Official Description:

Closing Keynote:

The Stamp of Truth: Brands in the Marketplace of Ideas
Paul Duguid, Adjunct Professor, University of California Berkeley

Technological innovations have continuously raised hope that everyone who chooses may be his or her own publisher. Faced with this new-found openness, old, closed monopolies - newspapers, publishing houses, television stations - will fall away and a pure marketplace of ideas will emerge to be, as Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested, "the best test of truth." It hasn't quite turned out like that. Bloggers who champion the overthrow of "old" or "mainstream" media also value the credibility that established media provide them. This paradox suggests that getting ideas out into the world may be more complex than sticking them in cyberspace. Indeed, acting on too naive a view of the old institutions may tend neither to replace nor to reform them, but only to enhance them. Paul suggests that to understand "the power of thought to get itself accepted," we can think less about "markets" for ideas and more about "supply chains" and brands, and, in attempting to go it "alone" - from "home" or elsewhere - to consider not just independence but interdependence.

My live blogging notes:

Indicates that he's going to talk about brands.

1. Information wants to be free
2. problematic freedom
3. information in chains
4. chains & brand wars
5. The Search for Quality

Lively opening with humor but he notes that there is a global anxiety with the issue of quality. This is a segue from our earlier discussion in the intellectual property segment regarding the quality "watermark" publishers feel they provide.

The market vs. hierarchy (classic economic forms). Current culture -- hierarchy bad; markets good. He touches as well on the same network effect that Kevin Guthrie opened with. Sometimes networks operate like markets and sometimes like hierarchies.

Info-fundamentalists (information wants to be free). Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we have lost in information." TS Eliot. (verify that I got it right).

Paul Otlett and the "burden of the book" - need to manage somehow to elicit the information from the book and leave all the unnecessary padding, extraneous material behind. (Hard to blog when the man has such a humorous delivery and you're laughing too hard to type. Story of dealing w/ a historian researching cholera when they used to soak mail in vinegar in order to "fumigate" it before delivery in a town outside the quarantine zone. You get that "information" in the physical environment, but wouldn't necessarily pick on that in a digitized environment. "All cretans are liars." (couldn't type fast enough to get source of the quote). A Cretan cannot testify to his own veracity. Documents cannot tell you how to read them (sense of irony, tone of sarcasm, etc.) Information doesn't stand up on its own.

Marketplace of ideas Refers to news stories out of Google (where you can't just rely on the algorithm; must add in additional context). His slide reads "Not so independent?" and shows painting of Pygmalion and Galatea. Institutions become invisible when they're most effective and efficient. Y'know he's so good and so glib, you really need this man's slides to get the full sense of what he's saying. Old hierarchies begin to break down - shows table indicating how IBM declined and rose again (Again, referring back to Kevin talking about the turnaround of IBM).

Accidental branding "I didn't really know what a brand was, but it became evident that we had created a brand - Denis Carter (Intel). Everyone putting Intel Inside on their boxes. Compaq having to fight back promoting the semiconductor company at the expense of Compaq's brand (Compaq) Dell, intel, Windows logo -- all these people trying to hold on to importance of their brand.

Accidental un-branding (Who knows who makes the disk drive in their PC? Only two people raise their hand in the room. ) Yet critical element of the operation.

Books in chain. What's the nature of a book -- he shows two separate definitions. - notes that the writer isn't given precedence in the supply chain shown in the lengthier, more detailed definition.

1518 -- first printing patent

1557 -- The stationers' charter; "binders, stitchers, sellers, publishers, etc" printers v. booksellers. Wouldit be the printers or the booksellers who would control in this environment?

1694/5 End of that licensing model "publisher's profit". Change to intellectual property thinking

1709 Statute of Anne (the author's due) printers v. booksellers didn't want the other to get control of the pile and thought they could themselves control the third party, the author.

Author's role - (quote from Daniel Defoe "injurious piece of violence and grievance to all Mankind -- robs Men of the due reward..." Publisher offers imprimateur (sp?)

Post modern flights? "The stationers made 'Shakespeare." - Erne

Who "brands" When you go to a play is it due to author director producer actor? When you go to a movie? Who knows the name of the author of the last movie they saw? Television another example. Music -- composer condustor orchestra soloists? Different markets for Different products the key name will change.

Whose brand is it then? This came up in the intellectual property discussion segment. The brand name is really the journal rather than anyone else in the supply chain. The dynamics and tensions of the relationships shift in our business.

How do you buy expertise? Lawyers, doctors, etc. Certification by ABA, AMA, etc. "The market for lemons" Akerlof's academia "education and the labor markets themselves have their own "Brand names." Brands as a form of validatin information are very important.

Moves over to Google. "incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly orgnaizae searchable online." incredibly condescdending quote from Page & Brin. translates to we'll help librarians or we'll replace librarians. Sought out the name libraries to recruit for their book initiative (Harvard, Bodleian, etc.)

Supply chain - academics - univerities - libraries -- publishers. Refer back to point in Postmodern flights above. Everyone is struggling to achieve the preeminent position (note: Libraries as DRM mechanisms for librarians, what a great line!) Supply chains are falling apart and being re-engineered. Who will be the last person standing.

Not a marketplace of ideas - a network of ideas. We form networks and again they may either be like marketplaces or like hierarchies. Plusses and minuses - tensions in our chain. Journals provide quality assurance but there are some hesitations about that. Can turn into monopolistic practices. Can't tell us how the fight is going to resolve itself. Visibility is going to be a key element to survival.

Nature's hatchet job on Encyclopedia Britannica in comparing w/ Wikipedia is an outstanding classic sense of this battle. (Bios on wikipedia may or may not be any good but they pop up third in the results listing. EB would be better but its not visible.)

Applause from audience is really quite enthusiastic! Enjoyed him immensely.