that the MySpace purge “provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators.”

For a more nuanced and candid discussion of the ISTTF report, watch the video of the presentation at the Berkman Center yesterday by danah boyd, John Palfrey, Dean Sacco, and Laura DeBonis, who worked on the report. The Q+A with a sympathetic child safety advocate is quite interesting. For whatever reason, American society wants to identify the child safety problem with the scary stuff that is shown on Dateline; it’s actually much closer to home.

Google Earth is out with a new version that extends an extraordinary tool. The new version maps the bottom of the oceans as well as land masses; allows you to move in time as well as in space, watching changes in the landscape over the years; and tour Mars as well as earth. Google’s announcement here, and the New York Times story here.

I went to the local Stop and Shop to buy groceries this morning, passing on the opportunity to use the hand-held scanner about which I’ve blogged already. Preserving my privacy, remember? When I got to the checkout I was happy to find an open line with both a cashier and a bagger. As I always do, I asked the cashier to use his card — in Massachusetts, supermarkets are required to give you the “loyalty card” price if you ask for it. He acknowledged my request and scanned the groceries. I paid my $57.17 by credit card. As I was starting to wheel my cart away, I checked the register tape and discover that nothing had been discounted. (Why is it that they make you verify the total and complete the transaction BEFORE showing you their account of what you’re buying?)

I complained, and the cashier was surprised and apologetic — plainly he’d just neglected to do it. (When I made my request, though he did hear it, he was in the middle of a conversation with the bagger about whether McDonald’s might have been the source of his indigestion.) By now he’d already started scanning the next customer’s order.

He directed me to the service desk, staffed by two teenagers. I explained my problem, and one of them took the register tape, tore something off the bottom, and gave me back the rest. He then scanned or punched something into his computer and handed me $4.41 in cash. It took only a few seconds.

Now what strikes me about this is that the entire record of my purchase was accessible at the service desk. There are many good reasons for retaining those records — to prevent me from “returning” the same purchase multiple times, for example, the record can be updated to show when an item is returned. And of course a great deal of the analytical value of the data doesn’t depend on knowing my identity. But the instant rebate of exactly $4.41 reminds me how disaggregated the scanner data remains — probably forever.

And by the way — in the realm of really, truly watching you in stores — some of those video displays that show ads now have tiny, hidden cameras and enough processing smarts to tell whether you’re black or white, male or female — and to adjust the ads you are shown accordingly!

Barak Obama was the object of a google-bombing — searches for “cheerful achievement” got you links to Obama. And Obama inherited from George Bush some of the White-House-directed search results for “miserable failure.”

We talk about Google bombs in Blown to Bits (p. 150). Some conservative sources are suggesting political explanations for the fact that Google moved more quickly against these bombs than it did when the object was Bush. That seems a pretty silly idea — Google would have much better ways to create partisan slant than this. I imagine Google is simply very reluctant to interfere with the natural search results, and it took several years to develop algorithms that could reliably distinguish Google bombs from legitimate shifts in the ranks of pages. They would surely like the whole search engine to operate as an automaton exactly so they could not be accused manipulating results for partisan purposes. But getting algorithms to do things about which human beings might make different judgments is a tricky business.

An NSF internal report revealed that some NSF workers (including at least one high official) were using their NSF computers and Internet connections to view pornography and participate in pornographic chat rooms. Senator Grassley of Iowa, the same Senator Grassley who put the bogus Rimm report on Internet pornography on the cover of Time magazine a decade ago (p. 239 of Blown to Bits), wants answers from NSF. He is threatening to hold up NSF’s #3 billion share of the stimulus money until the Foundation cleans up its act.

Now this story is a good giggle about human stupidity (OK, male stupidity, I expect) and workings of bureaucracies. You do have to wonder, right off the bat, if NSF is being singled out just because it’s the only agency that actually conducted an internal audit of how its systems are being used. (Have they done that in Health and Human Services, for example?)

But there are a couple of more serious questions this raises. The first is whether Senator Grassley’s problem is the agency’s inefficiency or morals. If the report had said that time was being lost to eBay, or to reading stories about US tariffs on Roquefort cheese, would he have been equally upset? Because there is every reason to think that in offices all over the country, government and corporate, people are spending lots of time doing non-work stuff on the Internet. Given the recession, wouldn’t this be the logical time to try to get full value out of every employee?

And then there is the reminder that this stuff can be tracked. Every web site you visit can be recorded, and employers can monitor, analyze, restrict, and punish what we do on the Internet.

For many of us, the Internet has shattered the barriers between work time and home time; it’s as easy to do knowledge work from home as from the office. A certain amount of bleeding in the other direction is inevitable. Where are the limits of control over employee’s actions? I’m willing to go with the good Senator in condemning someone spending 20% of his office time viewing porn, but the workplace needs some reasonable standards, other than “you can’t do anything personal from your office,” or the surveillance and retaliation is going to be capricious and unpredictable.

A group called the Open Media and Information Companies Initiative is advocating free speech and information privacy through a novel strategy: they are trying to get shareholder resolutions endorsing such principles, and disclosing corporate practices in these areas, put on the docket for shareholder meetings of major communication and media companies. It’s far from clear that this approach will be particularly effective, but it can create public relations pressure for companies to be more open about what they are doing. I wish them luck!

That’s the title of a terrific piece from ComputerWorld documenting what the journalist found out about himself on the Web and how he found it.¬†Here’s the list:

Most people still think of Facebook as connecting friends, or perhaps “friends” in the technical sense that’s rather less committed than real friendship. It’s possible that Mark Zuckerberg anticipated that proceeding from that foundation, Facebook would become the worldwide phenomenon that it has. But could he possibly have imagined that it would be a major vehicle for political organizing in countries where unauthorized political organizing is banned?

In Egypt, as the New York Times reports, you can’t assemble more than 5 people without a government permit. And yet there are many Facebook groups for political factions, both liberal and radically Islamist. These groups are used to organize flesh-and-blood protests, as well as for the exchange of news and ideas. It’s exactly what the government doesn’t want to happen, and what it long was able to control through laws outlawing political assembly. But it can’t block Facebook — the site is part of the daily, non-political life of too many people. So it has become an important political platform — every bit as much as the printing press was in the 18th century in the US and France.